The bus shelter With only a week to go left of volunteering in the jungle before we take a short break before we head off to the Galapgos for further volunteer work, I can honestly say every muscle in my body is aching today. I have worked 22 consecutive days here (apart from 2 days off) for the past month which will enable me to take the next 5 days off to climb Volcano Samoco. At this stage I do not know anything about it so that will be my next postcard. So onto the postcard... The project that I (Aidan) have been commissioned to do this week is to tile the bus stop in front of the botanical gardens. On the onset I though this would be a day job...little did I realise what this process involved. It requires 4 volunteers plus 2 staff members to go into the Palm plantation (over 2 consecutive days) and cut down all the mature leaves, approximately 80% of the whole palm tree, leaving only the new palms. This is repeated on approximately 50-100 trees And as the typical way of cutting anything in Ecuador (whether it is trimming the grass, cutting down or trimming a tree) a machete is used!!. As the palms are quite large these leaves then need to be split into two before picking up the leaves and tying them into an extremely tight 1m³ bundle. They then need to be transported to the bus stop. So picture some swollen hands with cuts and blisters all over them which are attached to some arms that have a collage of bites ranging form mosquitoes, bull ants, wasps and anything else that comes into the path of them. And there you have it after 2 days of work you have your material for your roof, approximately 20 bundles of palms. On the third day I though well we have our material, the frame of the shelter is built, we just need to attach the leaves to the frame, well was I wrong. The next process is get the material for the eaves of the shelter, bamboo. So back in the jungle we go to cut down 4 10m high bamboo trees (with a machete of course). These are then cut into 5cm strips and dragged through the lush forest (that is now pouring with rain, it rains 200 days a year here) back to the bus shelter. I was getting excited at this stage however we then needed to trim the inside of the bamboo cutting off the sharp nodes and sanding each plain of wood (again with that bloody machete). And as luck would have it I'm off to the Volcano tomorrow so I want be finishing it off. And on reflection after writing this some of you may say, 'Are you enjoying this type of work?' and I can honestly say yep, it may not seem like I am contributing my time to changing the world however I have helped build a bus shelter in from of a conservation centre of Amazonian plants that will protect the children and adults from the elements. And it is these people that come here that are interested in preserving this vast spance of jungle that we call the Amazon. And for the first time in my life I know what it feels like to do manual labour.