My rainforestheaven

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Time to get written down the story about my Bilsamonth. A special hello to all you wounderfull people i met at Bilsa and Congal.

This biological station is situated in a remote primaryforest-one of the last patches of its kind in this region. Getting to the place, is an adventure in itself-first 5 hours by bus to Quininde-a small town, from where trucks go to a tiny communitycenter-La Yeh, more or less in the middle of nowhere. La Yeh has a touch of wild west to it, with horses and mules tied outside the shops, weatherbitten men in hats hanging on the corners, and delipidating wooden buildings.
In the rainy season, this is where motorised transport ends, from here the road is a nightmare of sticky mud. Getting in to the station require footwork and a mule for your luggage. It took me between four and five hours to get in, and i arrived at the station as a boiled lobster with only two wishes in mind-a cold shower, and never having to see that burning sun again...I instantly got my cold shower, and spontaneously screamed to Will, an american volunteer, washing his clothing outside "THIS IS BETTER THAN SEX!!!!!"

The station concist of several buildings-the mainbuilding house volunteers and the leading staff in the second flooor, on groundlevel is the kitchen staffed by my two lovely "reinas de Bilsa", and a eatingroom doubling as the gatheringspot. On the backside there are 2 coldwatershowers-home to spiders and snails. The trails in the camp itself provide shelter for many creatures-tarantullas and landcrabs witch do their best to undermine certain stretches of path. Lot of digging is performed by a population of armadillos as well, mabny times i was close to see them, but Baloo-the everpresent mascotdog allways scared them away first. He is a beloved member of the community-but allways in our way. He sems to take pleasure in running between ur legs on steep and slippery trails in moments we are close to fall....

As mentioned, most (80%) of the Bilsareserve is primaryforest, and inb the tropics that mean an incredible variety of species. But spotting them is another mater-it takes time, effort and luck to find it. That is the most important reason for me to stay there for two weeks extra.

I saw so mutch in Bilsa-i will only bring up some highlights here. The forest itself is worth a description. Towering tall iwth a dense, intensely green roof. There are small, thin trees as well as gigants that came alive around the time the first europeans came to the continent. The forestbottom is many places quite packed with vegetation, but generally primaryforest-the untoutched forest-is easy to walk trough. The gigantic threes simply don´t allow enough light down to the forestfloor to make it totally unpenetrable by walls of vegetation. The old trunks are host to a wide variety of epifytes (organisms growing on it)-bromeliads, moss, fungus, long lians hanging down from branches far above the ground-all making the forest look very ancient. The forest is filled with the sounds of countless insecctspecies and birds. During nighttime, birds are mostly replaced by frogs and nightactive insects, some of them extremely loud. Painfully loud, actually, if they are close.
The leaves deserve a description-the shapes are familiar, but the size is not. Whern they fall down, i allways think it s a relatively big annimal or bird moving around. They can weigh several kilos each, and measure a meter and a half. A footlong leaf is too small to mention.

The bilsareserve mainly is made up of steep hills (one reason why it is still untoutched), but there are many small rivers, roofed by the canopies forming chilled tunells. Not unexpecterdly there are many beautifull waterfalls and rapids, some of them complete with that pool at the base, perfect for romantic moments. Those trails often doubble as trails during our hikes, beautifull walks but wet ones.

One doesen´t often see the stars in the millde of the jungle, but one night when we walked along a river searching for frogs, we did. Everybody switched of their flashlights and a beautifull starheaven framed by the treecanopies above us emerged. Breathtaking.

The howlarmonkeys is a starattraction here, they are very often heard when they mark their territory....it has been described as the scream of a jurassic monster-and that's what the first european explorers must have thought-the screams scared them away. I was lucky enough to get them close up several times-the most memorable two encounters follows:
One day an english volunteer-by me nicknamed birdman because of his passion for (guess what)-and i went along the red trail (all trails in bilsa are given names like that) in search of fruiteating birds. We suddenly heard a male scream close by. It sat in a high tree, but the hill was very steep (typical for Bilsa) so he came quite close. We started a howling conversation with him, for a while it definititely upset him, before he got tired of us and started only to respond with eyeglimpses filled with contempt.
The second last wekend a familygroup came in to the station and settled for hours in the treetops. The leading male was sleeping up there, looking like the prototype of laziness and selfconfidence. There was one pregnant female witch was a little more unsecure about our precense, and some youngsters witch were curious. After a while one of them started to throw down sticks, and i had to watch up for "rainfall" when taking my photos.

In Bilsa there are two species of sloths (dovendyr in norwegian). The threetoed and the twotoed. I got to see both. The first encounter was an evening well after dark when two of the scientists came to the mainbuilding with a stick between them. On the mudroad they had found a sloth witch they brought to a safer spot. If locals had found it, it would have been dinner. Everybody got big time exited, everybody seemed to have a camera working, and everybody got to see it as close up as they wanted. I would not call it a beautifull creature, but its sad face and slow movements make it a very charming creature. This slotrh came complete-even with the colony of greenalgae that inhabit its fur part of the year.
Next spotting was at the edge of the camp one afternoon we returned from reforestationwork. Allison, an american volunteer, suddenly raised the alarm. Across the path, a sloth climbed rapidly up ther treetrunk-the camera came out with recordspeed.

Then there are all the birds. On one walk we fing a group of parrots hidden in the treetop. On another there are the colourfull trogons-a group of birds witch is "the tropical birds of your imagination", with plenty of colours. Still-they can be incredibly difficult to spott in the thick greenery witch seem to absorb every other colour.
My favouritebird must be the toucans that eat our bananas just outside the mainbuilding. They have huge, "oversized" beaks, and a wounderfull colouration-yellow, black and red. At the most i saw six of them there, flaked by two woodpeckers and two butterflies measuring some 15 centimeters of height.

But there are so mutch small things to look at. Forexample the endless convois of leafcutting ants transporting precutted pieces of leaf down the treetrunks, across the forestfloor and down into their underground chambers where a fungus is allowed to grow on it. Ancient farmers.
But on the forestfloor there are many other anntspecies as well, one of he largest is the congaant, several centimeters long, with a scary set of mandibles. One fieldguide actually say-with bold letters:AVOID BEEING BITTEN AT ALL COST! I did my best, but one american was curious and picked up one wellgrown congaant. His finger was painfull a week after, and he needed antialergic pills....Less to blame was the german girl Luisa-she got it into her boot during an afternoonwalk-her reaction was amireable relaxed, but her face showed that congabites are no fun......
Also we got to see the armyants, witch send their oragingparties faaaar away fron the home. Nothing stop them, and they even build bridges by holding eachother with their jaws. We got to se some small examples of that.

Tarantullas abound in the rainforest, and it is a lot of species comming in a lot of colourvariations. My favourite has purple stripes on its back. The spiders are often seen, but luckilly they are peacefully. You have to work to get them to attack you. One day we did some machetework i deliberately made one female attacking my machete-but i was surprised over how mutch efforth it took, and how well it warned in beforehand. And after having hold the fangs of a tarantula in my hands, i was hapy it was only the machete it went for. I was lucky to get the newly shed skin of a tarantula living under the scientists doorstep-its owner was still sitting beside it.

Then there are the frogs-Flatlooking treeclimbing frogs, often with beautifull patterns and colours, and the members of the poison dartfrog family. Most of them can actually be picked up safely-only a few species are very poisonous. They come in a variety of colours-most usually in Bilsa are the orange and the red ones, pluss scores of black ones.

One truly facinating aspect of the jungle is camouflage, and there are some incredible examples.One day i made myself proud by finding an insect looking so exactly like a piece of moss, that some of the others refused to believe it was an insect to start with. Another find was made by US volunteer Amy a few weeks earlier. It was one of the socalled walking sticks-a group of insects looking exactly like twigs. This one was so perfectly made-with lremnants of "leaf", new shots and even a tail splitted and coloured like the drying end of a broken off twig. Very well camouflaged too is the walking leafs- large, green grasshoppers looking like that.

Gigamania is another feature of the jungle. One evening at the very rustic local drinkingvenue at La Yecita-15 min walk away from the camp, it came in a black monstergrasshopper, 15-20 centimeters long. In the diningroom we got a cockroachlikebeetle mutch longer than my hand, and a moth with a wingspan of several decimeters.

After Bilsa i went to Congal, a biological station on the coast. I had expected wilderness here too, but close to the station there´s mostly countryside and very secondary forest. But there was some very nice volunteers here too-leaving them was not the funniest thing.
In Congal there was mostly "slavework"-like weeding bamboefields with machete, picking taguanuts, witch are used for carvings. Bananaplanting, harvest of fish/shrimp frpm ponds were other tasks. And i have got totally addicted to hammocs!
Congal is situated in a typical frontierarea, infrastructure is little developed, and localls value independence strongly. Many prefer to work day out and day in earning a small and uncertain ioncome rather than beeing employed by someone.
Sadly for visitors-the local attitude (this doesent apply to everybody) is:take what you need whereever you need it. It can ber a tourists belongings or a neighbours coconuts. In nearby Muisne-the local servicetown-there are some really bad guys-ten months ago, seven guys attacked two volunteers with machete.

Now i am sitting in Quito. The old town has made it into the UNESCO list, and is a good place to spend a day strolling around. It is many nice buildings, and a busy peoplelife here.
Day after tomorrow i go southwards-Riobamba, Quenca, Loja-and then into Peru, i´ll work me down all the way to Valparaiso, Chile, where ill met up with exvolunteer Wiull from the bilsastation for several COLD beers.

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