The Jungle

This weekend the girls of Rotary Club Grigota were originally going to take a trip with other club members to Valle Grande, a small city outside Santa Cruz, to help with a charity they are doing. Two of the girls ended up going, the other 5 stayed in the city and had a wonderful time together. I was one that stayed behind. Matilde, Marie, and Lou from France and Charlotte from Belgium all came over to my house and we all went out to a party of a school called Britanico that two other exhcange students, Emily and Shyah from New York invited us to. The party was beautiful and we all had a wonderful time and went out to eat with new friends we made and old friends we hadnt seen since Carnaval. After the party we all came back to my house to find my brother was very sick, we made him tea. We all fell asleep right away. In the morning my father took 3 girls and two stayed behind to wait for a ride. We all went to La Guardia which is a aprt of tow about 30 minutes from my house and in the country a little ways, to a Quinta of a rotarian in our club. A quinta is basically a place for people who live in the city to go on the weekends to cookout and have a good time. Rodolfo and his wife Sandra are great people, Sandra is teh lady who took care of all 15 exhcnage students on teh trip of Bolivia, so we know her well, and we see Rodolfo every Wednesday at the meetings. We ate salad and avocados and sausages and meat. We explored the grounds and played in the medow. After we ate, Sandra took us on a hike.
¨Just a small hike¨ she said.
Well, let me tell you, it was incredible. There was a suspension bridge over a canyon filled with swinging vines, palm trees and other tropical plants. There was a canopy walk set up between 4 or 5 trees that had a wonderful view of the large river a few kilometers away that is actually rather dry this time of year. We saw Tucans and stepped over Armadillo holes. There were some parts of the trail that hadn´t been kept up in what seemed like years. We had to climb under and over fallen trees, slide down embankments 12 feet tall into a dry stream and climb back up the otehr side using vines. We saw incredible purple and blue butterflies. We all got bit up by tiny bugs called Hormigas...And one tiny bite hurt so bad i was in tears when a few fell into the holes of my jeans. There was a small tree that we COULD NOT TOUCH or else a bunch of Hormigas would crawl out of teh leaves and eat us a live, said Sandra. Every 10 yard or so teh path was clocked by a spider web containing a spider as big as your hand. Harmless though they were, we all screamed evrytime we ran into the web.

It was an incredibly dirty and fun day, hiking in a Bolivian jungle.