Well, I have now hiked the mother of all rainforests and I will go back, no question about it. I´ll take Ali (for sure...he´d really love it) and any other adventurous person who wants to experience one of the most pristine areas of the world. One really feels transportated back into primoridial times there and the beauty of the area is beyond description.
I stayed at a lodge owned and operated by an indigenous community called the Sani Isla. To get to their lodge, I took a small plane to the town of Coca which is a sprawling industrial community primarily set up to service the oil industry in this part of the Amazon. The town is situated at the entrance to the Amazon. From there we travelled for four hours by motorized canoe down the Napo river which is the largest tributary of the Amazon. This river is miles long and miles wide and would normally take a full day of rowing in a convential canoe to reach the Sani Lodge. After this ride we changed into a smaller, also motorized, canoe and headed down curving streams (we would probably classify these streams as rivers) for another 45 minutes or so until we arrived at the serene lagoon on which the Sani Lodge is situated. The lodge consists of a bar house and dining hall and small cabins in the back. It also has a camping area.
This facility was built with oil money! Initially the Sani Isla cut a deal with the oil company out here (It´s called Petroleo de Ecuador or something like that - I´m not sure if Chevron is a partner here) to do some oil exploration on Sani Isla land. The community built the main rooms of the lodge and a couple of cabins with this money. Fortunatly, no oil was found so the Sani weren´t tempted to cut another deal that would have involved exploration. However, oil was found on other nearby indigenous land and the oil company then negotiaed another deal with the Sani to lay pipelines over their land to transport the oil to the coast. With that money, they expanded the property with five or six additional rooms and more cabins. This is worrisome because the oil pipelines tend to break and leak.
Oil exploration in the Amazon has primarily been a disaster for the land and people in the Amazon. A few hundred kilometros north of the Sani lands is an area called Lago Agrio (Sour lake). Oil was extracted there for more than two decades with absolutely no safety precautions and the land and waters in that region are completely poisenous. There is a big class action suit against Chevron to clean up the damage done there. Hopefully that will case will be settled in favor of the people. It´s a major battle, as you can imagine, with the a infuriatingly unequal balance between the oil company´s hefty cadre of high-priced lawyers and Ecuadorian lawyers here (the leading attorney is from the Lago Agrio region and still ives in a small one room cabin there), but there are NGOs in the states and here assisting, so everyone remains hopeful.
We passed a number of oil rigs on our way down to the Sani Lodge and I hope that the law suit in Lago Agrio is motivating the oil companies here to use safer pracrices in extracting oil, disposing of waste, and sealing used pits. What a shame that oil seems plentiful in this beautiful region.
But enough of that. The weather was much cooler than I imagined it would be and I can say that I was never really uncomfortable with the climate. It was cool in the mornings (one needed a blanket in the middle of the night and morning) and it often rained off and on for days, leaving the air cool and fresh. I spent about 12 hours hiking in the jungle and many hours canoeing the tranquil streams and the lagoon. Hiking was especially fun because we wore tall rubber boots and sloshed around in water and great expanses of mud. We were never hot on the hikes because we were always under the canopy. One hike required stealthly balancing on slippery logs through about 100 yards of swamp, and yes, I did slip and fall into the swamp. But it wasn´t at all disgusting because the swamps were not at all dirty with decay as one would expect. Neither is the forest floor, in fact, the jungle smells wonderfully clean and fresh. I think it´s because things decay so quickly in that climate, it´never gets to the smelly point.
A few more highlights were; monkeys on parage in the trees, ants that tasted like lemon (on advisement only...I didn´t do any teste-tasting), trees that walk (albiet slowly), wild orchids, plants leaves that smell and taste like garlic, hundreds of medicinal plants (the amazon is one great pharmaceutical cornicopia), and the late night canoe rides looking for caimans(aligators that lived in our lagoon..they eyes light up at night....) My group never saw any but it was great star gazing and listening to the thousands of nocturnal animals and insects go about their buisness of mating and forging for food. We also visited the school and community center and were guests for an afternoon in our native guides home, which is essentially a big deck on stilts. Pictures forthcoming.
We had one rather dramatic period when we thought a gang of wild pigs (they travel in groups of 100 and are aggressive) were coming our way. We had to tiptoe through the jungle, our native guide studiously scanning the ground and sniffing the air (you can smell them). I followed along spoting all the trees that I could jump into in case of an encounter.. but fortunately we never crossed paths.
Wow, the Amazon. What an enchanting place. And to think it covers the greater part of South America. You may have heard that a new tribe unknown to anyone else on earth was recently sited somewhere deep in the Amazon...in Brazil I think. There must be many, if not hundreds more.
Well, I´m back in Quito for two days. I head to a rural community on Monday to spend a week with a family and continue my Spanish studies. Next post, I´ll tell you about a weekend trip to the Saturday Indegneous market two hours north of Quito.
cheers.
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