CARNIVAL in Tena

What we know in the US as Mardi Gras translates to Carnival in Latin America, a holiday in which families stop what they are doing to throw buckets and balloons filled with water or paint at passersby (from which I have a yellow splattered shirt as evidence), and attend the numerous parties, parades, and festivals throughout the content. While I had been in Bolivia and Peru for Carnival in 2007, I was backpacking around and at the time didn’t understand all of the traditions, or even that the holiday was celebrated so widely throughout the continent why children were throwing water balloons. Now as a resident of Ecuador, I was prepared-although still not thrilled with the idea of being attacked at every street corner. Quito basically empties out for the long weekend, while people take advantage of their days off of work to visit family, go to the beach, or just travel around with friends.
To celebrate the four day long weekend, I joined my roommate and some of her Ecuadorian friends on an expedition to Tena, located in the western part of the country-near, but not in, the jungle. We stayed with one of the girl's family in their finca, loosely translated into farm house, situated on acres of open country filled with fruit trees and animals. We spent our time outside, hitchhiking around the town, tubing, and learning what it means to live on a farm. I particularly enjoyed my early morning wake up call to milk cows (that is not meant to be facetious, I honestly did have fun).
I demonstrated how to make s'mores, and spent hours talking with the father about his opinion of America based on 2 trips he has made there, one for work and one for pleasure with his wife, and how it compares to Ecuador.
We left Quito from the packed bus terminal, located about an hour south of my apt, at 8am to make the 5 hour journey to Tena, where we met up with the father of the family we were staying with. After grabbing a $2 lunch of fried fish, rice and salad in the town, we hopped in the back of the dad's pickup truck and drove to the finca. The entrance of the farmhouse is situated on a two lane highway, and has been marked by two garbage cans, or you would miss it along the stretch of open land along the road. Once you have turned into the finca, a long driveway leads you to a wooden structure that housed at least 15 people that weekend. While the house gave meager protection from the insects from the outside, it was a welcome refuge from the hot sun of Tena, and filled with good conversation and food.

Our first day we spent the day at a beach situated along a river, listening to a concert the town holds annually to celebrate carnival. After an afternoon filled with dancing, swimming, and squirting foam at each other (also a tradition associated with carnival) we made our way back to the finca, showered, ate, and prepared to go to one of the 2 discotecas in the town of Tena. The small, one-room club was packed, and played a mixture of electronic, salsa, and tradition American music. It was fun for a night, but I’m not sure I could imagine living there with that as my only source of entertainment at night; it reminded me of a mini version of an American club. In order to move such a large group around, we would split up, some sat in the back of the pickup truck while the rest squeezed inside. I loved sitting in the back, soaking in the fresh air and lush scenery. If we weren’t traveling with her parents, we would either hop in a pickup truck taxi or hitchhike (a common and safe practice in this part of the country) to the general vicinity of where we wanted to go and then walk the rest of the way. Our second day there, we went to a huge festival the town holds, the epicenter of carnival, or as I liked to call it, the war zone, as kids and adults alike took your presence there as a sign that you wanted to be drenched with water and foam and whatever else they could find to splatter you with. We did get some serenity when we took a canoe ride along one of the Amazon tributaries, which I had done the previous time I was in the jungle, but was still a welcome break-even though it only lasted about 30 min, because that’s all we could afford at the time with the cash we had brought.
While I think 3 days of cold showers, mosquito bites, and sunburn was about all I could take in one visit, I would love to go back.