EVERY DAY IS A WINDING ROAD

 Or so says Sheryl Crow on my headphones. I´m trying to drown out The Jaun Pedro Jose Fausto Garcia Band playing on my six hour bus ride to Tena, Ecuador as well as the movie playing on the tv above my head, Redemption. The ride should have been only five hours, but due to some random road construction, we wait another hour while a bridge was being built. While we wait for the construction project, I get off the bus with a few other women to use the bathroom in the woods. Yep, this is Ecuador; the land where oatmeal is considered a cold drink, not a hot cereal. 
        The chaos began the moment I landed. After being delayed and bumped off of two different flights, I arrived in Quito. My luggage did not. There are two bus stations in Quito. Carcelen is for travelers going north, like to Otavalo. I had to take a 45 minute taxi ride to the Quitumbe station for travelers going south. I was headed to Tena which is east. I guess that counts as south too. The bus headed out of the city and soon we where in the middle of nowhere and the paramo grass mountains made the landscape seem we were bussing through Mars. And yet the busdriver still made stops and picked up more passengers. Where the heck did these people live? There were no visible houses, or grocery stores, or shops of any kind. Maybe they lived under rocks, I thought. But there they boarded... women carrying little reddish babies, men holding large buckets of Lord knows what, teenagers with baggy denim jeans and cell phones.Yeah, there definitley wasnt a Verizon store here, or any cell towers for that matter. I really got a good laugh when about an hour later, still in the middle of nowhere, the bus had to slow way down. We were behind a parade. Where it began and ended, I´ll never know.
                Closer to Tena we started passing small peublos with about 12 people each. In these little neighborhoods graffiti rules. Well, at least Bart Simpson, Pac-Man, and misspelled cuss words rule. Finally we arrived in Tena, a city in the Amazon rainforest. Except there´s not a cloud in the sky and the sun is beating down on me like I´m again at the Grand Canyon. I looked up for circling buzzards. I hailed a taxi to take me to my hostel, but a kind man said it was in walking distance and to save my dollar. He gave me the directions in Spanglish. Six blocks and pouring sweat later, I figured it was worth a measly dollar.
             I like my hostel. It´s small and simple, but my room is on a veranda and overlooks one of the rivers that flows into the Amazon. Pretty cool. The owner, a handsome older gentleman, gives me my room key and a tour of the 8 room hostel. He has kind brown eyes and you can tell he is a wealthy Ecuadorian. He owns two other hotels. After a quick change into shorts, I take a taxi to a guidebook reccommended restaurant and order chicken over rice. It came with french fries and one random lettuce leaf. I wouldn´t have recommended it. 
             The sun is about to set. It never rained once. The air feels warm without much humidity and I feel like walking slowly back to my hostel and windowshopping at all the jungle tours this town has to offer. In the few hours I´ve been here, all I´ve seen is cement block buildings, glass windows, honking trucks, and ice-cream parlors in a town bigger than the one I live in the USA. Am I really in the jungle?