Today was a banner day. And we have internet in the Amazon!
Eddie picked us up at 7 am after we had a light breakfast. He couldn’t drive the Pan-American highway because it remains closed so we took another route, and we went by several places where tires and debris had been burned the previous day.
We got our boarding passes and waited for the flight to Coca, which took about 40 minutes over the Andes to the Amazon.
When we arrived the folks from the Napo Wildlife Centre where we’re staying took care of us. Loaded our luggage, bussed us to their new facility where we got an overview of the Amazon before loading into a motorized canoe.
Part of the introduction was the Napo River, on which we were going to follow, is one of the main tributaries to the Amazon River. It’s only called Napo in Ecuador, as it has different names in Columbia and Brazil, for example.
He named eight tribes that inhabit the Amazon here, two of which are extinct. Because of the oil extraction business, only two still live traditionally because they built roads and Western culture followed the roads.
They’ve had at least two oil spills that contaminated the Napo River. Part of the demands of the protesters is to stop expansion of the oil industry. They also want better health care. For example, if a woman were to birthing, the closest hospital is in Coca, and they must navigate the river to the get there. We traveled about two and one-half hours on the motorized canoe so you imagine what an obstacle is for rural indigenous folks to get health care. They’re asking for clinics to be built closer to the settlements.
The river is very wide and has a strong current. During our two and one-half hours, we were dodging all sorts of stuff in the river. Much to my amazement, there is no navigation markers.
At one point, we came to a port that was literally the end of the road. There were huge oil trucks that, much to my surprise, were loaded on barges and taken from the oil fields to the port. We only saw one flame, indicating some of processing plant for the oil.
The day actually was very, very nice. The sun was shining – most of the trip. As we were nearing the Napo Welcome Center, the rain moved in, and our guide said “Welcome to the Jungle” (remember that song?)
It was raining as we prepared for the next segment of the trip to the Wildlife Centre – a paddle canoe with no cover. We were given ponchos and away we went. There were two canoes: one with six people (we were in the very front) and another with one couple and our luggage. The luggage was covered but it was still quite wet when we got it next.
The paddle canoe was the best part of the day! We paddled through a river to a lake on which the Wildlife Centre is located.
Here’s some of the things we saw: stinky turkeys (they’re only stinky after they are cooked so the indigenous people don’t eat a lot of them); a beautiful yellow and black bird; a gray hawk that is endemic and can only be found in the Amazon; we caught a glimpse of a Caracara, which is like a condor but not that big; two kinds of parrots; tiny bats that had snouts that were attached to a tree trunk – they were sleeping – and they looked like they were part of the tree (they were about the size of a ping-pong ball; a red-howler monkey, which is the loudest monkey in the world but we didn’t hear them – yet; South American squirrel monkey. We say a floating spider that is largest arachnipod in the world. He was about 7 inches across. He was near a centipede that was about 4 inches long.
And to top it off, we saw a two-toed sloth in the trees moving about and a black caiman (an alligator) that was about eight-feet long and was probably 30 to 40 years old. It was missing its back left leg, which the guide said it probably lost in a fight.
There are anacondas here as well but the guide said they hide themselves pretty well, as do the jaguars that feed on the caiman.
I got some photos with my camera (the caiman) but few with the phone. The sloth, doggone it, was too far into the jungle to get a photo of any kind.
We arrived at the Wildlife Centre around 4:30 pm, and this place is awesome!
It is owned and operated by the local indigenous tribe, the Anangu Kichwa, and consists of a series of lovely cabins, and a huge dining hall that is on the first floor of a seven-story observation tower that has a glass elevator that goes to the fifth floor. It is a community-based project that took two years to build.
The government gave the tribe (well, they already owned it, so we assume the government gave them permission to build the project) several thousand hectares. It is in the Park Nationale Yasuni, and the lake is Anangu Cocha.
We might take a trek tomorrow to a parrot lick where hundreds, even thousands, of different kinds of parrots can be viewed (including macaws).
Dinner is at 7 pm so we’re heading up to the bar to have a glass of wine before we eat and possibly hear about tomorrow’s activities.
It is very, very quiet here except it is dusk and we can hear more and more birds and frogs. Might be a noisy night.
Got our marching orders after supper: we eat breakfast at 5:30 am, canoe over to a parrot lick, then on to the local community before going to the Napo River, lunch at the Welcome Center, then canoe back. Should be back by 3 pm – and it’s nap time!
No comments:
Post a Comment