We arrived there in the evening and checked into the nearest hostel. It was a quiet lazy little town and luckily we were staying right off the main square. We dropped our bags and had a bite to eat at one of the restaurants at an outdoor table in the square. We didn't realize that this would impossible to do the next day.

The next morning we moved up to the "back-packer resort" (the best oxymoron I'd heard in ages) that was two kilometers out of town. It was absolutely gorgeous and also reasonably priced, but we will sadly have no pictures of it to show you- a story that will be shared in a later post. We were greeted by Emilio, the large and cheery employee, who showed us our room and then gave us just the information we'd been looking for- the whereabouts of a quality shaman and San Pedro ceremony. He called the shaman down to the resort to meet with us, and we were informed that his master, one of the most knowledgeable shamans in Ecuador, would be arriving in town to host a ritual on Saturday. That's wonderful we said, but could you please tell what day it is today? Yes, our trip had come to not having a clue what day of the week it was, but luckily we were told it was Thursday, so all was working out beautifully.

The shaman, Benjamin was his name, and his wife Leslie were lovely, if not just a little bit "dirty hippie" types, but they seemed trustworthy, so we were on board. They instructed us to bring our amulets, so I asked if my gecko ring would do. They told me I was to wear a skirt to be more feminine; I laughed at this explaining that I hadn't brought as skirt, but that was okay because I'm really not very feminine. They further explained that on Saturday we were not to eat after breakfast- Dair pouted- no alcohol- he sighed- no drugs- a slight hmmmpphhh escaped- and no sex- WHAT!!?

We spent the day on Friday taking a horseback riding tour through the Podocarpus National Park, which is rain forest up in the mountains and has a lot of endemic trees and plants. I hadn't actually been on a horse since I was 18 and that was on a beach which of course had a soft flat surface. This was different. The first twenty minutes while riding to he mountains, I thought my breasts were going to fall off, meanwhile Dair kept hollering about how much fun it was. Then we had two or three hours going uphill all the way. My horse, Mangdango, was huffing and puffing. I kept mulling it over and over in my head, why did his name seem so familiar? "Aha", I yelled out a few hours in, "he's a famous porn star!!". Yup, my horse was special.

We left the horses for a little while and "hiked" deeper into the forest to a waterfall and sat down for lunch. My night of insomnia was starting to catch up with me and my ass was starting to ache, but there was nothing to be done; what goes up, must come down. And so another two and a half hours down on the horses we went. My knees were killing me, my back was hurting, and the town just didn't seem to be getting any closer, no matter how far we rode. We finally made it back out of the mountains and that's when the horses decided to show us what they could do. I saw Dair take off, making air, bag flying one way and him flying the other. All I could hear as Mandango and I flew past him was "no me gusta, no me gusta" I'm happy to say he did manage to stay on the horse, but it would seem the tables had turned and I was now the one yahooing at how much fun it was!

Very sore and a little chafed, we headed into town for a coffee only to find that the tables had all disappeared. The police had come around that morning and decided to start enforcing a law that had been ignored for years- no tables on the sidewalks of the main square. The customers were disappointed and the proprietors were angry. It would seem they had far too many tables to actually fit them all indoors and most of the cafes now looked like furniture stores instead.

We're 7 hours into our 5 hour bus ride, and I think we're finally almost where we're trying to go! I'm sooooo sick of buses at this point! I'm sorry to say I'm tired, so you'll in fact have to wait for the next post to actually hear how the San Pedro went. Hasta Pronto!