Advertisement
Published: November 3rd 2008
Heat, humidity, and chocolatelessness are 3 things I generally seek to minimise in my life, so heading into El Oriente had the potential to cause me some major trauma. El Oriente is Ecuador's slice of the Amazon basin, that sprawling stretch of steaming selva that occupies nearly 50% of South America and functions as something of a lung for the planet as a whole. I had ambitions to see tarantulas, piranhas, and anacondas in the wild and it was here that I was hoping to meet them.
Leaving a chilly Quito under grey skies, the first leg of my journey was a short hop on a plane to the gateway town of Coca, a transport option that had greater appeal than the alternative of an overnight 11 hour bus ride. The scene below me gradually became green and forested, the occasional murky brown river the only break in this expanse of jungle. Coca had a ramshackle appearance, its collection of corrugated iron roofs giving a first impression as we flew in that my subsequent taxi journey through the town confirmed. The air was hot and still, weighing heavily on the inhabitants, who walked slowly along its cheerless streets. I met
2 of my "intake" as we were waiting for the ride to the jungle lodge, a 50-something German lawyer who I immediately christened Captain Mainwaring, and his sternly efficient Russian wife. Clearly not short of money (his Rolex and Leica stood out), their trip to South America had been dogged by problems from day one, with the large commissions they'd paid to travel agents having brought them lost luggage, missed flights, and a $4,000 diving cruise in the Galapagos in which the boat had only cold showers more often than not. This luck had clearly followed them to the jungle as, near the end of their stay, they discovered that their flight back to Quito was a day earlier than it should have been. My own luck seemed to have changed for the better, as I found a cat near the dock that I was able to stalk and tickle.
Our destination was the Yarina Ecolodge, which sits about an hour away from Coca on a small tributary of the Rio Napo, which itself flows into the Amazon near Iquitos in Peru. We navigated the turbid waters of the Napo in a motorised canoe, seeing ripples, bubbles, and splashes
Tarantula
Apparently fell from its nest in the roof to join us for breakfast. One of the guides returned it to the rafters.that spoke of unseen activity under the murky surface. The scenery was dominated by trees and bushes, with birds and butterflies dotted amongst the greenery. Once into the tributary, we moved slower, the banks and dangling foliage closing in to create exactly the atmosphere I'd expect for intrepid Amazonian explorers.
The accommodation at the lodge was a pleasant surprise, being a step up from that which I'd experienced in
Borneo last year. It helped that the heat and humidity were unexpectedly bearable, and it was quite possible to sit around without becoming a sweaty mess. With the river waters being acidic, mosquitos were not present in plaguelike proportions. I was also lucky enough to get a cabin to myself, meaning that I could lounge around naked with impunity if I so wished. Electricity was available for a few hours each evening, bringing with it the unexpected luxury of hot showers. And I was reminded once again what a great invention the hammock is. Our 3 meals per day were excellent and generally veg-heavy - we certainly weren't left hungry.
The majority of the lodge had been taken over by a tour party of birders, so the remaining individuals,
couples, and pairs of friends were thrown together in one group. 5 of them were doing a combined jungle visit with Spanish lessons, meaning there was a great deal of Spanish thrown around at mealtimes, as their (generally non-English-speaking) teachers ate with us. A young American couple from Boston/New York and the aforementioned German/Russian combo brought the tally to 10. Our guide Carlos was a naturalist by training and spoke excellent English. Apart from guiding, he was also in charge of a foundation for underprivileged children (in particular, alcoholism is a big problem in the indigenous communities, leading to fathers spending money on booze that should be going towards food for their children) and was studying for an economics degree. Our native guide Marcelo spoke no English but knew the uses that the local Quichua people had for various plants and trees. Marcelo also had authority conferred on him by the fact that he wielded the machete. Both men had the uncanny ability to sense wildlife where us stumbling city folk saw/heard none, and they could identify creatures from the merest glimpse at 100m.
The 400 hectares around the lodge are primary forest, though everything outside is secondary and
from the Rio Napo at night you could see the flares from an oil company downstream. The lodge is involved in an animal sanctuary project called Arcadia, whose main area is around a lagoon nearby. It was here that we made the majority of the mammal spottings, including lowland tapirs and capybaras, though I suspect we wouldn't have had such luck in a "real" slice of jungle. The second part of Arcadia was a few cages in the lodge's grounds, populated by a couple of birds that were waiting for their flight feathers to grow back before they could be released, and some desperately friendly monkeys that needed to reach adulthood before they could be set free. The monkeys whizzed around their cages in amazing fashion, using their tails as a fifth limb. This was an even sadder spectacle than it would have been in a zoo, with the sights/sounds/smells of the jungle just an impenetrable wire fence away.
Each day at the lodge consisted of an early start followed by a morning walk and/or canoe ride, with something similar in the afternoon. The walks provided a reminder that we were in a hot and humid rainforest. Layers of
sunscreen and insect repellent were streaked with sweat within minutes, as we plodded in long trousers and wellies in the stifling air under the canopy. My clothes never had time to dry off between hikes and, back in Quito, I made sure to give a preemptive apology for the stench when I handed them in to a laundry. A swamp on one of the walks gave me an opportunity to demonstrate my clumsiness as I twice went in over the top of my wellies.
The walks had more of an emphasis on the jungle flora, since sightings were much easier to guarantee. We were introduced to a tree known as the telephone of the jungle, whose spreading hollow buttresses make a loud noise if you whack them with a stick and hence the tree can be used for communication. We saw another whose seeds are sought by monkeys after it rains so that they can "comb" the water out of their hair. The Socratea palm has the interesting property that it can "move" up to 50cm per year to find light via its stilt roots. The sap of the dragon blood tree can be used as a coagulant, which
came in handy when Carlos had a spectacular fall from a rope swing during which he shredded his palm on the liana. A tree with penis-like roots provided some all-round amusement.
Strangler figs and kapoks provided memories of Angkor. We spotted a few cacao trees, giving little indication that they are the source of one of my major vices in life. Carlos told us of a light-loving tree (whose name I forget) which has a symbiotic relationship with a species of ant - the ants clear all the plants nearby so that the tree receives plenty of light, and in return it gives them sap. A couple of rickety wooden lookouts gave us views over the canopy and the lagoon, the open space a novelty in the normally intimate surroundings of the jungle.
Animalwise, we saw crickets, toads, frogs, tortoises, and spiders. Carlos inadvertently disturbed a wasps' nest, receiving a few stings for his pains and giving us a glimpse of territorial behaviour in insects. A watery area with walkways gave us our only daytime sighting of a caiman, which sloped off into the depths when we got too close. We saw various types of ants - fire
ants, with their infamously painful bite/sting, leafcutter ants displaying superant strength to cart small sections of leaf away from a tree, and conga ants, whose bite/sting is even more painful than that of fire ants (it tops the
Schmidt Sting Pain Index). When we encountered a column of conga ants we had to run through quickly, stamping our feet to prevent any climbing onto and into our wellies.
The one night walk we did provided the best insect viewing, with numerous spiders at work spinning their webs in mere hours. A night canoe trip in the lagoon, with fireflies flitting among the trees and some sort of larvae glowing green under the surface, revealed many caimans, their eyes reflecting red just above the waterline.
One afternoon, we all went piranha fishing. Unfortunately, the moment that we moored, the heavens opened and there was a constant drumming of raindrops on the river's surface for the next 30 minutes, making it unlikely that any fish would be tempted from the bottom. It was no surprise that the guides were the only successful fishermen, Marcelo bringing in a large piranha which we all marvelled at, and Carlos hooking a small catfish. We were lucky
with the weather in general, the heaviest downpours saving themselves for when we were in bed.
Sadly there were no anaconda sightings, an even greater pity as Carlos had tickled our snake appetites with an apparently true story of an army parachutist on a training drop near Coca, who had gone missing and eventually been found in the stomach of an anaconda. If attacked by an anaconda, we were told to locate its tail and bite it hard, probably not that simple an exercise if a 6 metre 50 kilogram coil of muscle is attempting to suffocate the life out of you.
We also had several canoe excursions, propelled solely by man (and woman) power, the gentle watery sounds as the paddles dipped into the river pleasantly unintrusive when compared to an outboard motor.
Unfortunately I don't have a good photographic record of our jungle visits, as the light was generally poor enough that I was constantly battling with the noisy high ISO settings on my camera. There was rarely any sun or even blue sky - not that that would have made any difference under the canopy anyway.
We didn't need to leave the lodge
to see wildlife, however. Apart from the cages of the Arcadia project, there were two tame lowland tapirs that lived under the main lodge building and which could be seen roaming around throughout the day, occasionally snacking on the plants. One morning at breakfast, a tarantula was the star attraction having apparently fallen from its nest in the roof. One of the guides gave it a helping hand back up to the rafters, as it would not have survived a day of sleep on the dining room floor with so many careless tourist feet around.
Of course, it's not just animals and plants that live in the rainforest, and we had a visit to an indigenous Quichua house to see a way of life that is disappearing almost as quickly as the wildlife due to the predations of "civilisation". First was a trip around the garden, source of both food and medicines. Our progress was watched by 2 shy girls, who ducked out of sight when confronted with a wave or a smile. The garden had some interesting contents, including yellow chillis (which apparently grandparents are wont to put in a lazy kid's eye to get it to buck
its ideas up), some plant whose sap is so powerful that 2 drinks of it when heavily diluted with water will cure malaria (which, if true, roughly 2 million people in the world per year would be glad of), and an extremely strong hallucinogen (I forget just what this was doing in a garden). In the house, we met the family - the parents who spoke both Spanish and Quichua, and the kids who seemed to communicate purely in giggles. Theirs was a life of self-sufficiency, the garden providing their food needs as well as some raw materials from which to make tourist souvenirs. There was no electricity. The souvenirs we purchased were put on our bar tabs back at the lodge, and I was amused to flick through and see entries like "3 beers, 2 Cokes, 1 blowpipe".
Returning from the indigenous house at dusk, we witnessed an excellent sunset over the Rio Napo as Carlos described the Tagaeris, a tribe deeper in the jungle that no-one is in contact with both because they're nomadic and because they aren't very friendly to casual visitors, in the sense of killing them. We digested this information as we marvelled at
Marcelo's ability to pilot a 5m canoe from the stern in virtual darkness.
Optimistic as ever, I'd predicted that this jaunt to the jungle would be something to be endured rather than enjoyed, to satisfy the obligation of any visitor to South America to see the Amazon basin, but it was considerably better than that, and my mind was more filled with thoughts of chocolate as I boarded the plane back to Quito, rather than any pressing need to get away from the heat and humidity.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.136s; Tpl: 0.02s; cc: 13; qc: 34; dbt: 0.0698s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
deleted_49612
deleted_49612
Great photos! :)