Ecuador
There And Back Again
A Gringo's Holiday (Okay, Photos Coming Soon)
I started off from Eugene, hopping from flight to flight. My big stop off was at Houston, where I made a few attempts at calling my mom and was not in the least bit affected by the hurricane that apparently ravished humble Texas in my wake. I met up with other students in the airport, and began the flight to Quito. I was surprised to find myself sitting next to an International Baccelaureate (a program geared toward international perspective of which I was a part in high school) Bigwig (a sort of IB missionary). We spent the night at the Sierra Nevada, in the middle of Gringotown (also known as Gringoland, Gringolandia, and Whiteyville). The next morning, we left half our crap in Quito and drove east with our excellent bus driver (in the majestic Autobus de los Gringos...there's a theme here) to the P�ramos, an odd sort of mist-strewn frozen mossy scrubland. Completely covered with vegetation about three inches tall and totally soaked with water. Windy and cold as hell. Our translator and general guide until September 2nd, Harold, and our short-term botanist, Edwin, showed us around the countryside. We ended the day in the Papallacta Hot Spring Resort. It was fantastic. Ahhhh.
The next day we got up early for Mindo. We passed through the dry South Choco Region, part of a band of dry mountain terrain nestled between the mountains, of which Quito is a part. Cacti, Agave, and dry shrubs. Then we got into the Cloud Forest! Cecropias with white-topped leaves popped out of the hillsides at us. Mindo was great. It's a little liberal Eugene-esque town west of Quito. After the strenuous hike in to the Mindo Biological Station, it was totally apparent. I was in the freaking Ecuadorian Cloud Forest! ROCK! Huge leaves attached to bizarre plants, everything wierd and beautiful. We spent a week at the lodge there being pampered and studying the local plants and animals. It was like the cool hikes some of you may have done around Oregon, only steeper and (slightly) wetter and very bizarre. Harold took us on a creek walk (i.e. we were in the water), where we saw a Cock-o-the-Rock nestling and a bunch of cheerio-moths (this is Harold's name for them - they're yellow and have circles on their wings) and generally had a grand, if somewhat wet and bruised, time. Up on the hill, strange cuttings have provoked debate for decades as to their origins. They may have been made by animals, Incans, streams, treefalls, earthquakes, aliens, or any combination of the above. There was mostly secondary forest where we were, but a little primary. Vines and lianas and bromeliads and huge spiders and humongous tree ferns, and palm fronds bigger than any of us! We went on a night walk, catching lizards and frogs, and checking out the bizarre insects that come out around 10 at night, and we also did independent projects. My group consisted of Chelsie, Beth, and Phil, working on river ecology, trying to figure out what bugs lived on what rocks in various water speeds and forest disturbance levels. We had a bat-man out to catch bats with us (one of his assistants was bitten by a Vampire) and a frog-man (a depressed Brit) to catch frogs with. We finished with a big party, in which I dressed as Bam Boo Boi. We drank a little. Some more than others. I was actually pretty good, but my roommate fell off his bunk in the middle of the night. We also saw a moth as big as my hand that night. I was impressed.
The next morning, we hiked out to Mindo, took a bus to Quito, and spent the evening there. We washed our clothes and slept. The next morning, it was an early flight to Coca, a small airport city east of Quito, on the Napo River, a large tributary of the Amazon. We boated down that behemoth for a while, noticing the hand-hollowed canoes and the open-walled, thatch-roofed cottages dotting the sides of the river. Whenever we closed on either bank the sounds of the forest intensified to a roar, a great mass of chirping, buzzing insects. We finally arrived at Pompeya, a military checkpoint surrounded by solid forest and topped with barbed wire, looking like something out of Jurassic Park.
After the obligatory dose of high frequency radiation, we clambered aboard a Ranchero, something like a bus with benches and no sides. We were in it now, this was the real deal. Every once in a while a flock of yellow butterflies waiting on the road would start up as we passed, fluttering away in a big golden cloud. We started noticing big brown sacs attached to the living walls on either side of the road. Then we noticed the brown tentacles that crept from these proturbances down their local trunks to the ground. At first they looked like lianas (there were plenty of these already) but I slowly convinced myself that they were part of the same brown mass that they ended in. I later found out that these were termite nests, with enclosed termite roads to the Earth for protection while they gathered mud and other resources. Another thing we ran across was the Natives, and by this I mean the Huaoranis. The Huaoranis are in the process of succumbing to the evils of modern society. Half a century ago they were filling missionaries full of spears. Now a lot of them work for the Man, and those that don't are seeing their land crumble before the might of capitalist venture. Some of them aren't too fond of whitey, and others are just...difficult. They might stop your truck and demand USD$2,000,000 for passage. At one point we got a nasty look. At another point we passed a school, and the driver was kind enough to stop when somebody asked him to. We stopped long enough to let a couple teenagers climb on, but not long enough to get swamped with requests and tolls. We eventually arrived at a large metal bridge. This spanned the little brown Tiputini River, on the edge of the Yasuni National Park.
One of the reasons Ecuador is such a nice place to visit is because it's very sympathetic to U.S. interests. Articles were already running on September 10th about the pain that their neighbors to the north had suffered two years earlier. One of the reasons Ecuador is so sympathetic to the U.S. is because Ecuador has oil, and therefore makes a lot of its money keeping things easy and smooth for gringos. Suffice it to say that a lot of cash is always changing hands, and a lot of favors are done. The resident Oil Company is kind enough to sell outboard motors to the National Park guides, which they attach to their canoes to haul around student ecology groups. It also is kind enough to sell them gasoline by the barrelful when those exceedingly inefficient outboard motors run dry. When we got to the Tiputini River, the canoes had already been delivered, and as a result of their journey, were, of course, out of gas. An expedition was sent back to local Company headquarters to buy a few barrels, four or five total. Phil and Xander, a couple of friendly, occasionally obnoxious students in our group, joined Harold in throwing stones across the river at stuff. After the better part of an hour a few other people joined them. Sometimes the local oil barons are asleep, or gone, or just don't feel like getting up, and the guides have to wait a bit to make their purchase. I skipped a lot of rocks.
After the gas arrived, and was loaded on the canoes, we started down the Tiputini. If it was cool before, now it was amazing. Simply a wall of green on either side of the river. In Mindo, the plants had jumped out like street performers, each with some bizarre trait to show off. Now everything was a jumble, everything on top of everything else, everything competing for a spot of sunlight on the river bank. After a couple of hours we arrived at Tiputini Biological Station. If I had had a slightly weaker grip on reality, I would have instantly recognized it as an Ewok Village and prepared myself for a wild evening of percussive wooden instrumental music and the feverish dancing of tiny hairy humanoids. It was even better. It was, at least for a biology geek such as myself, paradise. We settled into our cabins for a few days. I had previously roomed with the Boys of the trip, Phil and Xander. This time it was Dan, a slow, lanky introvert, and Rich, an older man, both teacher and student, who wavered between enjoying the company of us kids immensely, and feeling wierd about it. We had a dining area, a lab area, a hammock building, and the cabins, which on occasion had running water, lukewarm running water if you knew when to take your shower.
For our three short days at Tiputini, we went on three walks, and then did a big project, which we presented to each other before taking off. Rich, Ester, a kind, goofily enthusiastic Christian girl, and I almost studied the habits of Leafcutter ants, but settled on Lemon ants, a bizarre species that protects a spindly tree by injecting an acid that I can say from personal experience tastes like citrus (thus the name) into all surrounding vegetation, in exchange for permanent residency in the plant's bulbous leaf petioles. The rainforests of Ecuador are like the metropoli of the human world. If you've got a good idea, you can really go far. Another odd survival tactic that also involves interspecies cooperation is the use of a white herbicidal fungus covering the bark, which allows an otherwise scrawny tree to compete for light with the multitudes.
We had three different guides for the three walks, only one of which spoke English, so when we divided into three groups of students to rotate between the guides, Peter made sure two Spanish-speakers were in each group. This made for a sort of easy-medium-hard setup. Harold was, of course, easy to understand if you could get past his somewhat mumbling speech. He gruffly introduced us to various animals and plants around the rainforest. The medium difficulty guide, Franklin (his father was obsessed with American history), was a young athletic Quichua who knew a lot of useful flora around the research station, and had a clear, precise manner of speaking which allowed even some of the non-Spanish-speakers to keep up, augmented with our and Peter's clumsy translations. He also took us canoeing out on a little lake to see our first Hloatzins and some other interesting birds, and up into a canopy tower in a bald thorny cecropia tree to see monkeys and makaws. Luckily I had him before I had Meyer, an old Shuar who knew a little English, but didn't use it, and liked to tell very long stories. He knew a great deal about the local plants and animals of the forest, and had a great store of cures. When Carla, Peter's girlfriend, asked him about remedies for eye problems (she's practically blind in one eye, and is an art teacher at the University), he simply asked what kind of problem, and proscribed the watery sap of a particular liana. Later, when I slipped on the incredibly slick wooden walkways that led between different parts of the station, scraping all the way up my leg, he insisted on rubbing "dragon's blood" on it, the healing sap of a local tree. It did get better. Meyer claimed that doctors were a sham, since their business was treating sick people, not actually making them well, and claimed that any problem could be cured easily and permanently with the right natural medicine, using himself in his aged strength as a prime example of the wonders of ancient medicine. I mentioned he also liked to tell stories. Megan and I were the translators for our group. We waited in rapt attention for about half an hour for him to finish a story about a Puma attack (Jaguar is a muddy term, used for anything from the big black cats of the Amazon to their Puma neighbors to Bobcats back home, Puma is much more specific) before we could try to give a thirty second explanation to the bored students with us. He also told an interesting story to another group which Beth, one of their translators, a young but motherly hippie chick, close friend to Fern, an equally laid back, eternally content flower child, related to some of us later.
You see, long ago there was a Shuar village around this area, only down where it's flooded much of the year. One of the families had a young son, a child remarkable only in his dreams. Every so often this young man would have a dream in which two ghostly white skinned women would come to his room at night. His parents didn't think much of this, until one day they went into his room in the morning and found him missing. Distraught, they organised an expedition to find their son. They searched long and hard, but in vain, and eventually resorted to a visit to the local Shaman, who went on a spirit journey and described the white skinned women and the place to which they had taken the boy, an island in the middle of the flooded forest with one great tree growing out of it. Setting out again, they found the boy, who refused to leave the island with the great tree. They forced him back to the village, but the dreams continued. The parents visited the Shaman again, dreading that the boy would disappear forever, and after another spirit journey the Shaman said simply that the boy was having the dreams because he didn't have a wife. Eventually, the young man was married and sure enough, the dreams ended, and he never disappeared again.
We left Tiputini Biological Station the day after Mars' closest approach to the earth in around 50 millenia, and it moved in and out of the early morning fog and darkness, jumping out at us from gaps in the clouds and peeking over the butresses of the fortress of vegetation looming over us, but always leading us onward, down the river, towards our destination.
When we got to the road, we boarded a bus where our driver awaited us. Not our bus. Not our driver. This wasn't friendly Nikko, but someone who'd grown up watching plenty of violence and sex on TV. He was kinda creepy. Apparently the bus's horn served as an extension of his sexual organs, because whenever we passed anything resembling a female figure, he would lay on that thing and leer like some impregnating god of virility. Eventually he dropped us off at a little canoe tie-up at a swollen creek that would eventually dump us into the big, slow, muddy Cuyabeno River. Patches of thorny palms, home to large pouchlike bird nests, broke out of the now familiar walls of green on either side of our canoes. Another addition that this place offered was the roots. They would hang down in ropes and veils from the large trees that occasionally spread over us, just brushing the water, or hanging a few feet above it. At the juncture with the Cuyabeno, muddy whitewater and tealike blackwater met, the latter won, and the water opened out into a lagoon. This was the soggy doormat of the Cuyabeno Lodge, a bunch of open rooms with an extremely inmtimate view of the wildlife.
By "open rooms" I mean to say that these rooms had floors, ceilings, and a little bit of wall. Cockroaches, rats, and tarantulas had people hiding in their mosquito-netted beds, and if you wanted to get dressed in privacy, you kindof had to squat down. Actually, this was the site of probably the biggest rift in the group. One cabin had a tarantula living in it, which was, some might argue, treated quite poorly, permanent resident that it was, and short term guests that we were. At any rate, we woke up in the mornings to absolute cacophonies of Hoatzins, Toucans, Vultures, and a wide variety of smaller birds. Little black Monk Saki Monkeys stopped by the lagoon side of our dining area every once in a while, and the caretakers would toss them hunks of banana, that they would greedily consume to the students' delight. We took trips throughout the flooded forest, mostly by canoe, over the next few days. I got a soda and some cookies at a little general store that was really a shack and a chicken coop. We saw an Anaconda, which I regret to inform you actually was only about four feet long, no bigger than a large rattler, but it was young. We saw a Conga, or bullet ant, nest. They're about twice as big as one of our carpenter ants, and apparently they got the name "bullet ant" because that's exactly what their bite feels like. We also had to detour around a wasp nest under the initial stages of construction in the middle of the path, which really looked like nothing more than an inconceivable number of wasps all swarming around a single large leaf. We fished for Pirhanas, swam in the teawater, and ate termites (they have a crunchy head and taste like wood), we even saw both a three and a two-toed sloth, but nothing was quite as cool as the freshwater dolphins.
Millions of years ago, the South American continent looked something like the letter "p". It consisted of what is now the Andes, what is now the Brazillian coast, and a huge sea in between. Naturally, ocean species could swim in and out of this sea at their whim. Eventually, however, as silt washed down from the mountains, the entire South American continent filled in, and became the Amazon Basin. As the large sea shrank to an enormous river, one notable species stayed behind and adapted to the change in salinity, and that was the River Dolphin. These creatures are quite amazing. They have a pink tint to their skin, an oddly arched back (giving them the look of a swimming triangle), and of course the usual dolphin capriciousness. They'll come up fairly close to the canoes, out of sheer curiosity, and we stopped to watch them at more than a couple points in our daily meanderings.
After far too short a time, we boated back down to the road, took a bus up to Lago Agrio, and flew back to Quito. This time we actually spent a full day in Quito, and it was quite exciting. Besides wandering around the local markets and practicing our Spanish and our haggling, we had a great night playing pool and drinking with Harold. On the way back, Harold advised us to slow down as we turned the corner to our hostel. He peeked around the corner, decided to continue, and told us off-handedly that the man we'd passed on the opposite corner was checking to see how drunk we were. If we were sufficiently inebriated, he would signal to the two prostitutes that we passed, who would have stalled us while a couple of big Ecuadorians would have sauntered up to us, pulled out weapons, and demanded money. Fortunately for me, I turned in after that, but Harold led another expedition out into the metropolitan jungle. On the way, they were, in fact, mugged. Someone punched Phoebe, a tall hippy girl who normally doesn't take a lot of crap, but unfortunately was caught off guard and had no chance to retaliate, and Harold and Fern were grabbed. Apparently one dollar was successfuly picked from Harold's pocket, and Phoebe got a nice bruise on her neck for the rest of our adventure. The rest of their night, I'm told, went splendidly, and they were left alone on the way back.
After a little recuperation, we took a morning flight to the Galapagos, by way of the biggest, meanest, deepest heart of darkness, Guayaquil. I've heard a lot about this city. Ecuadorians would tell you it's where all the black people live. Seasoned Estadounidense visitors would tell you it's really just like New York, only poorer. Your mother would tell you just to stay the hell away from it. I wanted to stop there at some point, but my itinerary and my mother's voice in my head prevented me from doing so. We arrived at the airport on Baltra (the small Island north of the main tourism island, Santa Cruz) about 14 hours after we left Quito. Step off the plane, shuffle your feet on the de-seeding mat, get your bags checked for anything more biotic than snot, and pay the $100 entry fee. We took a bus to the docks and were immediately dazzled by the avian wildlife.
Imagine a giant mole under the surface of the southern Pacific Ocean, pushing it's way through the rock of the sea floor. As it moves forward, it creates a mound of shattered earth that pops up above sea level for a while, before falling back under as it moves past. That's more or less the Galapagos. Tectonics creates a hot spot that moves northwest along the floor, pushing up volcanos and vast chunks of sea rock (Baltra is a huge plateau created in this manner) which are then slowly eroded back into the Pacific. Of course, the surrounding water is about three and half kilometers deep, but the sides of the islands don't go straight down to the ocean floor, in fact the depth around the islands is actually pretty low compared to most places in the ocean. And shallow water surrounded by islands tends to be nice, calm, and warm. And therefore full of coral. And fish. And since there's a high proportion of prime fishing area around the islands relative to the surface area of the islands themselves, that means that the shores of the Galapagos, their craggy, barren rocks as much as their beautiful white sand beaches, are absolutely teeming with birds. And not just any birds. These birds, being about 17,000 kilometers from the mainland, pretty much keep to themselves. There are a lot of indigenous species, and plenty of other species that northerners such as myself simply haven't seen anyway. Lumbering frigatebirds sailing through the air with taut, arching wings, some of the males with their large, bright red throat sacs inflated. Pelicans that hit the water like a dog hitting a sliding glass door - but come up with a fish nonetheless. Black, sweeping storm petrels, floating about as if they were being held up by strings. And of course, blue-footed boobies. Later, we would see wierd little penguins, totally out of place and totally happy, diving around the calmer shores, elegant, venerable albatross dextrously clapping each others' beaks in a days-to-weeks-long mating dance, and, flying like little white kites with long, pendulous tail feathers, floating effortlessly above shear rocky cliffs and crashing waves, the red-billed tropicbirds. Biology, ecology, environmental science, whatever the major, we were all very happy.
So, thus dazed, we followed the instructions of our new guides, taking the two small boats out to the yacht that would be our home for the next five days. Our vessel was the majestic Coral II, the Crew consisted of Captain, First Mate, Cook, Cook's Assistant, Bartender/Waiter, Custodian, and two Naturalists, Juanito, a small, vibrant, pleasant man, and Marco, a taller, more macho guide, who had a great love of soccer and a somewhat less impressive store of genuine knowledge.
Our tour of the islands started with a trip through the waters west of Baltra. Required reading for the trip included The Beak of the Finch, a book largely about the small group that did (and perhaps still does) research on the finch population of the tiny island, Daphne Major. We told the captain that, and he swung the ship around to get a closer look at the Daphne islands, their meager vegitation (mostly Palo Santo, a shrubby skeletal tree), and the researchers' landing site. Then we cut back around to North Seymore (Baltra is also known as South Seymore), another shear plateau jutting out of the waves, and landed for our first view of an unimproved island.
Over the next week we explored several different rocky islands, and went snorkeling in the ocean. Flamingos, Sea Lions, and Albatross. Then we went our separate ways. Some of us wandered the central island, Santa Cruz, for a while, and I went scuba diving for my first real time before heading back to the mainland. Once there, I took a trip to Banos, a town perched under a volcano, hung out with friends and hiked around, and then went back to Quito for a day, before heading on my own to Otavalo, a little market town, on the way to which had my digital camera (with all my pictures) and my binoculars stolen. A few days in Otavalo, hanging out, buying stuff, meeting back up with people, and I headed back to Quito to fly up to Mexico City. I met up with Eve, and we toured for a while, seeing a variety of ruins and interesting spots, and doing LOTS of hiking, before I headed back to Quito and flew home...except for the delay due to fog. Remember, Quito is high in the Andes. Finally, I got home the day after school started. More detail on this last paragraph as time permits. It's now June 2nd, 2004.
Here's where I got the main page picture.
And here's some Berley Lakes pictures.
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