I donned my boots with chagrin, and by then everyone else in the group was also up and dressed. Painfully, I made my way down to the Commodore - our dining hall thinking all the way about these stupid rubber boots we had to wear. Sure, boots are nice and all, keeping off mud up to your knees, but they can also be miserable.

I slipped a few times on the muddy stairs leading down, but managed to get to the bottom of the steep hill without soiling my clothes too much. I walked steadily past a few other cabanas - cabins - and along a sheltered path that crossed two trickling streams. I finally got to the commodore for breakfast, and all before 6:30 a.m.!

Breakfast went fine, as usual. We had fried bread, everyone's favorite, and fruit. After the usual card games and fooling around that usually accompanied meals, it was time for foot treatment. I, and a few other people unfortunate enough to have blisters took off our foot wear and prepared for the stinging pain of applying rubbing alcohol on open blisters. This was a time we all dreaded. But, this time we were suddenly saved, well partly. We still had to clean our blisters with alcohol.

Andrea, a Jatun Sacha guide, produced a small bottle of dark liquid that she called Sangre de Drago, or Dragon's Blood. People of the rain forest of Ecuador use it to heal open wounds. Andrea told us it would heal the offending blisters in no time. Of course, most of us didn't believe that anything but time could help our feet now, but we consented to this native treatment anyway. Soon all of our blisters were covered in a dark red fluid that dried rapidly.

We went on a painful all day hike after that (and you can tell that just did wonders for our feet). We could barely walk by the time we returned to Jatun Sacha. Everyone wolfed down dinner and fought each other for the showers, and then went to bed listening to the wonderful sounds of the Ecuadorian rain forest.

The next day was basically the same routine, but we found ourselves totally amazed. All of our open blisters had closed, and they didn't hurt nearly as much as the day before. The strange and unique Blood of the Dragon had worked!

Sandre de Drago comes from a tree (Croton lechleri) is a tree commonly found in secondary South American rain forest. It is also called Laniqui. It is an important medicinal plant whose dark red sap is applied topically for skin problems such as bites, stings, and cuts.

The tree is medium sized and can grow 10 or 20 meters in height. Although tall, the trunk is usually less than a foot in diameter and covered by smooth mottled bark. It has large heart-shaped bright green leaves and unique greenish-white flowers on long stalks. When the trunk of the tree is cut or wounded, a dark red sappy resin oozes out as if the tree is bleeding, hence its name.

The red resin as well as the bark of Sangre de Drago has a long history of indigenous, or local, use in the rain forest and South America. The earliest written reference dates its use to the 1600s when P. Bemabe Cobo, Spanish naturalist and explorer, discovered that the curative powers of the sap were widely known throughout the native tribes of Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador. For centuries, the sap has been applied to wounds to help stop bleeding, to accelerate healing, and to seal and protect an injury from infection. The sap was used internally as well as externally, aiding in treatment for intestinal and stomach ulcers. Another rather unique indigenous use was to help with childbirth, and for skin disorders such as eczema.

Although thousands of pounds of bark and resin are currently imported into the United States, American consumers know very little of Dragon's Blood and its effective uses. Rather, imports of Sangre de Drago are going to a U.S. based pharmaceutical company named Shaman Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Shaman has filed patents on two pharmaceutical drugs which are in Phase I and Phases II FDA-approved clinical trials which contain anti-viral substances they have isolated and extracted from the bark and resin of Dragon's blood. Their drugs include Provir, an oral product for treatment of respiratory viral infections and Virend, a topical antiviral product for treatment of herpes.

Notice the word anti-viral. The mystifying powers of Dragon's Blood can cleanse and heal viral infections, and quickly, too. Something that not many "modern" medicines can currently boast.