Tena and whitewater rafting

Last weekend was a blast! On Friday about 7 of us left for Tena which is about6 hours away in the Oriente. Even the bus ride was nice! They say that Ecuador has every climate of the world except 4... I definitely saw like 6 of them on the busride. On Friday night we just relaxed for the most part- we stayed in a $5 hostal. Saturday morning we woke up at 8 am and had breakfast ($1.80 for eggs, bread, cheese, coffee, and juice) and headed to Riverpeople Rafting. We headed out and while they were getting the rafts ready we dove into this beautiful pool of water under a waterfall and then climbed up the mini-waterfall. It was very nice and the perfect temperature. We rafted level 3 rapids which were really fun for my first time rafting. The 2nd rapid we hit we surfed, which means the raft gets stuck in like a whirlpool sort of and you can't get out. I definitely thought I was going to get sucked in or something, but we all jumped out the top of the raft. Then later, my friend Becca and I fell out at a different rapid. It was a lot of fun though and there were a lot of pools to just jump out and sit in. We also swam one of the rapids which was fun although I swallowed a lot of water.
We had lunch in the middle of the river on a beach which was nice... the whole day was about 9 am-4 on the river, for $50!! It was great. The only bad thing was that all the insect repellent we put on got washed off by the water so we all got tons of bug bites and I've been itching ever since! After we got back and showered and everything we were going to go to dinner but there was a huge storm and lightning hit pretty close to our hostal and all the power went off. I was really surprised by how fast they fixed it though- within 30 min, and then we ran through the rain to a really good restaraunt called Tortuga. We were going to go out dancing that night but it turned out we had no energy again.
The next morning we went to a place called monkey island. We hiked a little on the trails they had there and sat by the river a little which was relaxing. Then we went to this little hostal there to look at the view and all these monkeys started appearing all around us! It was really cool and they were very close to us! The people who worked there also brought out a boa constricter and I held it which was absolutely insane! It was really heavy and a little scary but I'm glad I did it!
This week at school was pretty relaxed, we don't have school on Friday so I'm leaving tonight with two other girls to go to Vilcabamba in the south of Ecuador where everyone apparently lives til they are past 100 years old. We were going to fly but it's $155 round trip, so instead we are going to take the 12-15 hour bus ride to Loja and then another 2 hour bus to Vilcabamba.