Everyone, when mentioning the Amazons, in passing or even as a joke, talks about it like it is a magical place where the unexpected happens and there are flora and fauna that almost look like they crawled out of an Alice in Wonderland type dream. This is exactly how it was when I visited Tiputini Biodiversity Station this weekend.
Friday morning we meet at the Aeropuerto Mariscal Sucre de Quito to begin our journey to TBS. Our first leg of the journey is a flight that will take about 30 minutes, but if we were to drive it would take about 10 hours because of how mountainous the region is. We would basically have had to drive around mountains to get there. There are only two terminals at this airport - international and national - and the entrances are about 50 yards apart from each other. Just goes to show you how small Ecuador really is.
We board the flight with sweatshirts and jackets and hiking boats already adorned and within the hour are walking off the plane in Coca, the gateway to the Amazon. The humidity hits us in the face like a wet towel and I smile to myself remembering what I had heard about the humidity. Some of my friends who already went on this trip a couple weeks earlier (as part of a different study abroad program also through USFQ) told me that once things get wet in Tiputini, they really do not dry if they are anything but canvas pants and shirts. We take a short bus ride in a very janky looking bus, with a driver who I believe could only see out of one of his eyes, to this hotel that is right next to the boarding dock for boats travelling on the Río Napo. (PS "janky" will be frequently used from here on out to refer to something that is either really dirty, low-tech, sketchy, unsanitary and/or unsafe). We climb onto a large speed boat with a tarp covering and are accompanied by 4 or 5 ecuatorianos with large white coolers and "Tiputini" t-shirts, caps and lightweight cargo pants. The next boat took us along the very wide Río Napo past where Río Coca empties into it to a security check point. Because we were going to pass through petroleum extraction fields to get to el Río Tiputini, we had to submit to a security check-point and where we were not allowed to take pictures of the area. On the otherside of the check-point, an open-aired bus took us down a long dirt road past indigenous houses, the sights of this natural existence broken by the occasional petroleum truck that would come rattling through.
We arrive at "Tiputini 2", the second bridge over Tiputini, two hours later with sore bums from the bouncing around on wooden benches and a new friend named Alfonso, who turns out to be one of the chefs at Tiputini. We descend to the river by way of a muddy path and begin our next boat road which is again about two hours but could not be more different from the one on the Napo. Here the banks of the river are full of vegetation, not a bare piece of dirt can be seen save for where trees had recently fallen over or where there had been a mudslide. The river snakes back and forth through the jungle and at one point they cut the motor because we see some monkeys resting up in a tree very high up. The type of monkey we saw there evades me, I believe we saw 6 types of monkeys total but I'll have to come back and correct this when I remember / get confirmation from a friend (*******). We arrive at the Biological Station which is conspicuous from the rest of the forest only by a small wooden staircase that leads to a small gazebo. We unload and hear a brief security talk from our stern, I-love-this-place-too-much-and-am-weary-to-share-it-with-people-who-might-be-here-thinking-this-is-vacation, Red Sox cap adorned site manager, Diego:
Breakfast: 6:30AM, Lunch: 12PM, Dinner: 7PM, sharp. Wear the rubber boots. Stay with your guide. Do not talk on the hikes as you will scare away the animals. Electricity is on between 10AM-1PM, 6-9:30PM. Anything you don't want to die from humidity must go in the dry boxes in the laboratorio - this goes for all electronics, books, etc. If you go swimming in the river, don't swim alone and don't swim after dark. Respect that the "investigadores" (researchers) need to get up very early in the morning so do not talk loud in your rooms after lights out.
After dinner, which was vegetarian chili con arroz y crackers with queso fresco and half a canned peach with the BEST whip cream I have ever had, we meet in the laboratorio for a presentation about trap cameras. These are cameras that are set up on the trails away from camp that are heat and motion sensitive. We saw some of the highlights of this project which included photos of tapirs, pumas, jaguars, grey and red deer, armadillos, short-eared dogs, black puma, ocelots, and many other critters - all living around Tiputini! It was so characteristic of Seth to say the moment we get back to our rooms, "I want to see a jaguar. If I see it, I will be satisfied. If I don't, I will be unsatisfied." I know it was a joke, but it was too funny to pass up including it here :)
The next morning we ate a breakfast of pancakes with peanut butter and jelly, cornflakes, fruit, coffee and hot chocolate. Who would have thought our most American meal would be in the place where the nearest hospital was a 6 hour trip away?? We met our tour guide for the weekend, Ramiro, a sweet man who has worked in Tiputini for 13 years and worked in other areas related to the jungle prior to that, and finally headed into the rain forest for our first hike.
Our destination is a lake a little ways down the river. As we leave camp Ramiro introduces us to a buttress root tree whose bark, when boiled, is used as an anesthetic by the indigenous people of the area. We take a quick boat ride to the trail head of "Sendero Anaconda" (Anaconda Path) which is so named because when Tiputini was first being put together, a group of students found an anaconda in the lake we were headed towards and carried it back to the station for some measurements and data collection by way of this path. On our hike we come across a beautiful flower about 15 feet up on a tree and Ramiro tells us that this tree, when one boils the bark and drinks the tea, is useful as a contraceptive. This is why the indigenous families are not as large as they used to be. All 8 of us pile into a canoe made for probably 5 or 6 people and we begin our journey around the small lake. Immediately apparent to me are the sounds of the rainforest which are amplified in this open space. We come across a group of Hoatzin which are leaf-eating birds that are dark brown, reddish brown and black, with a funny crown on the top of their heads. Because they eat leaves, they weigh a lot and so flying is very difficult for them. After continuing around the rest of the lake, which was lined with spiky small palm tree type things, Katelyn points out a monkey in the tops of one of the trees. This one was a Howler Monkey, classified by Ramiro by the sounds it was making, and is one of the largest types of monkeys in the world . Obviously here it looks puny but remember how high up it is.
On our walk back, we decide to take the "adventurous way". All we know is that we are going to be walking through water up to our knees. As we begin our walk another sound catches Ramiro's attention and we begin to walk off the path towards the sound of the noises...Ramiro calls them with a whistle that mimics their exact calls. They answer back. These monkeys, different from the howlers, are called spider monkeys or capuchin monkeys (I can't tell which one :P). After following them for a while we stop by an ant colony again off the path. Ramiro explains to us that these ants work 24 hours a day bringing bits of newly formed leaves back to the colony for the queen bee to eat. **1979**. As we get back on the path and walk a ways, Ramiro stops by a plant, pulls out a stem and tells us that this can be used to die tongues temporarily (for about 4 hours) or clothing permaneantly as the indigenous do. Needless to say a handful of us all took bites of the stem and chewed it for a few minutes before spitting it out and sporting some beautifully vibrant blue tongues! I also added some stripes to my shirt but after this photo was taken (above).
The adventure begins when Ramiro spots the tree that houses the lemon ants. The ants are much like the ones in the states that are small and reddish brown, but these taste like lemons when you eat them because they are so acidic! A common indigenous use for them is to stave off thirst while in the jungle and water is scarce. this was my second-helping so it was a bit smaller :P I had when we come to a bridge that, unlike normal bridges, is half sunken under water, and completely loaded with ants that are eager to crawl up your arms. After emptying out our boots and taking some pictures, we continue onward - not knowing which direction we are going in nor what we will see or have to do next. We come across a conglomeration (small) of pygmy marmosets, one of the smallest types of monkeys in the world right before heading back into camp. Talk about an adventure!After a large lunch (lunch is larger than dinner here), we head out for our second activity of the day which is a short hike to a tower (torre) that is about 70 meters high and is built into the tallest tree in the area. Unfortunately my camera died at this point so I have no pictures from here on out, but some vivid descriptions! Here we were hoping to sit for a few hours and look for birds and monkeys across the canopy. Something definitely came in the way though: insects and many of them. There was a bees nest (they were about 1/3 the size of a standard pencil eraser and completely black) in one of the support beams and two of them found their ways into my eyes during the time we were up there. Thankfully Ramiro was pro at getting them out and at comforting people during the experience, because I was not the only person that happened to. The tree was covered in small spiders and ants. Occasionally a bullet ant would walk by carrying the larvae of some other poor critter. Wasps that were completely yellow and the occasional black and yellow bee (though twice the size of the smaller black ones) were also common place and made it very difficult to focus on the canopy. I have to admit it was funny though because by the end of it we were all going crazy having been stung and crawled on and buzzed into at some point. However, during all of this we did manage to see a green macaw, a few aracari (toucans) and the red-tailed hawk if I remember correctly.
At this time it is worth it to mention just how incredible Ramiro was as a tour guide. While we were all fighting off the urge to scream and kill all the insects around us, Ramiro would sit calmly looking at the horizon while at least 30 bees at one point swarmed his arms and were "licking" his elbows and hands. Then he would point and pull the nearest person towards him to look in his same direction. Most of the time we could not even begin to guess what he was seeing when he said, "Mira, mira, allá, allá". Not until he pulled out the telescope and focused it on the bird did we realize just what he was looking at. Also, that didn't make it any easier to locate the bird outside of the telescope, which was many times hundreds of feet away. And he was always ready with explanations of common uses for plants, legends of the indigenous people near by, etc. He was an interpreter of the jungle.
The next morning we went on another hike to the "puentes" which were bridges between platforms about 30 meters up. We were at just the right height that the tall palm trees' leaves were at eye level. When the breeze passed through it sounded so like the ocean! It was so extraño (odd is the closest word) and relaxing to hear the sounds of the ocean in the middle of the jungle. We also saw some beautiful toucans (Toucan Sams).
That afternoon was the infamous swim. We had been warned that there were anacondas, pink river dolphins, and, of course, pirañas in the water the first day but there hadn't been any attacks in a very long time so we were welcome to swim if we wanted to as long as we wore life jackets. No problem. I must admit I was a little timid at first, but I jumped right in and boy the current was fast! Unfortunately we didn't see much except some more monkeys, but that's also a good thing. No one really wanted to see or feel anything in the water. I for one kept my feet up as much as possible. Swimming back towards the boat was not an option as we floated down the river. The only way out we figured out was to grab onto one of the branches of the trees bent towards the water and wait for the boat to catch up. But boy did we have fun. Floating down a river in the Amazon. Making sure NOT to drink the water because let's face it, no one wanted the worms.
The final hike of the trip was my favorite: a night hike. Everyone brought their flashlights / head lamps and we took after our guide who took us, at about a quarter the speed that we did during the day. We saw scorpion spiders and stick bugs right off the bat. They were just sitting on leaves waiting to be discovered with a pass of the flashlight. We also saw poison dart frogs, tree frogs, and two tarantulas (one of which was making residence in the bottom of our house - comforting really :P ).
The two most amazing points of the night hike however (and probably of the trip for me) were, first, when our tour guide, unfortunately not Ramiro, asked us to switch off our lights and stand in silence for 2 minutes to hear and see what we could in the dark. As my eyes started to adjust to the complete darkness, I saw a glow in front of my eyes which at first I thought was just a light spot in my eyes, but as I moved my head and it stayed still I realized that there was something glowing in front of us. I shook my head and squinted and tried everything to make it go away, but there it stayed. It glowed faintly but irresolutely. After our two minutes, we turned on a light and our guide asked us if we had seen the glowing thing. Frantically I searched for what could possibly have been the source of the green light, but to no avail, everything was brown and leafy green in front of me. Our guide got closer to the source and asked us to turn our lights off again. All of a sudden he picks it up and it begins to float in front, closer and closer. We turn on our lights to reveal what it was: a collection of mushrooms. dark brown in the light, but fluorescent green in the darkness of night.
The next incredible thing, that I only would have expected to see on Planet Earth, started when I spotted what I thought was a beetle in the ground. I asked our guide what it was and he told me after a quick glance that it was just a cockroach. He turned to continue our walk but then for some reason turned back towards me and seemed very interested in finding it again. It had buried underground though and was not keen on being found. I asked him why he wanted to find the cockroach and he said that he wanted to feed it to the spider. After 20 seconds of brushing the ground and looking, his hand makes the dive for a small hole and he pulls out another cockroach. Pinching it between thumb and forefinger we walk over to the spiders web which is about 2 feet long and 1 foot wide and right at clavical level. We shine the light on the spider and hold our breath as he throws the cockroach at the web. I was skeptical that the cockroach would stick first of all and second, skeptical that the spider would even react. But react it did, within 1 second of it landing on the web, the spider bolts down and starts spinning the cockroach in part of the web. A few times the cockroach wiggles and tries to move its legs but is already over. Every 15 turns or so the spider sticks two large fangs (non-retractable) into the cockroach - poisoning him. He does this for about 45 seconds before returning to the center of his web to wait. The guide says he can feel our heat and is scared to eat the prey now. We turn off our lights and wait, hoping that will help, but it doesn't. The spider needs his space to eat - fair enough - I have never seen something quite like that in my life.
That pretty much sums up my entire trip: Never seen that before in my life. Some of the things I saw felt like they were straight out of a movie, other things out of dreams, and still other things I had no idea were even possible. What an incredible experience, someday I hope to go back - that is without a doubt.
Con cariño,
María Elena
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