Into the Jungle: Nature

A couple of weeks ago, I took my first trip into the Amazonian rainforest. It was very cool. It was one of the things I really wanted to do in South America, and even though the actual Amazon doesn't flow in Ecuador, the rivers that lead to the Amazon do, and they are the rivers from which Orellana, the Spanish explorer who mapped the Amazon, began his journey. I was going with the school. Basically we each had 20 hours of class for the week, about 4.5 hours each day, and then we would go on some sort of excursion. Most of the students took a bus down to the town of Coca, but I, wisely, decided to take a 30 minute plane ride instead of a 10 hour bus ride. The main river that flows in Ecuador is the Rio Napo, but most of the "developed" area is either indigenous villages (more on that on my next post) or oil fields. Ecuador's oil stock is in the forest, and, as you can imagine, it's a political hot potato in the country because of the dangers both to the forest ecosystem and the indigenous cultures. For now, however, I just want to focus on the nature part.

Anyway, I and another student, Christina, from Norway were scheduled to leave at 9:45, but our flight was cancelled, so we had to wait until 11. Although annoying, I wasn't really surprised. In Ecuador, nothing happens on time. Eventually, we got to Coca, and I got my first view of the river. Weirdly, it was exactly what I expected: a big river, with lots of trees and humidity. It wasn't as warm as I expected, which my tour books had also said. If you want to go to the jungle, I guess February is a good month, according to the people there. Anyway, it's a one hour boat ride from Coca to the lodge. So we waited for about 30 minutes, and this boat came to take us to the Yarina Lodge. The only way to really go into the jungle, unless you plan on bringing big guns and lots of knives, is to stay at a lodge. Yarina isn't the most wild of all the lodges, but it's the most accessible, which I'm sure is why the school uses it. Honestly, it was lovely, considering where we were. The cabins are simple, but have hot water. Most people just hang out at the "lobby" which is where we ate and had our classes. When you go to one of these lodges, you're essentially a hostage. You can't go anywhere without one of the lodge's boats. They do have great local tour guides, and since we were a Spanish school, they only spoke to us in Spanish, and that was cool too.

There were ten students and 4 teachers there, and we all got along really well. The other thing about the lodge is that the electricity went out at 10 p.m. every night, so it was an early to rise, early to bed kind of week.

The jungle itself is really interesting. Just like the cloud forest in Costa Rica, there's not much soil to speak of. There's only 5 centimeters, and then it's all clay. And since it rains a lot, when you take a walk, you're walking in a lot of wet clay. The lodge gave us these rubber boots to wear whenever we were on an excursion. One big difference between this jungle and Costa Rica is that here the indigenous people are still allowed to hunt animals, so the animals have a very healthy fear of humans. Hence, you don't see as much. What you do see are lots and lots of plants. Still we had some good sightings. We saw capybaras (the largest rodent in the world), tapirs, monkeys, caimans (on a really cool night canoe ride), land turtles, and lots of cool bugs. Here are some pictures:

Because I lost my old camera, which was much better than the new one, it was harder to get good animal shots, unfortunately.




Some of the other highlights. During one of the hikes, we got to this Tarzan swing, which was made of one of the vines that hang from the trees. It was sort of silly, but fun to swing on it. Also, on another hike, we got to this tall tower where we were able to get a great overview of the jungle. What is striking is how flat the area is, particularly compared to the mountains (obviously?). But basically when you get to the top of the tower, all you see is a level field of tree tops. Also, I tried "lemon ants" which are ants that live in plants and that taste, in fact, like lemons.

All in all, it was a really cool experience, but in many ways the most interesting part was the last day when we visited an indigenous family. But that requires it's own post, so I'll do that next.