My adventures in Ecuador part I: The Rain Forest (Jungle)

The area of eastern Ecuador known as "the jungle" is tropical rainforest rich in plant and animal species. For its size, Ecuador hosts more plant and animal species than any other country. On May 17, my son Mike and I traveled to Cuyabeno, a protected wildlife reserve. If we had traveled one hour more to the north we would have been in Colombia.
We were also not far from the border of Ecuador and Peru.

Our guide's name was Hugo and he had been leading expeditions in the forest for about 25 years. I was struck and impressed by Hugo's knowledge of flora and fauna and his good eye for seeing things that were small and camoflauged or which required skill to see, such as animal trails (he showed us the trail of a wild pig and of an armadillo, which to me just looked like leaves on the forest floor.) Also impressive was Hugo's obvious love for nature and his enthusiasm for finding things to show us. One night after dinner, we took flashlights and searched for tarantulas in the empty cabanas (thatched huts which resembled tents but had board walls and no screens on the window. More on that later.) We didn't find any that night, but we eventually found one, and I was to see a few others in various places in Ecuador before I left the country! While I am on the subject of spiders: a large, scary-looking spider took up residence on the ceiling of my cabana (luckily not above my bed) and did not move once during my entire 4 day stay. I assumed it was alive but didn't want to find out, so I didn't attempt to disturb it.

Cuyabeno has been a protected area since the late 70s and since then has been a magnet for ecotourism, a thriving field in Ecuador. The mission of ecotourism is to educate tourists about the importance of protecting endangered species by providing hikes and trips in large canoes down the small river (a tributary of the Amazon) which runs alongside the main lodge and the guest cabanas. Among the endangered species are the red macaw and the jaguar. Sadly, animals are still being caught and sold for huge amounts of money on the black market--a macaw can bring as much as $10,000. Along the river are some remote communities of indigenous peoples who have been there since before the Spanish brutally conquered them in the 1500s. Some of these communities allow tourists to come and visit. We visited one which was a 4 hour canoe trip (by motorized canoe) away from the lodge. This community now has electricity, running water, plumbing, gas stoves, and a satellite dish, but for generations people lived very simply and self-sufficiently. Now they must grow crops to sell to survive. Hugo pointed out cacao and papaya trees, which were growing alongside the corn and yucca. Chickens (the real free-range kind) were ranging freely, as were some dogs and a pet woolly monkey named Nacho who insisted on wrapping his limbs and tail around whatever part of your body he could get to and nipping you like a puppy. He stopped nipping and settled down when I spoke to him gently, and he sat contentedly on my arm as we walked into the main hut. (Just call me the Monkey Whisperer.)

In the main hut we were introduced to an old woman and an old man--the relationship between them was not clear. The old woman was pounding yucca with a large pestle in a huge wooden trough. She was making a fermented beverage out of what looked like heaps of mashed potatoes--yucca is a starchy root and a staple of Ecuadoran cuisine. We were invited to taste some yucca bread, which was like a large, hard flour tortilla.
The old man was a shaman. Usually he would dress in his traditional clothing for visiting tourists, and perhaps perform some incantations--I never did find out what he did, unfortunately--he said he was feeling ill that day and he was probably tired of performing for gringo tourists. He said he was 100 years old. I doubt if birth certificates were prevalent when he was born, and if he really was 100 he looked damn good for his age. I would have guessed that he was about 75-85. He had all his teeth and hair and looked very fit. At first, he seemed somewhat distant but warmed up to us when he realized that we were in agreement with him about the importance of saving the rainforest from the depredations of oil companies which are plundering Ecuador for oil and destroying human and animal habitat in the process. He said he had lived on that particular reservation for 60 years and had seen many species of animals decline and disappear. My son translated his Spanish for me, and I tried to express my gratitude to him in the few phrases that I know. His children and grandchildren lived in the surrounding huts, and the ground was solid clay-based mud. It rains every day here and there were large barrels set out to collect the massive amounts of rain water. It rained for about 5 minutes while we were there and the barrels rose by about 3 inches. It also rained in the canoe during our journey. We wore large ponchos but got wet anyway and Mike had to bail out the canoe. On this same day trip we
saw a gray river dolphin sticking its nose out of the water, several birds including two beautiful large herons, a woolly monkey family high in the trees along the river, a family of squirrel monkeys, also in the trees, and a three toed sloth (these are very hard to see because they hang motionless from branches in very tall trees and without binoculars they are indistinguishable from the various large dark patches of leaves.) A canoe in front of us full of tourists had spotted the sloth and called out to us.

Also along the banks of the dark, slow-moving, muddy brown river we saw a white orchid in flower with large 5 petal star shaped blooms. In the Laguna (a large lake that the river fed in and out of) were many large trees growing out of the water. Each tree was the host of several hundred oncidium orchids (I know this because I am an orchid geek and recognized the leaves even though the flowers were not in bloom.) We saw large, bright azure-blue butterflies and a flock of bats that flew across the boat when we disturbed their tree branch.

I have compiled a list of all the plants and animals (including insects) that we saw in Cuyabeno. You'll find some great photos of them if you Google search; the photos Mike and I took were not that great because you really need a telephoto lens.

Here it is:
Squirrel monkeys
Woolly monkeys
Capuchin monkeys
Black tamarind monkey
Saki monkey
Howler monkey
Three toed sloth
Gray river dolphin
Toucan
Pappagallo (blue and yellow macaw)
Parrots
Blue anis
Aninga
Heron
Kingfisher
Swallows
Red tanager
Red-capped cardinal
Crested woodpecker
Trogan (a bird Mike really wanted to see)
Bats
Turtle
Tiger heron
Baby boa constrictor (we saw 2 of them)
Frogs
Grasshoppers (over an inch long with wings that looked exactly like brown leaves)
Leaf cutter ants
Conga ants (bite is poisonous and can cause temporary paralysis)
Lemon ants (tiny ants that tasted like lemon--yes, I bravely tasted them!)
Red ants (one bit me on the hand and it felt like a bee sting--not fun!)
Wasps (one stung Mike on the arm--again, not fun! luckily the whole swarm didn't come after us!)
Termites (in enormous nests)
Morfo butterfly (bright blue)
Swallowtail butterfly
Worker ants
Orapendalas (a bird with a funny cry which awakened me at 6 every morning)
Cacique (a bird that makes a nest like a bag hanging from a tree branch)
Hoatzin (a prehistoric bird, I was told)
Vultures
Piranhas (we went fishing for them and ate them--more on that later!)
Chachalaca (bird)
Some BIGASS spiders
Social spiders (a community of small spiders which spin a large tent-like web)
Tarantulas
Ghost orchid (I'm not sure--it really looked like pics I have seen of them--they are rare, though, so maybe not)
White orchid not sure what kind
Oncidium orchids
Pet wild parrot owned by lodge owners

I'm going to end this post but will write much, much more in days to come, so as Ira Glass says, "Stay with us!"