My Trip to Ecuador By: Samantha De Corso

 Every year my family and I take an adventure trip that involves hiking, biking, river rafting, rock climbing, touring, zip lining and much more. Two summers ago my family and I chose to go to Ecuador. The trip was absolutely amazing. I learned so much about a third world country and got to experience and see so many new things. We hiked through rainforests, river rafted down the amazon river, saw volcanoes and so much more. Introduction

Amazon River/ Eco lodge  The first night of trip we stayed in an Eco lodge that was up on the mountain beside the Amazon river. The lodge had no lights, screens, or any electricity besides the lit lanterns that were scattered around the lodge. This picture was taken from the area where we ate all our meals. Ecuador gets about 6 in. of rain a year and while we stayed there it rained almost every day. You could basically see the river water rise as the rain kept coming down. This part of the trip was my favorite because it was so different and such a learning experience.

Volcano lodge After we stayed in the Eco lodge for two nights, we took about a two hour drive to a resort that was right at the base of a volcano. We stayed there for two nights as well. When we looked out the window of our room you could see the volcano smoking. Although it had not erupted in years, it was still scary to think that we were staying next to something that was burning and melting inside.

Rainforest hike  Our first day of hiking was through a rainforest where we literally had to hike through streams. Some of the trees and branches had fallen into the streams that we were hiking down which caused the stream to back up to some points where the water came up to our knees! I will never forget this hike because to get to the next part of the trail we had to climb though two rocks and a waterfall. This was such an amazing hike. We saw bats, frogs, snakes and even monkeys!

 River Rafting!  One of my favorite parts of our adventure trips is when we go riverrafting. Some of the rapids are class 3 and 4. On one of the rapidsme my dad and my friend Nicole all fell out! When you are justfloating down the Amazon river there is so much to see. Some ofthe coolest things to see were the rocks that were perfectly shapedby the river water. You can see in the picture on the right the rockoff to the left is extremely smooth because the water has shaped it. This was our boat! Smooth rock!

Water falls! This picture was taken on one of our hikes to the top of this waterfall. All the water led to a huge pool of water at the bottom of the fall which then led into a river that we hiked along side the whole time. Again you could see how smooth and shaped the rocks were around the waterfall. This hike was About 8 miles and was so amazing the whole way. We saw a ton of monkeys and got to swim in the pool of water at the top of the falls.

This trip was such an amazing experience and seeing all of these things really opened my eyes and showed me how much more there is to see then just what we are use to. Seeing all the volcanoes, waterfalls, mountains, rainforest, rivers and much more, I have learned so much and realized that many of the things I saw on this trip were very similar to what we are learning about in class. It is very cool to look back on pictures from this trip and get an idea of why things were happening based off information from this class.