Ecuador: Day 11

Day 11:
We awoke around 10:30 and began to pack up all our things in our hotel room since we were going on a trip to the amazon for a couple days. We met Eduardo in the lobby around 12:00, we checked out and then headed to the university. We were going to meet Howard who was going to drive us. Howard is the sculpting teacher at the university and we had met him the week before because he sat in on Greg's class several times. Unfortunately he wasn't ready to leave yet so we headed over to a restaurant to pick up some food for the journey ahead of us. Mom and I got our favorite taco salad along with lemonade and a yummy fudge/brownie thing. Finally Howard, Greg, mom and I piled into the car and started off. Howard talked a lot to Greg telling stories and past experiences of Ecuador. I must first begin by saying that Howard is from New York yet he moved to Ecuador some years back and likes it very much. Some of the stories were quite interesting, that is until him and Greg began to talk about politics which, as you may know, is not one of my favorite subjects. The drive was very very long, around five hours to be exact. We drove threw small villages, grassy green fields, by volcanoes and threw lovely mountains. The streets were quite bumpy due to the cobblestones and the large bumps in the road which would come up out of the blue in the middle of the highway. Many times we would stop to ask the locals for directions. Sometimes we'd have to ask several times because each person said something different. It began to grow dark which wasn't great because I couldn't look at the forested mountains anymore. We went threw some pretty amazing tunnels. The walls were chiseled and Howard remarked that it looked like "The Bat Cave!" It was also wild because water would pour down even inside the tunnel! It was as though the mountain was so soaked that it was always dripping. Plus Howard wasn't quite sure how to use his lights, or else he would forget to turn them on so we'd go into the tunnel and it would be pitch black, which was rather scary to be honest. When arriving in the city of Puyo, which was where our hotel was located, we asked directions and, as always, received many different directions. We ended up going the total round about way to the hotel threw streets filled with potholes. It was a bumpy ride, but we finally made it to our hotel "El Pigual".
From what I could tell of the hotel at night, it seemed like a nice place. Mostly outdoors with little cabin like houses and lots of jungle like trees and animal sounds. We ate dinner which was extremely dry chicken, salad, rice and yucca (which was actually quite good). For dessert we got a canned peach sliced nicely on a plate. It wasn't awful, but not amazing either. Mom and Greg had one room while I had another so we all went to our respective rooms after dinner. The room smelled rather odd, like moth balls or something and the bathroom smelled even stronger. I also had this light that seemed to have a blue bulb in it and this made my room seem rather sad.
I read a bit, but was so tired that I ended up just going to sleep. I had a rather odd sleep, waking up sideways in the bed filled with strange dreams.