Day 4: the beginning of the jungle adventure

Another early morning with breakfast at the hotel and a 6:30am departure for the first of four days of the Jungle Inca Trail. 

After a terrible zig zag van ride up the mountain, we got ready for activity 1 for the day. We put on riot gear i.e. body armor, shin guards, fancy gloves, windbreaker and giant helmet. Makes you wonder why we need such heavy duty gear!! Then we began a 2700m decent on bikes down a mountain. Seriously. Downhill bike riding for 2.5 hours. Amazing views! And really cool to see the climate sand vegetation changes!!! I was annoyed that I was going so slow in comparison to other bike groups, but I was totally riding my brakes around all those hairpin turns! Crazy stuff, but I think we both loved it!! 

Oh and they clearly don't have the "Turn around don't drown" phrase here because we biked through at least 8 streams that crossed the road! Chaos! 

After our bike rides we had to wait a while for our van that was following us because he got hit by a giant truck on the way down. At least the truck didn't hit us. But I did feel bad for our driver. 

Then we arrived in the city of Santa Maria and had a lovely Peruvian lunch at what looked like someone's home. Soup with potatoes and carrots, chicken, potatoes w/ peanut sauce, rice and a chocolate cake that looked like a Little Debbie cake w/ sprinkles. We also saw this great map of our plan the next few days:

After a short walk it was time to go rafting. I'll call it rafting instead of white water rafting because the rapids were not so great that day. Supposed to be class 3. Maybe there were some class 2. But it was fun and only an hour so no big deal. The rafting company also seemed to be run by teenage boys so maybe that had something to do with how well the trip down the river went. They were like the three stooges. 

After rafting we hiked about 30 minutes up the mountain to our "jungle hostel" known as The Monkey House (because they have a pet monkey named Mona Lisa). We arrived to some yummy passion fruit juice and some hammock time. Then we were shown our room complete with mosquito net beds. 

We relaxed for a bit and had another lovely home cooked Peruvian meal of banana soup, beef stir fry with potatoes in the stir fry (quite a good idea), and a banana covered with homemade chocolate sauce!!! Delicious! 

The monkey house is pretty rustic. The showers and bathrooms are not the best. But, we survived and it's fun to be somewhere so different than the city!

The only bummer was that our bag was not here. Big miscommunication! First, our tour company should have told us we needed a pack that we could get all our stuff in for 4 days. But they didn't, so our tour guide said no big deal. He can find people to transport our bag for us from place to place. Great! So we only packed what we needed for one day in our small packs and they took our bigger bag in Santa Maria. Turns out they took it to our next stop. SO...stay tuned for the next post as to how we managed wearing the same clothes two days in a row and surviving without any toilitries.