Campo Cocha continued

Yesterday I left the Cabañas Nanambiki and Campo Cocha. Was I sorry to leave? I am not sure. I had been counting down the days, but to say that I could not wait to leave would not be correct to say either. Mixed feelings... I guess the water, the bat and the insects were not helping to make me feel 100% comfortable there?

In the last few days more tourists came to stay in the cabañas, and this time they could speak English, so it got quite pleasant. Then on Thursday Elise got there - the girl we shared the flat with back in Cuenca. This round, however, most of the people fell sick. I mean, food sick. I cannot understand why none of the first lot did, and the second lot all without fail, at different intervals. Maybe a change in the water? I got sick also, right on the day when I came into Tena, but in my case it was the food back in the community at the cookery class. The French girls, Leila and Tania, got the ladies to prepare 3 different types of raw salad in a kitchen with no running water!!! Not such a brilliant idea, thinking about it. All three of us and none of the locals got sick for a day - the locals thought it was a 'bad breeze' because of Claudio's death. Better not to argue there... So I spent the day between the Internet and the toilet, only to come back home from Tena in a pitiful state on the bus for 1.5 hours and find that we had no water!! Not only no electricity, no water either. And 9 new people had just arrived!!! Of course nobody was worried or panicky, apart from me and my diarrhea state, and just like a miracle electricity came back that same night along with water - which needs a pump to come up from the river, so no wonder it ran out with no current for 2 days....

The tarantula's predicament suffered a bad turn. One day I was folding the washed sheets when I saw a small spider looking like a baby tarantula. I showed it to Ariosto, Cesar's brother-in-law, and he confirmed that indeed it was a baby tarantula!!! I must say that it looked really cute, just like a miniature tarantula but with beige hairy legs and a darker body. Really quite cute. From there we inferred that there must be a nest, so we set out looking for it near the laundry lines and surely there we saw it, hidden under the roof. This was a crucial moment for the tarantula, because it meant that it was not going to get away the next time it showed up - there were obviously far too many around and they needed to be killed. So they did... this is how you kill a tarantula: you throw petrol on it and set it alight! A really tragic death, I felt quite sorry for the tarantula, like with the snake dying in the alcohol, but nothing I could do about either of them.

On the last day I was there a group of 4 young French guys arrived. Somewhere between 22 and 25. They started looking around, examining the snake jars, then at dinner they announced they wanted to do a 2-day hike in the jungle, camping out. I thought to myself, bloody hell this lot are really couragous, these young people have no fear! So after dinner Cesar, just to make it more interesting for them, pulled out a couple of animals from one of the jars: a small black venomous salamander and a huge insect, which he described as extremely dangerous and with no remedy if bitten. Everybody was there taking pictures when the tarantula appeared, which was then set alight. At this point the most torrential rain I have ever seen in my life started - all around us were falling buckets of water and flowing water. Insects started crawling in from everywhere, different spiders, beetles, and a conga. The conga is a 4 cm black ant that bites and is quite horrible. When you see one, you make sure you kill it before it stings you. Then we all went to bed. The next morning, the 4 guys announced that they were leaving immediately!!!! That really make me smile. So much for brave young men!!!

The other interesting event of this last week was the chocolate making. Cesar and Ariosto showed us how you make chocolate from raw cocoa! The first step is to let the cocoa beans dry in the sun for a few days. Then you roast them in a pan in the fire, like with chestnuts. Just like with chestnuts, you then peel the skin off. At this point you grind the beans together with a cup or two of sugar a couple of times, till the mass starts to melt. You then place the paste in a leaf or aluminium and leave it to harden, and there's your chocolate bar!

Other than that, not much more happening. I gave my last two lessons and they went well, I had 8 people each time and it seemed to me that they did learn the few things I taught them, which is nice.

Saturday was good-bye time and a nice bus ride to Baños to meet Gregory.

Kids activity group at the cabañas

Eleli, Celina, Maite and Narcisa

Cocoa fruit and dried cocoa beans

Ariosto roasting the beans

Grinding the beans

Elicia making real chocolate bars...

These are called mayones and are palm giant maggots that the locals eat...notably a lot worse than cuy!!! They fry them and it seems that they taste like fat, say mayonnaise...I did not manage to try them so cannot say.

Nicely fried mayon with rice dish