Third of four S.A.P.E. posts re Ecuador.
Back in Quito! (Don't worry, mom, the only injury I sustained in the jungle was a sliver under my fingernail from paddling up a river in a dugout canoe. I am not, in fact, an invalid; it's just a catchy title.)
So: five days in the jungle. Cuyabeno Reserve, in the west-northwestern [actually ENE - ed.] part of Ecuador, bordering Colombia. In case you were wondering, we did not encounter any Colombian paramilitaries hiding in the undergrowth, nor get caught in any crossfire between them and the Ecuadorian military. Though it's worth noting the soldiers at the local airport sported machetes as well as rifles. I should also mention that the two-hour bus ride from the airport to the park entrance was never out of site of the region's main oil pipiline, which of course continued straight on into the park past the point where we stopped to begin our two hour river journey to our lodge.
But enough about depressing geopolitical economic context -- this was a nature excursion, and the jungle delivered in fine style. It was, the reader will please recall, this author's first real foray into a tropical ecosystem. So, yep, as he expected, the jungle is a mass of vegetation, and river, and flooded forest, and vines climbing and drooping from and sometimes strangling anything it can get a hold of. There were not, to my surprise, as many flowers as I'd expected, but then many of them were reportedly up in the canopy. Really, there was mostly a lot of green. In fact there was so much green that the most captivating creatures out of the myriad species I encountered were the palm-sized irridescent blue butterflies [blue morphos, they're called - ed.] that winked in and out of the sun along the shore, the only blue thing (and what a blue!) other than the sky and a definite contrast to the browns, greys, and blacks that served to camouflage most of the other critters we saw. Of course, there were also some gorgeously coloured birds. For the eco-nerds among you, a listing of the bird, monkey, snake, spiders, frogs, dolphin, caiman, etc. species I saw can be found in the appendix following the main body of this email. Suffice to say, we saw six types of monkey, two types of river dolphin (one of which we espied leaping fully out of the water on a few occasions), a 3-meter anaconda, hawks, falcons, toucans, macaws, woodpeckers, piranha, caiman, poison dart frogs, and various creepy crawlies of considerable size.
As for activities, these included motorized wildlife-watching excursions; a paddling watching excursion, in which I was stuck in a boat sterned by a complete amateur, making me long for all you and your paddling prowess -- on the bright side, our boats were escorted on the way back by first one, then two, then three, then four pale yellow butterflies, and as they accumulated I imagined they were the beginning of a great gliding rippling procession, an ever-expanding fluttering silent yellow cloud in some fantastical magical realist episode, and in fact that is exactly what happened, except that at the end when we reached our lodge the thousands of butterflies that had joined us did not simply settle into the surrounding vegetation to wait for our next excursion as I hoped, but rather swirled off and up in a vortex that disappeared into the blazing sunlight. Also, a couple of walks through "hilly" (i.e. non-swamp) jungle forest, which was a surprisingly similar experience, I thought, to hiking through boreal forest except with different and many more species, but still, it's a path, and watching your step, and looking around at green stuff; and a brief walk through swamp jungle, with mud sucking at your wellies every step, and having to grab at branches to balance yourself while hoping the branch is not inhabited by fire ants, with giant palm leaves towering over you, and which was decidedly NOT like a typical boreal forest hike (and therefore my favourite walk of the trip); and a couple of short night walks to look for nocturnal critters (mainly snakes, which we didn't encounter, and frogs and spiders, which we did); and a visit to a local indigenous community, which was interesting but touristy, especially the meeting with the shaman; and appreciating the extremely bright equatorial night sky, which affords a view of both the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross -- a fellow Canadian on the trip with an interest in astronomy brought along the biggest goddamn binoculars I've ever seen in my life, and through them I saw a galaxy, which looks like someone shining a spotlight on the roof of the world, a kind of hazy indistinct yellow blur that was, if individual stars were like those crunchy spherical sprinkles you sometimes get on cupcakes, about the size and shape of a Smartie. Oh, and we also fished for piranha. I caught one, though the photo evidence leaves something to be desired -- serves me right for handing my camera to someone else without ensuring all the settings were correct -- though on the whole fishing doesn't excite me much so this was not my favourite activity, although the midwestern woman that took the bad photo displayed an alarming stubbornness in the face of her failure to catch anything, getting tense and frustrated on day one, going back out on day two and getting twice as agitated, and finally waking up early on the last day to fish off the dock at the lodge, where to everyone's considerable relief she finally succeeded.
The lodge itself [Samona Lodge, on the Rio Cuyabeno near Laguna Grande - ed.] was pretty sweet, with basic but comfy cabins that you share with zero or more critters including cockroaches, tarantulas, and/or non-poisonous frogs (there was an apocryphal story of one past guest having found a boa in her shower), decent and plentiful food, and a central lounging area that was pretty much a big room with hammocks radiating all around from a central support, which was great for siestas. My tour mates were all pretty excellent people, a fact for which my gratitude increased immeasurably when on the next-to-last day this German gay couple (we believed) arrived and tagged along with us on our excursion: tall, skinny and shirtless and showing altogether too much boxer, who figured skinny jeans were the most appropriate attire for their walk through the jungle swamp and who lit up smokes whenever the guide paused to explain anything, enveloping the rest of us in a cloud of smoke. Turns out you can't escape douchebags no matter where you go.
And now today I'm back in Quito, taking it very easy before heading off to the Quilotoa loop tomorrow for a few days of sierra hiking, cloudforest exploring, and volcanic crater-lake appreciating. The only things on my agenda are reading, journal-writing, ATM-visiting, and potentially an excursion for ice cream.
Life's a pretty sweet fruit.
Appendix I - Wildlife Encountered in Cuyabeno Reserve, as recorded by the author in his journal at the time, where names were provided and he remembered to write them down. Apologies in advance for inconsistent punctuation.
squirrel monkeys, capuchin monkey, woolly monkeys, monksaki monkeys, black-mantled tamarinds, yellow-handed tiki monkey, red howler monkeys (heard but not seen). three-toed sloths.
pink river dolphins, grey river dolphins. 3m anaconda, flat-headed snake, tree boa. A 2.5m caiman, and some babies. poison dart frogs of various types (some red, some blue and yellow).
Many-banded aracarai (a toucan); white-throated toucan (Ecuador's largest); blue and yellow macaws; several parrots and parakeets of some types or other; various swallows; greater ani; "stinky turkey"; several kingfishers, including South america's largest, various vultures, eagles, falcons, and hawks, a juvenile night heron, cardinals (not the kind we see in N.A.), ringed woodpecker, some kind of wood creeper.
tarantulas. wolf spiders. scorpion spiders. scorpion. some kind of social spiders that work together to build webs that blanket entire bushes. bullet ants (so called to describe the pain of getting bitten). lemon ants (tasty and tangy, they're so small they pretty much dissolve on your tongue), fire ants.
Originally published via email, June 27, 2009.
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