Round the World

The first day in the jungle was an early start with breakfast that I could not eat. The lake reflected back a beautiful sunrise in a cloudless sky. I think one of the most unexpected parts about these entire weeks was that it never rained until our last day, as if to remind us that a return would bring us what we had expected.

We took to our canoe for a short ride to a carved out path of an old Huaorani family that settled there. The first thing that I saw was paja toquilla, the palm plant used from the coast land to make Panama Hats that I read so much about the day before. It didn't occur to me that the plant might have other uses than just providing the fiber to make hats, but it seemed like its uses were infinite. Our guide Fausto knew his stuff. Just like two days before, we could stop at any point and he'd have something to say. One of which was an enormous ant. I had heard of ants like these, only in Africa, ants, that go in hoards and encompass their prey, no matter how big and leaves just it's bones hours later. This was not quite the same. In fact the exact opposite was true. The ant had a punch to its bite, so overwhelming its prey in numbers is not necessary. In fact four or five bites from one of these ants could kill a baby human. I kept my distance. The diversity of ants never let up for a moment. Around one corner would be leaf cutter ants; another corner stood a hollowed tree that housed hundreds upon thousands on nasty little biters. Some of them gave you a good sting, others you couldn't even feel the bite. But perhaps the most peculiar of them all were the lemon ants, not called lemon ants for their association with a lemon tree, but because they in fact TASTE of lemon!

As soon as I started getting comfortable with the slow pace of our exploration, Fausto took off running. We took off after him, in fear of being lost like the two German and French couples we heard about the day before. I had to keep my head down and keep ducking this way and that to keep from running into spider webs or low hanging trees. Anything I brushed up against gave me a sneaking suspicion that I took something along with me for the ride. We ran for what seemed like fifteen minutes until we had a clearer view of the canopy and there was a colony of spider monkeys leaping from tree top to tree top. No one was in any mood to keep the chase going, though. I did a little ants-in-the-pants dance to shake off the sensation of being covered in bugs from the run.

We went back to our stroll through the jungle at which point we came upon a tree of such monstrous size that I can only compare it to a redwood, only it's base was wider than the redwoods I have seen. Hanging down to the ground were vines, reaching up to the heavens above it seemed. The first branches of this tree spread out above the canopy of all the other trees. I was in no mood to test my endurance at climbing the vines to find out that I would give out too high to simply drop back down, but others took on the challenge, not getting more than twenty feet off the ground. The indigenous, according to Fausto, used this climb to the first branches as a little test of going on past adolescence. I felt dizzy just looking up that high.

The next day was spent in similar fashion. We took a little twist in the afternoon to get in some fishing. I was a little giddy about that having already seen what some of the guide members had dredged up from this river. It was like watching Okie noodlin’, the way the boosted of their fishing technique. But the fish were far more exotic than an enormous 80 pound catfish. There were fish with spikes and armor of similar size and weight. The most frightening fact was that one in particular was apparently only a juvenile. Its adult size reaches about five or six meters long! That’s a shark if I have ever heard of any!

I found out precisely why anyone would be proud of their fishing. I was handed a clean hook on a string and given a raw slab of meat. Huh? Piranha fishing. It was possibly the hardest bit of fishing I have ever done. They would strike the meat just for you to help in their tearing off the bait while avoiding being hooked. But I got a lucky piece of bait. One with a sturdy piece of scale attached to the meat. The scale seemed somewhat familiar, probably because it was a piece of the armored catfish I saw earlier in the morning. The piranha couldn't keep from getting their mouth in the hook if they wanted the meat and so I pulled in the one and only piranha. The smallest, puny fish you'd ever seen. If it were just the foreigners fishing, we would easily have used more fish meat in bait than caught in fish. I pulled him out of the water and my knees started shaking. I had to put THIS in the boat with me? My toes had to have looked better than that stiff piece of scale and bone that the piranha had on a death hold. But it never let go of the bait, like a raccoon holding on to a piece of shiny metal.

That night, when everyone when into to wash away their accumulating jungle rot off their body in the acidic waters, the only thought on my mind was not wanting to be like that piece of bait. I did no more than splash the water on me from the deck. That was enough for me. But the adrenaline from the catch encouraged me to go another night hike, this time guided by Fausto. In the first two minutes we came across the biggest bug I have ever seen. And Fausto had never seen it before. It was a huge leaf bug, brown in color, and about the size of two hands spread out next to each other. I was convinced we found a new species, and we did nothing more than look at it for a couple of minutes and then carry on. I didn't think I would find any more than big bugs but Fausto was in to seeing much more than that. He was more interested in finding fish. Fish? In the dark? But sure enough we found one. It was swimming back in forth between the roots of trees that crept into the water. Its eyes were devilishly red. I got the chills looking at it, and standing in its water. Another reason not to swim in it. On the way back, having seen large grasshoppers everywhere and spiders of all sorts, we stumbled upon another unique sight. Well, not really stumbled on, but with Fausto's owl eyes, he spotted a snake coiled up sleeping on a leaf. It was the smallest and most lethal snake in all of the Amazon rainforest. There I was, already slightly nervous about the closet darkness of the forest, now standing in front of the most poisonous snake in the world's largest tropical rainforest supplying an enormous percentage of the Earth's fresh water, the crucial element for nearly every living and breathing animal on the planet, one of the most sobering thoughts that ever came upon me.

The next morning we saw what humanity is beginning to do to the jungle. We walked along the Rio Napo among the inhabitants of Ketchwa living there. I had a preconceived notion that they lived in harmony, only I was wrong. The western developed world had already reached these people. You could see the evidence with the hard hat hung on the wall of one of the raised houses we passed. Plots of land had been crudely chopped down for "sustainable agriculture." We finally came upon a school for the students of the area. Their classes are unlike anything you can imagine. More than forty students in the one concrete constructed building for miles and miles, without a plan of teaching, and pets of every kind, from monkeys to lizards. I am fascinated by the thought that anyone would have the idea that western ways could fit into this kind of world. But I saw how they did. We saw an oil drilling project under way, previously owned by the United States company Occidental, until the Ecuadorian government found out that the company had broke nearly every law on the contract in which it signed. And who’s the new prospective company to drill for oil here? A Chinese company.

It was a hard day to swallow, especially at the last, and I felt like a part of me would never leave or rather the jungle would never leave me. I definitely felt that way on the return trip back to civilization. Nausea and dizziness overtook me from hunger and dehydration. I pulled into the non-existent terminal of Cuenca shaky and ready to recover from a grueling test that I hope to someday encounter again.

The Amazon Jungle couldn't have seemed more vast than the way we traveled to and through it. Travel, though, was really only I could ask for and more. I felt tested at every step of the way, battling the most unforgiving environment in the world while trying to kick away the lingering effects of illness that never seemed to rest.

Our first day was a bus ride through the "easiest" passage in the Amazon Jungle that Ecuador has to offer, but it was nothing more than switch backs and tunnels. It took us nearly ten hours to travel north in the inter-Andean valleys and veer east to plummet into the low altitudes of the Rio Napo watershed. We experienced on the drive far more than I was expecting. The Pan-American highway, in parts, is no more than a gravel road, recently carved into the steep cliffs of the Andes. The flat terrain of the valleys were for the rivers and its inhabitants, not for the long distance traveler. So, high up in the mountains we could see nearly everything but the closest point on Earth to the sun. Chimborazu was blanketed in clouds. Unexpectedly we stopped in a small town that seemed to have no specific purpose. Its church was supposedly the first establishment in Ecuador and most of South America; a little unbelievable, like most of the historical sites found in this country. But the church was remarkable in its minimalism, something rare for the Spanish. Later, we reached the provincial capital of Riobamba, where hopefully at a later date I will return to take "el nariz del diablo," a switch-back train going west towards Guayaquil. From here, we started to head east towards the perpetually erupting volcano of Tungurahua. As if to let us know that it was still there the clouds surrounding the mountain parted to show a high ash cloud ascending into the heavens. The volcano looked higher than any mountain I had ever seen before, and its black silhouette showed the jagged edges of its crater. Further on, vegetation identifiable as tropical forest became more and more lush but still, we were high in the mountains. We stopped for what I thought was only for a casual view of the grand valley of a tropical river which flowed over one thousand meters below our feet, but to my unhappy surprise I was in for more than just a casual view. To get a better view of a stunning waterfall on the other side of the canyon, Ecuador's fine tourist department had built a zip line gondola spanning the canyon. Gratefully I was not first to find myself speeding down a steel cable on a shaky gondola, but the wait may have been worse. Not for the faint of hearts. At last, what seemed like a whole in the wall location, we found our hostel which was no less than a tropical paradise in the capital of its province, Puyo. There we observed how those with money can "experience" the grand Amazon jungle.

That wasn't our final destination, though. On the following day, we stretched our legs for another long bus ride through jungle. We traveled in a little procession of public buses. It seemed so out of place for coach buses on dirt roads at full speed winding through hills where tiny tributaries to the world's largest river began. This was the best route of transit in Ecuador's Oriente. If we decided to go from the border of Columbia to the southern border with Peru, it would take five days in a bus on this road. Fortunately, we were upon the Rio Napo before noon, and a rather bumpy ride led us to our trip guides with a motorized canoe patiently waiting our arrival. Our hostel was comfortably named Hostal Anaconda. Immediately as we stepped off the canoe, we saw what the jungle had to offer. On my first steps along the upper Napo, I spotted a parade of leaf-cutter ants, looking like a thin file of grass on the move. That afternoon, we took a trip upstream, taking twice the time it took going down, in order to get our first true introduction to the Amazon rain forest. It was like I was with the camera crew of the Discovery Channel, seemingly every twenty paces had something unique about this ecosystem. The first was a tree fruiting large green, mango-sized fruits layered in black life. Ants. Hundreds of them on each fruit. It was an example of symbiotic relationship between plants and animals that are so frequently found there. The next was a gnarled tree that is actually a type of vine. It suffocates it's host, like a boa constrictor, killing it. The tree inside rots away, leaving the perfect cove for bats. Inside this particular tree, there slept four of them. There were seemingly infinite instances of unique life. After the hike, we drifted back down to our hostel in poorly constructed rafts of tethered tree trunks. This is claimed as Ecuador's finest river rafting. I saw not one white capped riffle. That night, there was no way I was going to lay still and go to sleep. I gathered up a troop for a night hike into the jungle, unguided as to give us as much time as we wished. I have never had such an exhilarating and terrifying experience in my life. The insects, spiders, and frogs were abundant. Every step had something to see. But the darkness was think, and in the background played a jungle soundtrack coming from some far off party. I felt like Indiana Jones, leading our group of four into perpetual darkness, guided by the pathetic light of my tiny flashlight.

We still weren't at our final destination. Not even close. The next morning, as the sun started to rise, we drowsily boarded our dugout canoe for the longest boat ride I hope to ever take. Eleven long hours until we stopped. I wished I had brought more to keep me occupied. Two hundred pages of The Panama Hat Trail wasn't nearly enough. Midway down we passed the city of Coca. Ironic name, as Ecuador strives to keep itself a clean country. The town was just like I read in my book, however. It was the modern "wild west." Each block housed at least two bars, prostitution houses, and shifty-eyed walkers. This place originated in the oil boom. No other purpose could give rise to clearing land under the harshest sun I have ever felt. The presence of the first-world to the north was very apparent. The best example I'll give came upon finding fairgrounds. We were lured in by the siting of a farris-wheel and sought to get a better look. I choked back tears of childhood joy when I saw behind the gates a Mickey and Minnie caterpillar train. I couldn't be anymore disgusted by this place. I was glad when we finally left. At this point, we still had another four or five hours ahead of us, weaving around sandbars and barges of oil trucks heading towards their company-paved roads. We arrived at last as the sun set. We had a lodge tucked away behind vegetation alongside a placid lake of Rio Piraña (Piranha River). I settled in, knowing for the first time ever, I had absolutely no idea where I was, only the knowledge that I was further away from civilization than I will probably ever be.