Rainforest Part III: Mowgli, cacao, and piranha fishing

It seems that the collective attention span collapsed after my first installment, but I will continue to write as if people were still reading this blog.

More stories of the lodge at Cuyabeno:

The owners of the lodge adopted a boy who was abandoned by his mother as a baby. He is a dark-skinned, dark-eyed, beautiful child whose real name is John but whose nickname is Mowgli after the hero of Kipling's The Jungle Book.

Mowgli is eight years old, and like most eight year old boys (and I am an expert on them) is a constantly running, jumping, spinning ball of energy. He hung from the rafters at least 6 feet from the floor and dropped to the floor without sustaining any injury. He scurried up several flights of steps to the roof of the hut where there were hammocks for resting and enjoying the view. He wasn't supervised, and I feared that he might somehow fall over the railing, but he was careful enough not to. He is an affectionate child, greeting me by throwing his arms around me and attempting to teach me Spanish. He would get impatient with me if I didn't grasp what he was saying immediately, but I was surprised to find that I was actually learning some words and phrases from him. One evening I was more or less in the role of baby sitter because I was too exhausted to go for a night ride in the canoe, having hiked all day. His parents were occupied with chores and Mowgli had no one to play with. He brought me books from the pile intended for perusal by tourists. One book had beautiful color pictures of the various animals of the jungle. We looked at it together and he commented on each photo. Another book was a history of indigenous people in the area, written by an archaeologist. Mowgli directed my attention to the fact that the people in the drawings were naked (this reminded me of the scene in Catcher in the Rye where Holden Caulfield goes to the Museum of Natural History and is relieved to see that things haven't changed: the figures of the Indian women were still naked above the waist.) He insisted that we search for "las cucarachas" in the dining room, which unfortunately were not a figment of his imagination. His mother eventually called him into the kitchen to eat dinner, but not before he brought a couple of 6 packs of Oreos from the kitchen to me and insisted that I eat them.

Speaking of eating, I tasted for the first time the fruit of the cacao tree, the source of chocolate. The pendulous fruits have a hard outer shell which is red when they are unripe and banana-yellow when ripe. Mike and I split one open to reveal many large seeds which were covered with a clear gooey gel-like substance. You suck the gel off the seed and dispose of the hard nut-like interior. The gel, while deliciously sweet, does not in the least taste like chocolate. When chocolate is made, the seeds are dried in the sun, fermented, and roasted, then ground up into cocoa powder. There are further steps in the process depending on whether sugar is added and whether it is to be made into bars or liquid. I tasted an Ecuadoran chocolate
bar, which was 70% cacao and very good.

One of the scheduled activities was fishing for piranhas. When asked if I wanted to do it, I initially said no because I have mixed feelings about fishing. It seems cruel to catch a fish on a hook and then let it flop around until it suffocates. Then again, I eat fish and seafood. Also, my son and I spent many hours fishing on the lake we vacationed near on Cape Cod when Mike was the age Mowgli is now, and I could tell that Mike wanted to re-live those experiences. So I agreed to go.

Hugo, Mike and I set out in the canoe and reached a small cove where the water was relatively still. Armed with crude fishing poles which were sticks with fishing line and a hook attached (no reel, flies or lures) we took our places in the canoe, baited our hooks with pieces of raw meat, and churned up the water with our poles as instructed by Hugo so that the fish would be fooled into thinking the bait was live prey. Well, piranhas are not easily fooled. They are brilliant at removing the bait from the hook, and no matter how many times I re-baited, they would always steal it.
Hugo caught one, but it was too small and he threw it back. Then Mike caught one. It was on the small side but large enough to cook and eat. I was glad that there were no large piranhas in this part of the river for obvious reasons. Fishing is a patient sport (if it can be called a sport when you don't need skill to land the fish, only to hook it.) I am not good at things that require me to sit and wait for long periods of time. And I was getting irritated at the fish for stealing the bait. Eventually we returned with only the one fish that Mike caught. The cook fried it for dinner. Mike ate it and I had only a bite. I have to admit that piranha is a good-tasting mild white fish similar to trout, flounder, or the dourade Curtiss and I used to eat at the Blue Ribbon bistro in Brooklyn.

The next installment will be a whiny piece about my Quito adventures. Stay tuned.