Amazon - Days 41-44
The morning we’d been looking forward to (nervously) finally had arrived! Since the conception of the trip we’d talked about how awesome it’d be to head to the Amazon rain forest, and throughout that time our plan on what to do there evolved a number of times. Originally we wanted to enter the Colombian forest, but these things change and after talking so some other travelers who’d been to the Amazon we decided the place for us was the Caimen lodge in Cuyabeno Reserve, Ecuador! Why were we nervous? We were both anticipating some real heavy heat and humidity and probably clouds of mosquitos. Additionally, spiders.
We didn’t have to get up too early since our flight was at 10, but like all South American cities Quito’s airport was a 45 minute drive out of the city, so we got a taxi around 8 for the journey.
Our flight to Lago Agrio was a quick one on a prop plane! We thought we’d have to wait for our bags at the airport since we had to check them because they were too large for the little prop plane’s overhead space - turns out Lago had one runway, and the baggage belt was a loop maybe 8 feet in diameter, with a wall in between where they set the bags on the belt and where we scooped ‘em. We left the tiny building to find one man with a sign - “Caimen Lodge”. Must be us. We boarded a minivan with a family of 5 from New York and drove to the entrance of the Cuyabeno reserve, about 2 hours away. Once there we grabbed some snacks at a little shop and hopped into the motorized canoe.
The canoe ride was pretty awesome. The temperature was ideal in the 70s prolly, and the water was glassy. Meg and I made a bet on what animal we’d see first, I picked the caiman and Meg went with monkeys. It wasn’t long before the guide on our canoe stopped us as he saw some trees shaking by the side of the river. Monkeys! A group of 10 or so cappucians playing near the water. We observed hopping from branch to branch for a while before making our way farther into the reserve. The jungle was pretty dense and the river meandered back and forth a lot but our driver really cruised through the turns so the ride was really fun.
We stopped again to see an anaconda snoozing on top of some brush near the riverbank.
Since it was the river’s high season the water extended into much of the jungle, and there were a number of times we’d take a turn and the river would open into a lake with some tree tops sticking out here and there. Eventually we made it to the caiman lodge, right off the biggest lake in the reserve.
Our guide told us that if we’d return in February, the lake would be dry and we could walk around on the bottom of it! The lodge was pretty cool looking with thatch roofed huts and one tower with four rooms and the top for bird watching.
Once our guide, David, learned we were honeymooning, he told us we had the room with the best view in the place, on the 4th story of the birding tower! This was only mostly good, as it required us to climb a bunch of stairs whenever we wanted to go to our room.
We dumped our packs off in the room and headed down to the main lodge for a late lunch, some strange cut of beef with – brace yourself – arepas and rice. We weren’t shocked. We ate our lunch rather quickly and met the other people at our table – Gabby and Billy who had been studying abroad the past semester in Santiago, Simon and Siphon (pronounced Schivonne) from New Zealand, and Noah and Carly from Boston! We all were staying at the lodge for the next 3 nights so it was great to make friends! Our evening activity was cruising the river and looking for the Amazonian pink river dolphins so we loaded into the canoe (they were pretty big and sat like 16).
Our lodge was actually on a little hill poking above the water but we’d have to take canoes virtually everywhere else. We didn’t find any dolphins after zooming throughout the various offshoots near our lodge (I’ll never understand how the guide and canoe captain didn’t get lost) but we did spot a cool little owl-y looking bird that is apparently quite rare! It started raining so we decided to forego the sunset swim and do some evening hiking instead.
On the way back to the lodge we “pulled over” near some sunken trees and David pulled out a dry bag he had, opened it up and procured a boa constrictor! What! He showed it to us all up close and told us he was making a guide book of animals in the reserve or something, then released it. We all got a laugh out of David’s craziness as we headed back to the lodge for supper which was I think fish, but certainly a meat with rice and arepas. After eating dinner and learning we could get seconds (which I did), we hung out in the lodge with the others until it was sufficiently dark enough for the night hike. This was the only activity we didn’t use the canoe for, and we put on our ponchos and some rubber boots and headed into the forest at the lodge.
Well, we saw bugs and spiders. Frogs too I guess. It was alright, some of the frogs were colorful or whatever, and we slogged through the mud for 45 minutes or so and turned around. We saw bullet ants (most painful insect bite in the world) and praying mantis, then on our way back someone behind me goes “whoa! Look at that!”. Something told me that it wasn’t for me, so I backed the F (Hey Mom! Less swearing just for you!) back up the path a few yards to watch the group swarm around the thing. The thing was a fucking banana spider. (I take a break from typing to make sure my legs are spider-free) Wonderful. Over to Meg for a description of said spider… Meg: It was pretty scary looking. About the size of a baseball with big ole fangs. Our crazy guide poked it with a stick to put it in “fighting” position, then we all (minus Ben) swooped down to look at it real close. He then told us it was quite poisonous.
Not sure how I managed to get to sleep with all the spiders around but I did.
End of D41 cribbage score: Ben 72 (12 skunks) – Meg 54 (10 skunks)
Today’s agenda also featured hiking but at a better time of the day: the day! After a breakfast of bananas, papaya, scrambled eggs and bread we loaded up into the canoe with our new guide, Nelson. I would describe Nelson as an awkward low-talker with plenty of room to improve his English. Anyway, we took the boat a ways till we found a chunk of land that wasn’t underwater and started down the paths in our rubber boots. I’m not sure if Nelson said anything in this time since I wasn’t right next to him.
The hike was really cool, we spotted three different types of monkeys, a ton of brightly-colored butterflies along with other neat insects (and no spiders! Probably selective looking though). We’d stop here and there for Nelson to presumably look for wildlife but I think he may have sucked at that.
Eventually we ran into a swampy area while hiking, with a foot or so of standing water everywhere.
This was the trail, so with our rubber boots which probably went 13 inches high, we went trudging through the swamp! Craziness. We walked in a line going slowly, feeling with our boots for a shallow area with good footing, then slowly stepped down and hoped the water to stop before the end of the boot. I believe Meg and I were 2 out of 3 people not to get our boots swamped. A couple people completely lost their footing and went into the lovely brown water – but not us! After probably a half-hour we crossed the swamp – maybe a total of 100 yards. Fortunately we didn’t have to cross the swamp going back to the canoe since the hike was a loop.
Back at the lodge we had lunch and played some cards with the new arrivals – 3 guys from Australia. They taught us a new card game called Cambio which will be played a lot during our Nepal trek I reckon.
While we were chilling at the lodge an entire family of Cappucian monkeys came up to the lodge (open air), and a few of them came inside! It was very cool to sit there and just look at them, watch them try to get closer to the bananas to steal.
Then the obnoxious family from New York came clomping in, loud as a damn stampede and frightened them off. The idiots scared the monkeys off. But then the monkeys came back inside! And every time that happened, the dumbass dad would like shout “hey monkeys!”. No shit. Literally – literally - everyone else is watching them quietly, hoping they come closer, but nooooo captain shithead kept driving them away. God I wanted to drown that guy.
Later that afternoon we took the boat our again to try to find the pink river dolphins. I didn’t hold my breath because we didn’t find them with David, who was awesome, but I gotta give Nels his credit – he found em! It was a pretty cool thing to see dolphins in the flooded Amazon basin for sure (but it’s not like they were jumping out of the water doing tricks).
After observing the dolphins for a while we cruised over to the main lagoon and jumped in for a sunset swim! The water was nice and the guides said there weren’t likely to be piranhas or caiman there – what more could you ask for?!
We went back to the lodge again, for dinner, which wasn’t memorable, but did the job. Then yet again we piled into the canoes to go looking for caiman in the dark. We were told to shine flashlights into the distance and look for two eyes just under the water reflecting back at us. It was pretty creepy since it was like pitch black, and we did see a few sets of eyes but they all turned out to be boa constrictors. They were still real cool, but we didn’t end up seeing any caiman.
Back lodge-side we taught the group to play Oh Hell, a fun Bruden family card game that everyone really enjoyed! Meg and our friend Noah were one point apart in the lead going into the last hand, but they both missed their bids and I swooped in to steal the win!! It was awesome. Then they turned off the power and we went to bed.
End of D42 cribbage score: Ben 74 (12 skunks) – Meg 54 (10 skunks)
Today’s agenda was a visit to a local indigenous tribe a few hours upriver – the cultural experience if you will. We (we being all the fun people our age) piled in to our canoe, and the New York family (should I just call them the dipshits collectively? I think no since it was mostly the Dad and the little kid, the older girls seemed at least a little embarrassed of him, which I appreciated) piled into a different canoe. The river ride there was probably the highlight of the day for me, cruising up the glassy water looking for wildlife with our awesome binoculars (Thanks Dana and Paul!). We stopped a little town along the way – where the indigenous live now. The town was fairly modern (for being in the middle of the Amazon) town with power and (of course) a little shop to sell us stuff. I think that’s the only reason we stopped actually. But we took the canoe another short ways upriver to our destination.
There were a couple indigenous people there to run the day’s program – first we hiked to the yuca farm (patch of dirt) and the lady had us unearth some yuca root! Meg was the volunteer and may have broken the above ground part of the plant off. She recovered well though, peeling the yuca root with aplomb! We took the yuca back to the hut and grated it into a pile of wet mush, which the lady then dried. I should note that the New York father-dipshit-man was recording video of like everything here. Like a constantly running video of every step - far too much video even if he was making a video on how to make yuca tortillas. Classic him.
Next the local chick turned the yuca powder into tortillas for lunch, which we filled with some tuna salad or some spicy paste that was really pretty good. Next up: the shaman. He was a wildly-dressed individual, and Billy translated all the stuff he said for us, none of which was very interesting. Then obviously he performed a spiritual cleanse on Gabby that was pretty wild! She just sat in front of all of us and he shook leaves around her while chanting. Interesting would probably be the most accurate descriptor for this incident. Next they brought out a huge blowgun and we took turns shooting wooden darts out of them. Not at people though.
On the boat ride back we finally saw a macaw! We were really excited to see it – it was bright red with yellow and blue accents and definitely the coolest bird we had seen. Our luck wasn’t over though, and on the boat ride back to the lodge we saw some of the big toucans! They looked ridiculous and off-balanced with their big ol’ big ol’ beakers, then they flew off, somehow supporting their big ol’s!
After dinner we did another sunset swim in the lagoon since it was close, then drank some beer and played cards with the group as Amazonian nightlife was either non-existent or too spidery, depending on how you’d interpret “nightlife”.
End of D43 cribbage score: Ben 74 (12 skunks) – Meg 54 (10 skunks)
Well, we’d enjoyed the Amazon more than we thought we were going to! The weather was excellent and the friends at the lodge were awesome as well. We’d both learned and taught some card games, learned some new phrases (Carly in particular I’d like to thank for “fuck me in the neck”), and our friends thought Meg was very funny and witty for some reason, which she enjoyed immensely.
As awesome as the Amazon and the lodge were, we were definitely not looking forward to today. We had to get up real early to go birding. Birding in the Amazon just meant driving the canoe around earlier than usual. It left at 6 AM but we made it in time, and I suppose it was nice since the jungle was particularly peaceful. We didn’t see a ton, but saw a few smaller species of toucans. After breakfast we loaded our bags and said goodbye to Noah and Carly as well as the Aussies who were all staying another night. We took the canoe for the last time 2 hours back to the entrance of the reserve and loaded into a minivan with Gabby, Billy, Simon and Siphon. The minivan took us 2 bumpy hours back to Lago Agrio where we unloaded and waited while Billy went to work his magic (Spanish). We had a bus! And it left in 2 minutes! We raced through the building to find it, making a pit stop to pay 10 cents each to empty our bladders, and we hopped onto the next transport, a full sized coach bus.
The seats were big by South American standards, meaning that I could almost stretch my legs out. This bus ride was a long one back to Quito, about 7 hours. They did have entertainment though! A handful of TVs – one was close to us, so we were able to watch some movies. Downside though, the movies were in Spanish with Chinese subtitles. Definite bootlegs given the quality and also that they were new releases. We got to see a terrible quality Pirates of the Caribbean: whatever the new one is called (just looked it up – Dead Men Tell No Tales). Also, Logan, and Kong: Skull Island. And they had started Fast and Furious a hundred when we got off the bus that night, so call it 3-and-a-quarter new movies that I could follow fairly well (spoiler – none of those movies are dialog heavy). As a bonus on the ride there was a family of 6 (like seriously) sitting in the two seats behind us somehow. They had a crying baby but declined to put it in the luggage hold below – bummer. We stopped once to use the restrooms (Billy didn’t make it but had an empty gatorade bottle), and we grabbed some empanadas at a little stand there since we’d only had snacks all day, and it was like 7 PM now. Billy and I were waiting for our empanadas and then the bus started driving away... Oh no. The lady handed us our greasy paper bags containing the goods and we started sprinting for the bus! Fortunately Meghann isn’t sick of me yet somehow, and told the driver to wait for us. Hahaha it was pretty exhilarating.
When we finally made it to Quito, we said adios to Gabs, and Billy haggled the cab driver from 40 USD each to 30 total to drive us 3 across the city to our hotel near the airport. An hour later we made it there – after 11 hours on a canoe, van, bus and taxi – to our hotel! We said adios to Billy and were shown to a cool little private cabin/bungalow where we took some excellent and frankly, necessary showers, and fell asleep real, real fast.
End of D44 cribbage score: Ben 74 (12 skunks) – Meg 54 (10 skunks)
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