Back from Ecuador - an incredible trip, as well as exhausting, frightening, inspiring, uplifting and life-changing. I need more time to process everything, but here's a very short run-down of our 20 days of madness.

We spent time in the capital city, Quito, before and after the other segments of the trip. Got to see a lot of the city, and it's a pretty awesome place. Dirt cheap, too, which rocks for a grad student on a budget. We went to the local markets and I got some great fabric, jewelry and art, toured around the historic district and saw the Virgin of Quito (a huge statue that looks down on the city from the top of a huge hill) and the churches, ate lots of great food. Even took a salsa dancing lesson and it was awesome. Apparently I'm a rockin' salsa dancer. Yeah, you know it.

We also went to the jungle, to a research station called Tiputini (if you Google it, you'll find its site). To get there we had to fly into a tiny tiny tiny airport, take a boat down the Rio Napo, drive in the back of a truck along an oil company road and then take another boat down the Rio Tiputini. It's pretty remote, which suits me just fine. The getting there was, in some ways, the best part - I loved being on the rivers.

The jungle was intense and really demanding, physically and emotionally. It's a hard thing to be so far out of your comfort zone and I was definitely light years away from feeling "safe," for lack of a better word. But we had an amazing guide who I would follow to the ends of the earth, so even though I struggled when he said everything would be OK I trusted him. He was a machine. He'd tell us, "we're going for a little walk," and five hours later we would stagger back into camp, covered in mud and sweat and barely able to stay awake to eat.

We saw so many birds and plants, slogged through knee-deep mud and slid down embankments where paths used to be. This is a hardcore place that's generally used by researchers, no coddling of the soft Americans. I even climbed 42m up into the canopy to a viewing tower (scared out of my mind) and then the next day went almost as high along a series of rope bridges (even more scared, which I didn't think was possible). I ate ants, shared a breakfast table with a cricket the size of my hand, saw anacondas sleeping on branches, got hissed at by a gang of giant otters, watched birds of all colors. There's something about South America, in the jungle as well as in the city - you just don't see colors like that here.

It was demanding and sometimes really upsetting, but I look back on it now and feel so blessed to have been there. It left a huge impression. Nothing else in my life has been like that.

Almost immediately after getting back from the jungle, we took off for the Galapagos Islands. We had visions of laying on the beaches with cocktails and taking long afternoon siestas, but it turned out to be just as grueling as the jungle. Every minute of our time was scheduled, every day it was go go go, see this, do that. By the middle of the trip we were all pretty much fried, ready to go home. Didn't help that our guide was kind of a prick and no one could stand him. Well, some people could. But not me.

It was a rough transition from the jungle to the islands. The jungle is remote, quiet, secluded - we didn't see anyone but the station staff and a handful of researchers while we were there. The islands, though, is a tourism machine. We were always surrounded by other boats, other groups of tourists. You can feel the industry there, everything exists for us, to take our money. It was a big production all the time, especially with our guide. His fake-nice act was just that: if the tourists think he likes them, they'll want to tip him more. I've never been in a place so devoted to tourism like that. It's not how I like to travel.

That's not to say it was all bad, though. The natural landscape was stunning. The animals are varied and fascinating. They don't view people as threats, so you're able to get extremely close, even to nesting birds or animals mating (lots of sex on the islands). We snorkeled almost every day, saw all kinds of fish and swam with sea lions and fur seals and SHARKS (reef sharks and hammerheads - omfg) and sea turtles and penguins and rays and even an eel one day. Birds everywhere, gulls and blue-footed boobies and red-footed boobies and albatrosses and frigate birds and finches and mockingbirds that are totally fearless and will practically hop right into your lap. There's nothing like it in the world.

And now...Pittsburgh. Great to be home, of course. I was completely spent and ready to come back. But I do miss it. It feels like a much longer trip than it was, because we did so much.

I took a bazillion pictures (literally thousands), so it will take me a bit of time to sort through everything and get them uploaded. I still have to write two papers about the trip and those take priority. Hope you don't mind waiting! :)