Day 16: Phase 10

Day 16: Wednesday, July 14, 2010
We were all grateful for a calm awakening this morning. Before we left Lisboa, we baptized three precious people in the river. It was beautiful!

On the “Logos” ride back, Steve, Sarah, Alex, and I played the new card game we learned, “Dirty Clubs” then Phase 10. It definitely helped pass the time, yet in a way it made me miss old times and all my friends in MS…We used to play that game all the time. I remember laughing hysterically when a group of us played during siesta time in Mexico. What memories!

As seems to be the generally case, we unloaded in Nauta and enjoyed a cold drink before getting reloaded onto a bus. The “young” folks all loaded into the back for a ride full of riddles: “the line game”, “Black Magic”, brain teasers, and lateral thinking were all pulled from various youth group repertoires (sp?). No more than 20 minutes into the 2 hour ride when we hear a loud pop come from the left rear wheel of the bus. Of course, all the Americans (and Romanian Americans, and Brits, and Peruvians, and Columbians) are thinking we should stop and take a look at it all, but the driver doesn’t stop until we hear a second pop followed by a clung, clung, clung and feel the bus bouncing up and down. And when he finally decides to stop he must’ve forgotten the “pulling over” part because he straight up parks in the middle of the road.

More men than necessary get off the bus to evaluate the situation, concluding that the tire needs to be changed but we don’t have a spare on the bus so we’ll just keep driving until we meet another bus and use their spare. Oh South American culture!

Thankfully, it wasn’t much longer before we finally met up with the other bus and stop once again in the middle of the road to jack it up (with all of us in it still… “esta bien”) and change the faulty tire. It’s one thing to have a busted tire…it’s quite another to have a busted tire in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Haha!

We arrived in Iquitos around 4, although it should’ve been much sooner. After a glorious shower, which no one had enjoyed the whole trip apart from a river bath, we went to eat with the team at Kiwiriki. A wonderful place since it had AC and something like French fries. It was amazing apart from a few misunderstandings. Of course, we concluded with some ice cream too! Osmar was gonna take Steve and Alex to go see Eclipse and Sarah and I wanted to go because supposedly it was playing in English, but it started at like 11 and the base closes at 10:30. In the end, I think only Osmar went and it turned out to be in Spanish anyway.

I don’t feel like I got to know this group as well because it was shorter I guess. Even though the hammock sleeps better than this bed at the base, I’m glad to be away from that blasted rooster!