November | 2012 | The Clark Family's Amazing Adventures

Amazing Amazon Animals – not everything you expect!

04 Nov 2012 4 Comments

by Ben in Education & Schooling, Family Gap Year, Photos, Top Experiences Tags: Amazon, Amazon Rainforest, Amazon Wildlife, Ecuador, Napo River

The children at Woodridge school have followed our journey and sent us some questions! They asked me to tell them about more amazing animals & insects I’ve seen, after they enjoyed my posts about hairy caterpillars and piranhas.

We’ve travelled through the Amazon rainforest from Belem in Brazil on the Atlantic Ocean, through Columbia and Peru into Ecuador by river.

Our journey through the Amazon Rainforest on the Amazon and Coca Rivers

It’s been an amazing journey – hot, fun, tiring, lots of bugs, lots and lots of water, lots and lots of trees and getting sick!

The Amazon rainforest has more insects, birds and animal species than anywhere else in the world but when you travel there, what you expect to see and what you actually see can turn out a bit differently!

Halloween and El Dia de Los Difuntos in Quito

02 Nov 2012 1 Comment

by Mo in Education & Schooling, Family Gap Year, Foodie Central Tags: All Saints Day, Colada Morada, Day of the Dead, Dia de Los Difuntos, DIa de Los Muertos, Ecuador, Guagua de pan, Halloween, Quito

With apologies to those enjoying our blog in date order, I’m fast forwarding to say an almost timely Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from Ecuador!

Halloween is certainly recognised in Ecuador. It’s the eve of All Saints Day after all and this is a Catholic country. But without much of the Halloween hype we’ve come to know back home.

Much more important is this Friday, November 2nd – the Day of the Dead, or more respectfully El Dia de los Difuntos (Day of the Departed) which, together with All Saints Day today, is a National holiday and a special time of year when families gather together and pay respect to their elders and those loved ones who’ve passed away, visiting and tending to family graves together, socialising with other families around them, young children playing at the gravesides.