Kepfram & Ellie's Travel Journal

Our Jungle Tour:

We decided to take a trip to the Ecuadorian Oriente, not so much because we wanted to, but because we couldn´t travel south due to continued roadblocks, we thought this opened up time for few days seeing something new and different. (Actually the day we left for the Jungle the government declared a state of emergency and stepped up their confrontation with the indigenous protesters, but the roads cleared pretty quickly.) The tour or Reserva Producción Faunística Cuyabena (Cuyabena Wildlife Reserve) was newly offered by our hostel (in fact, we found out later that we were the first tour - just me, Kepfram, and the owner of the hostel who wanted to see for himself). The hostel owners were so nice, that we trusted their enthusiasm for the trip and decided to go for it (at a bargain price).

This morning we got back from our "3 day" tour - which took 5 days because no one told us that it would take at least 15 hours to travel EACH way (and we somehow didn´t ask...). We actually had to turn down the extra night (no extra charge) for rest and relaxation before we returned - we just weren´t happy spending so much of the limited time we´d budgeted for Ecuador in this way.

The good:

• Animals: We saw quite a variety of insects and spiders and other bugs (Tarantulas, Tiger Spiders, Congo Ants, Centipedes, oh, and mosquitoes, horseflies, and wasps too....), a baby crocodile (thankfully no adults out hunting), monos micos, a snake (that dropped from a nearby tree into the water in front of me when I was walking along the shore), a variety of birds (although we heard many more than we actually SAW. We saw the dens of some wild pigs and of the giant rodent that´s similar to a guinea pig (but whose name escapes me). We fished for pirañas (we didn´t personally catch any, but our guide caught enough for dinner),


• Plants: There are orchids everywhere! It seemed that there was no spare patch of tree (live or dead) if orchids could carve out a home there, there they were. So many color of green and brown. So many different types of trees, and ferns, and shrubs.....


• Eating new and interesting foods: piraña, wild peanuts, some kind of local calabaza called zapallo, along with lots of (now familiar) green plantains.


• Guides with no apparent fear of this wild place.


• Learning all the things you can do with a machete.


• Seeing how a canoe can be carved from a fallen tree.


• Learning about all the things that can hurt a person in the jungle (stinging, biting, and otherwise poisonous bugs, biting animals, electric fish, anacondas, trees with sharp spines or thorns, toxic fungus, etc), and not getting hurt by anything.


• Sleeping in hammocks under the open air, or under a plastic tarp strung up to keep the rain off - and staying dry!


• Seeing all those stars.


• Really good rubber boots.


• Not too much rain (until the last day...).


• Spanish practice for 4 days straight with our guides and our host/companion.

The bad:

• Mosquitoes: although we used repellent, it seemed we just couldn´t keep all the the buggers at bay. Kepfram suffered worse than I did (being that he´s so much more tasty, I guess). When we got back he must have had 100 bites all over his back, not to mention those on his arms and the few on his face.


• Sleeping in hammocks. Did you know that mosquitoes can bite right through them? (Mind you, there were many more dangers on the ground, as far as we could tell.)


• Sitting in the canoe. Now this was not a modern canoe - it was a big piece of tree ("dug out") with NO built in seats. Although the canoe was solid, the guides preferred us to sit low, to keep the canoe stable while they stood up to row from time to time. They gave us little wooden stool to sit on, but they were too low, and too hard, and the canoe was too wet and muddy for us to really find comfortable places for out legs. The first 2 days we never sat for more than 2 hours at a stretch, but the last day - when we came back up the river - we sat for FIVE hours (most of them in the rain - we stayed relatively dry with our provided ponchos, but our stuff did not fare as well).


• Sitting in, not ROWING the canoe. It seemed that for our guides not asking us to help was their way of providing us a service (and maybe saving themselves the headache of incompetent assistants), but as far as we were concerned sitting in a canoe is really boring! We would have much preferred the work-out and the learning experience.


• Not seeing the variety of animals and plants we´d hoped to see.: No really colorful birds, only very distant monkeys.


• No binoculars! (If someone´d had these, maybe we would have seen more!)


• Not being properly warned of certain dangers: like mother crocodiles FOLLOWING their kidnapped babies, that biting Congo Ants can easily walk along the ropes our hammocks hung from,


• Not seeing any indigenous people. Everyone we met was a transplant of some other place in Ecuador, although the housing seemed to be traditional, we didn´t get any sense of the culture of the people is this incredibly remote place.


• Only speaking Spanish. While this wasn´t really a problem for basic communication, some of the finer points were lost, especially for Kepfram. This might also explain part of why we didn´t get all the information we would have liked before we decided to take the trip....


• The journey there and back. Not knowing Ecuador´s geography, and not asking enough clarifying questions we got a ride MUCH longer than we could have imagined (the kind of ride we´ve tried to avoid in the planning for our trip as a whole). It just didn´t seem conceivable that a tour offered FROM a place that was relatively close the central Amazon Basin, would be at the most extreme reaches of the northern Amazon Basin......


• Feeling compelled to "recommend" the tour when got back, just because the folks at our hotel were so damn nice!