Jungle Highlights (weeks 1-2)

Squeezing five weeks of living in the jungle into a blog post that people will actually be bothered to read seems like a pretty tough job so I think I´m just going to try and cut it down into a short(ish) week by week recap and if anyone wants any more details they´ll just have to ask me in person!
Week 1
We arrived at camp after a night in the jungle town of Tena on Saturday afternoon. After walking up something like 200 odd steps with our packs on our backs we were all feeling pretty tired. But beds needed to be baggsied and mosquito nets put up, so we all set about it and end up dripping in sweat by the end of it. In the rainforest it´s between 80 and 90 percent humidity most days.
The next day we had an introductory walk in the forest which was interesting and exciting but unfortunately hunger ended up ruining it a little bit for me.
Monday was spent doing EFR training, which ended with ridiculous scenarios of piles of severely injured bodies that our fellow volunteers have to detangle and rescue! I am now, however, a qualified Emergency First Aid Responder.
The rest of the week was pretty much spent doing various training exercises. We were given 30 bird calls to learn and 43 different species of plants, birds, butterflies, frogs and lizards to be able to identify by sight. Miraculously I got 43 out of 43 on the test which I was super surprised about. We ended the week with a trip to Agua Santa market on the Saturday, where we indulged in treats like cold drinks and crisps, and a trip to the Yachana Lodge and Colegio across the river (GVI Amazon works with Yachana) where we played an extremely muddy game of football with a bunch of the local kids.
This week, the Rio Napo also experienced its worst flood in 50 years, loads of houses were washed away further up river and the water climbed 12 steps above it´s normal height at base camp. We saw whole trees and fridges and bits of house floating past, it was pretty bad.
Week 2
Sat Camp week. This means trekking for about 45 minutes to get to a little clearing where we set up jungle hammocks and stay for the night, ready to do some mist netting in the morning. We ate and slept well and stayed dry despite the heavy rain. Mist netting is effectively where you put up really fine nets that birds fly into and then you get them out, band them and take all their details, weight, length etc. It´s pretty cool to get so close to the birds.
However, all the fun sat camp and mist netting was ruined a bit for me by the dreaded anti malarials. I was on Lariam and had been fine for the first 3 weeks of taken them. Then after the 4th pill everything went very wrong very quickly. At the start of the week I noticed my mood changing dramatically, one minute I would be completely depressed and the next I would be back on top of the world again. Then on the hike back from sat camp, halfway up a hill I started to feel like I couldn´t get enough air into my lungs and started to hyperventilate and cry and had to be sat on a rock and talked to to calm down. This happened again on another walk the next day. That same night I also had a horrendous dream that bugs were crawling all over me and pushing me into the ground and woke up screaming "help me help me help me!" I cannot remember ever having a dream where I have woken up screaming. It was horrible, I really thought I was turning crazy. So I came off them, and after another week or so I felt pretty normal again.
That weekend as part of our Saturday Night Entertainment Me and one of the staff organised a Fright Night. This involved getting dressed up as scarily as possible with the limited resources we had (most outfits involved copious amounts of talc, mud or ash!) then telling scary stories and the night was rounded off with a walk from the road back to camp in groups of 4 with only one torch between you while everyone else jumped out and scared you. Needless to say I ended up in a ball on the floor with my eyes squeezed tight shut! And the story of the ghost of a little girl at the toilets made me petrified of going down there by myself in the dark for the rest of the phase!

So that´s a round up of the first two weeks...I need to check my diary to check what happened when the rest of the time!
PS. Might add some pictures when I have my camera with me.