Aventuras en la amazonía

These past two weeks have been so incredible, and I really want to write about everything. We've been SO BUSY. I think there have only been two nights since leaving Cuenca that I've stayed up later than 10 PM. I'm afraid there's no way I'll be able to do justice to the awesomeness of all our experiences, but I'll do my best.

On Sunday, November 8, we flew from Cuenca to Quito, which is not that far (less than an hour by plane), but there are a lot of mountains in between. I sat in the emergency exit row for the first time in my life. Actually, all of the emergency exit row seats were taken up by B-W people, and you're technically supposed to be fluent in the language to sit there. Dr. Melampy, his wife, Nancy, and Professor Martin actually are fluent in Spanish, so they were probably okay, and I'd like to think I could have held my own in an emergency situation, but everyone else probably should have been seated elsewhere. I was a little nervous sitting in that row, actually, because that was probably the roughest flight I've ever experienced. There was a lot of turbulence, and about five minutes before we landed the cabin pressure dropped significantly for about fifteen seconds and I got really dizzy. We survived, though.

We spent the night in a beautiful hostel in Quito (it was way nicer than the hotel in which we stayed in Machala), and then we left at 5:15 AM for the Amazon. We had to wait a long time for our flight to Coca because of weather, but we finally boarded the shuttle bus that took us across the tarmac to our plane. The airport in Quito, Ecuador's capital city, has less than five gates. The airport in Coca is even smaller. Instead of a baggage carousel, they tossed all the luggage onto a wide bench and we had to go over and just pull ours out of the pile. We took a very short bus ride to a dock, which was right by a hotel. The hotel had a snackbar, and while we were waiting for our boat, we were entertained by the snackbar's resident toucans and spider monkeys. They hopped all over the place, including on some people's heads and shoulders. The toucans were particularly interested in untying shoelaces.

We had been waiting for three other people to arrive on a later flight, and once they got there, we set off to board the boat. That was something of a disaster. Professor Martin slipped in a big puddle of water; Angela lost control of her gigantic suitcase and it crashed down a huge, steep ramp; and yours truly took a spectacular tumble. My right ankle (the one I sprained a few years ago) occasionally decides to stop working without asking my brain's permission, and this occurred as I was going down a small set of stairs. I ripped a hole in my jeans and scraped up my knee pretty well, and everyone freaked out, but I was laughing. It did hurt, but my brain kind of experienced the whole thing in slow motion, so it was actually rather comical from my point of view.

The boat was a long, flat motorboat with an awning and two back-to-back rows of plastic lawn chairs. Each person received a life jacket and a really nice bagged lunch, and we had a very enjoyable two-hour cruise down the Río Napo. We arrived at what seemed to be some kind of military station, where we had to present our passports and go through security. Then we boarded our first chiva.

Chiva means goat in Spanish, but in this case it refers to an open-air, wooden trolley-kind-of-thing. All the luggage is thrown on top, and all the people are squished together on long, not-very-well-padded benches. It was noisy, hot, dusty, and bumpy for about an hour and fifteen minutes – easily the most uncomfortable form of transportation I've ever taken, with the possible exception of that awful overnight train ride in Spain two years ago. After the chiva, we were quite glad to get on another motorboat and sail two hours down the Río Tiputini.

We finally arrived at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, which is a joint project between Boston University and Universidad San Francisco de Quito. It's located right at the edge of Yasuní National Park, which is also a Biosphere Reserve, or an area recognized by the United Nations as a world heritage site. It's arguably the world's greatest biodiversity hotspot. It covers an area of about one million hectares (one hectare = 100 meters x 100 meters), and it's estimated that each hectare contains one thousand plant species and 100,000 insect species. It's also estimated that there are 1,200 vertebrate species in the area. All of this means that interference in this environment impacts more species than it could anywhere else on earth...Enter the oil companies.

Oil accounts for about fifty percent of Ecuador's annual federal revenue. In 2004, oil companies paid $811,000,000 to the state in taxes, royalties, etc. For this reason, the government often turns a blind eye when drilling occurs on “protected” land. There's a big oil station located inside Yasuní, about twelve kilometers from Tiputini, and we could often hear its motors humming as we were out hiking. In most oil operations, it's still a common practice to leave behind totally exposed pits of oil sludge which leeches nasty chemicals, and oil spills are also big hazards. Between 2000 and 2006, it's estimated that Petroecuador, a smaller, domestic company, was responsible for 850 spills, so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the big, international companies were responsible for a lot more. Also, there is only one oil refinery in the country. It's in Esmeraldas on the western coast, so the oil from the eastern lowlands has to be pumped through miles of pipeline across the seismically active Andes. And of course, to drill and transport oil, one must first build roads, which means cutting down trees. Deforestation or degradation occurs at a rate of one hundred hectares of forest per kilometer of road.

In addition, trees are still being cut down to be sold as timber. Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, has ordered a timber harvesting ban, but it hasn't been enforced at all. There's so much corruption in the region that it's really easy for illegal harvesters to receive forged papers to make their operations look legit. And then there's always the problems of commercial hunting and fishing (the latter is sometimes done via dynamite or poison) and the selling of insects, bird feathers, and animal skins to tourists. One million birds are shipped to the United States each year, but only five percent of them actually survive long enough to make it into the hands of pet owners.

Now that I've inundated you with unhappy statistics (courtesy of Dr. Kelly Swing, director of Tiputini Biodiversity Station and professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito), let me assure you that we had a fabulous time in the rain forest. It does rain a lot there, but not as much as you might think – certainly not as much as I was expecting. We were there from Monday evening to Friday morning, and it only rained Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon for a few hours. The humidity is relentless, however. My hair was never dry, and neither was my bath towel, which smelled strongly of mildew within twenty-four hours of my first freezing cold shower. Most species of the electronic family (laptops, iPods, cameras, etc.) don't appreciate the humidity in the Amazon, so they always spent the night in the dry boxes located in the station's library. Electricity, save for the lights in the library, was only available from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM and 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM every day, so sometimes we had to make do with candles or headlamps, which are a wonderful fashion accessory.

Most of Tuesday and Wednesday were spent hiking with our guides. We broke up into groups of six to eight people, because tromping through the jungle with a group of twenty-nine (twenty-four students, two professors, Dr. Melampy's wife and her friend, and the son of the director of Amauta) is a surefire way to scare off any and all wildlife. My guide's name was José, and he was fantastic. I don't think there was a question all week that he couldn't answer. Ashley Herman and I took turns translating his Spanish answers for the rest of the group, but he knew a lot of individual words in English, especially animal names. Sometimes we just hiked for hours, and sometimes we climbed up towers that nearly reached the top of the canopy. It was really cool to witness my friend Shannon conquering her serious fear of heights and then designing a project that required climbing up the tallest tower again. We saw a ton of insects and spiders, a few really beautiful birds, including an extremely rare curassow, which is kind of like a large, black goose with a red beak, and four spider monkeys, including a baby with its mother. Believe it or not, I ate some ants. There's this specific species of ants called lemon ants, because the tree species they inhabit makes them taste like lemon. José said it's a tradition for guides to offer the ants to their guests. Obviously we saw a lot of plants, but I was actually surprised at how interesting I found a lot of them. It was neat to see trees that we read about weeks ago in Ohio, and by the end of the week I was starting to feel a little like Neville Longbottom in a Hogwarts greenhouse.

On Thursday we did student-designed group projects, which we have to turn into Spanish presentations when we get back to Cuenca. I'm not particularly fond of scientific research, so I made sure I was working with people who knew what they were doing. My friend Natalie, a biology major, wanted to find out about aquatic insects in the Amazon, so I went with her because digging in the mud sounded like fun. Our group went out to a small stream and spent a few hours scooping up the bottom in sieves of various sizes and poking around for little critters. We also recorded the temperature and pH of the water and the mud and tested for the presence of nitrates, phosphates, and dissolved oxygen. There were no phosphates, which was good, because that means the area is pretty much undisturbed by humans, and there was dissolved oxygen, because without that, there would have been a problem. We found ten or so little wriggly things, mostly dragonfly larvae.

Wednesday night we went out on the river in the boat and went hunting for caymans. We saw about four, including a huge one that didn't actually try to get away from us. It just stayed where we found it, peeking up above the water in the shallows. Some people touched its tail, and the guys from the station fed it a large slab of meat. Thursday night our guides took us on short hikes after dark. We saw a lot of insects and spiders, ranging from interesting to gross and creepy. We found this gigantic female orb weaver in her web, and José sacrificed an unlucky cricket so we could watch her in action. He threw the cricket into the web, and the poor thing didn't even have a chance to struggle before it was wrapped up and being eaten. It was disgusting and oddly fascinating. We didn't see any owls, but we heard them, and we found an adorable frog on a leaf on the way back to the cabins, so I was a happy camper.

I think my personal highlight of the week was swimming in the river. The current was fairly strong, so all we had to do was bob along in our life jackets and literally go with the flow while the boat followed a ways behind. The water was absolutely the perfect temperature, and we were all having so much fun...until we were attacked. We were all floating along, kind of spread out, and Mark was right ahead of me. All of a sudden he started freaking out. I thought he was just kidding, because he jokes around a lot, until I felt something very heavy slam into my hip. The current was still carrying me, so my legs scraped along it too. I screamed, Mark was still freaking out, and then it hit Paul, so everyone in the water started flipping out. We eventually realized it was just a tree, and there are a lot of fallen trees in the river, but most of them are not completely submerged. When you're swimming in the same water in which you saw caymans the night before, you're bound to be jumpy.

After that, I decided I was done swimming. I paddled against the current and stayed in the same place until the boat got to me. When I got out of the water I had some pretty minor scratches on my right calf and a big, nasty scrape on my right hip. It bruised up nicely. That hip just has no luck, apparently, because that's almost exactly the same place where I wiped out in the Galapagos. Still, though, I was essentially swimming in the Amazon River, and I think that's awesome! The log monster just adds a touch of drama.

After everyone got back in the boat and we had turned around to head back, we saw a dolphin! It was definitely playing with us, because it would come up at the front of the boat on one side, and then when it surfaced again it would be at the back on the other side. River dolphins are pretty rare, because a lot of indigenous groups kill them to use some part of their bodies as an aphrodisiac. We were lucky enough to see another one Friday morning when we were leaving. River dolphins are really not all that attractive, but they're pink, which is cool!

Well, that's certainly enough for now. I'll post about Intag and Junín as soon as I can.