An Amazonian Adventure

---

The streak of bad luck that had started in Bolivia didn't show any signs of letting up when I got to Ecuador. I hadn't been there 48hours before I was robbed by what I can only describe as a magician. I had my camera stolen and my purse emptied. I have absolutely no idea how they did it or when it happened. I can only guess that it happened on the bus during the 5 minutes that my bag was up above my head on the luggage rack. Put up there by a man that I later realised was only pretending to work on the bus. But how he/they managed to open the bag, take out my cardigan and books, open the camera bag, take the camera, find and empty the purse and then put everything back without me noticing i don't know. Especially as i cant remember anyone even going near it!? I was so oblivious to being robbed that I actually didn't realise until that night as I was getting my bag ready for the next day! What was (and still is most upsetting) is not the fact that I have lost an expensive camera but that I have lost all of my pictures and videos from Lake Titicaca in Peru and all of Bolivia. What i don't understand is, if theses guys are so good at magical theft, why cant they leave the memory stick? Or hind it behind the poor victims ear like a real magician?

Anyway back to the beginning....

I arrived in Quito on the 9th of August and, still not fully recovered from the food poisoning, slept for 15hours. Which was pretty good going as I was in the noisiest hostel i have ever had the misfortune to be in.I was feeling pretty lazy the next day so i just spent the afternoon pottering around and eating, eating, eating! I had a lot of making up to do after all! Quito New Town is very modern. The centre resembles a European city, full of cafes and restaurants with tables and chairs spilling out on to the pedestrianised streets. A welcome change from Bolivia.

The following day I took a bus to Tena which is a smallish town about 5 hours east of Quito. I checked into a nice hostel where I found half a dozen other young gringos and we all went to a lovely restaurant right on the river front for diner. Ecuador really is like a whole other world from Bolivia. I cant tell you how good it was to order something other than fried chicken and chips! Tena is reputed to be the best place in Ecuador for white water rafting so that's exactly what I did the following day. We started at 9am and after driving about an hour up stream spent the whole day rafting back, stopping off for lunch along the way. In between the rapids the water was beautifully calm and we passed the time by pushing each other into the river and playing games with the raft. I seemed to get pushed in way more than my fair share of times, which I wouldn't have minded that much if it wasn't for the fact that it really hurt every time I got hauled back into the boat. The life jacket fastened around the middle and between the legs! Every time I got hoisted up I ended up with a terrible wedgie which everyone else found hilarious. One time our guide pulled me in with such force that he flung me all the way over the raft and I went straight back into the river on the other side, head first, knocking Rose in with me! The scenery was spectacular all the way down. The river Napo is very wide and is lined with tropical vegetation, and in places towering cliffs covered in vines. Its hot and humid and you can tell that its only a stones throw away from the jungle, which is where i went the following day!

I took a bus 7 hrs north to Coca where I planned to organise a jungle trip. As the major jumping off point for jungle expeditions in Ecuador i expected to find the town full of agencies and tour operators, but i was wrong. There wasn't a single one! They were all in Quito and Tena! After a few hours I managed to find a hotel that had a tour desk and loads of different trips. I picked out the one I wanted and was told it was leaving the next day - great! How many people are going I asked. Just you they replied! I wasn't too sure if I wanted to go off into the jungle on my own with a guide that couldn't speak English so i picked out another tour. It was also leaving the next day, and you guessed it, it was just me going again! In the end I had to ask them if there would be any other people going on any of the trips at all and luckily there was one group of 13 leaving the next day.

We left Coca and drove about 3 hours through the countryside past small villages and oil extracting plants until we reached the Shiripuno river. At the river we boarded a motorised canoe and travelled about 5 hours downstream into the heart of the jungle. I was so excited to be travelling down an amazonian river that i couldn't stop grinning. not for the first 3 hours anyway, after that my bum was so numb it was more of a grimace.

The jungle was exactly as i had imagined it, just like in the movies. The river was fairly wide (10-15 metres) and very windy. there were so many fallen trees in the river that navigating it was like doing an obstacle course! On the sides of the river were mud banks with the greenest of green trees spilling over the edges. The water was a glorious shade of mud, so rich that it was impossible to see anything lurking under the surface. And there are lots of things lurking under the surface of the Amazonian rivers! Things like Piranhas and Caiman's (small alligators!).

By the time we arrived it was already dark and we could barley see the lodge, just patches of it from candle light. It was obvious that it was very nice though. It was set in a clearing on the river bank, the rooms were in a long partitioned wooden cabin, and across from them was a big dinning cabin . The dinning cabin had a long table, big enough to seat about 20, and in the front were hammocks and a collection of board games. I was sharing a room with Brigitte (who I have to thank for these photos), a French Canadian who NEVER stopped talking! I felt tired just watching her! Our room had on suit bathroom with running water which i think must have been pumped straight from the river because it was also a nice shade of mud! The cabin itself was situated on the edge of the clearing next to the jungle. The walls were only half high, like stable doors, and at night when it was pitch black it felt like you were sleeping under the trees in amongst all of the animals. The noise coming from the jungle was so loud and so full of different sounds it was quite magical. I was so mesmerised by it the first night that i just lay there mimicking all of the hoots, whoops, screeches and croaks that i could hear.


Every morning after breakfast we went hiking in the jungle.Our guide Eugenia taught us about all of the different plants, trees and animals we came across. One morning we stopped off for a mid morning snack of ants, fresh off a tree! They had a very sharp taste, like lemon. They were only small but when i ate them i could feel the head crunching in my teeth! Yurrghk. On the first day we spent a long time trailing monkeys and eventually came across a whole group of squirrel monkeys leaping from tree to tree at the top of the canopy. Other days we would hide and wait for birds, peckary's (a type of pig like animal) and other animals to come out. But we were with Pasquale, a funny french man, who had a habit of blowing his nose very loudly or sneezing just as the animals were getting close. One day we had been sat for about 2 hours waiting for the hundreds of parrots and birds perched on the top of the canopy to come down and lick the minerals from the clay watering hole we were hiding near, and Pasquale let out an almighty big sneeze and scarred them all back to the top! This gave the rest of us, bar the Germans who told him off, fits of the giggles which try as did, we just couldn't suppress, so it was time to leave! In the afternoons we did nice relaxing activities like Piranha fishing, mud bathing and swimming in the piranha and caiman infested river! My favourite activity though was 'floating', another lazy mans sport! We would sail up stream in the canoe and then, wearing a life jacket, just lay in the river and float all of the way back, letting the current carry us. At night time before dinner we would do other activities. One night we went out walking in the jungle looking for insects. It was so pitch black that you couldn't see a thing other than the small patch that was lit up by your torch. We found grasshoppers, a scorpion and a couple of tarantulas! Another night we went out in the Canoe to look for Caiman's. In the day time they are near enough impossible to see because they are so well camouflaged, but at night, if you shine a torch on them their eyes glow red. We found a really big one and creeped up to it and as we floated slowly past we all got a really good look, it had huge teeth! Pasquale was sitting at the back of the boat and before anyone could stop him he started poking and jabbing it with a stick! Next thing the caiman's in the boat with us, thrashing around! Pasquale jumped out of the boat into the river and we never saw him again! The caiman turned on the nearest person to it, a French kid, and attacked it! The kid was screaming and crying and the boat was rocking, one of the Germans fell into the river but made it to the bank. After what was probably only a few minutes but felt like an eternity the guide slaughtered the caiman with a maschette! That night we all had caiman burgers and had a few minutes silence for Pasquale, the funny French man who died a horrible death in the jungle.

On the way back to Coca we stopped off to visit a tribe. There is one that lives deep in the jungle that are very hostile. Because of their extreme reluctance to mix with the world and other tribes they now all have 6 fingers on each hand! We couldn't go to visit them but we did meet the Huaorani tribe who all have two heads! Just joking. The Huaorani are made up of about 75 people or 12/13 family's. They speak a simple language called Wow. The chief of the tribe has 4 wives. They were first approached by the outside world in the early 1960's by missionaries and oil workers. The Huaorani killed them! Today they are used to visitors and they have adopted many things from the outside world. Most of them now wear clothes and shoes. They use gas for cooking, have real toilets and eat processed foods like sweets. Its a shame because they didn't adopt the use of toothbrushes and now most of them have no front teeth! They live a very simple life. The men go out into the jungle every 3 or 4 days to hunt animals for food. When there is no need to go out hunting the Huaorani don't do anything. They just sit around talking! It was definitely a place for Brigitte!

When I got back to Coca I flew straight to Quito and from there it was on to the Galapagos...

---

Comments

[Rayna]

ARGHH!!
LAAAAAAAAUUURRAAA!!!! Never post a picture of a spider without warning!!!!!!!!! EEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!