When I arrived at my hotel in Quito I realized I was short one pair of underwear. Digging into the dirty laundry bag I pulled from my backpack, the strong smell of clothes still damp with river water, sweat, sunscreen and deet began to fill the room. After finding the cleanest dirty pair and quickly rinsing them in the bathroom sink, I hung the briefs across the shower curtain with the hope they would be dry before I left the next day back to Washington. I then reached into the closet to grab another (empty) laundry bag, adding an additional layer of protection between the already double-bagged dirty clothes and the remaining clean air in the room.
For the past week and a half, I had been traveling across Ecuador with a good college friend who had moved to Cuenca to learn Spanish. He had allotted one full year to this pursuit before returning to Iowa for his final year of medical school. We met in Cuenca on a Wednesday evening, and I spent my time walking around and exploring the old colonial city while Andy finished up his Spanish classes during the rest of the week.
Starting in earnest on Friday afternoon, our trip had consisted of several seven hour bus rides, winding us north though the Andes Mountains to Ambato and Banos, then through Quito to Lago Agrio on Ecuador’s northern border, some 20km south of Columbia. Arriving in Lago Agrio around midnight on Monday, we were both exhausted after the long bus ride that brought us up from Quito and from the hiking and mountain biking in Banos over the previous weekend, including a 61km ride through dramatic mountains to Puyo that involved passing at least 100 different waterfalls en route (this ride is known as La Ruta de las Cascadas, or “highway of the waterfalls”).
Lago Agrio was now our starting point to head into the Amazonian basin where we would be spending three nights at the Jamu Lodge in the Reserva Cuyabeno Produccion Faunistica, a seasonally flooded forest in northeast Ecuador that traces the Columbian and Peruvian boarders. This jungle visit was to be the highlight of the 10-day trip, even as the unexpected beauty of Banos and La Ruta de las Cascadas now seemed tough to beat. In fact, our initial itinerary involved spending two days climbing Volcan Cotopaxi, a 5,897 meter active volcano in central Ecuador before heading to Jamu Lodge. While on our first bus heading out of Cuenca, we decided to visit Banos instead of Cotopaxi to avoid arriving in the rainforest with the lingering effects of the altitude sickness we had convinced ourselves would accompany the hike.
Waking up the next morning and eating our breakfast in front of the Hotel D’Mario, we both looked around at the surrounding tables to try and guess if any of the people we saw would be joining us later that morning as we traveled to the lodge. The desayuno Americano (“American breakfast”) I ordered was not the best I had eaten on this trip, and while it consisted of the standard toast with butter and preserves, scrambled eggs, fresh fruit juice and instant coffee (why a country that grows such high-quality coffee would be hooked on Nescafe is beyond me), I cleaned each of the plates on the table. While some sort of meat usually accompanies the desayuno Americano, this wasn’t the case at the Hotel D’Mario.
Right at 9AM – our designated meeting time – a driver in a large van pulled in front of the hotel and walked over to our table (it can’t be too hard to pick out a couple gringos, each with a large backpack). After loading our bags in the back of the van – which was already quite full with the various provisions we’d be relying on the rest of the week – we boarded and each took our own row of seats for the two-hour drive into the rainforest. Andy and I were joined on the van by a 38 year old female attorney from Madrid named Cristinia, and a 28 year old nurse from Munich named Miriam. Cristinia was on holiday visiting her brother in Quito, where he worked as a photographer, while Miriam was in Ecuador to facilitate a professional transition from nurse to midwife by working in a medical clinic. Andy and I were hoping there would be other people joining us at Jamu Lodge.
The two-hour drive from Lago Agrio to the entrance of the Reserva Cuyabeno was beautiful, as were all of the previous bus rides that had carried us and our backpacks thus far. Upon traveling through Ecuador, it’s amazing to think that this is the most densely populated country in South America. Approximately the same size as Colorado, Ecuador is home to an enormously diverse geography that includes tropical Pacific coastline, 18,000 foot tall active volcanoes, high-desert plains, Amazonian rain forests, crashing waterfalls, mountain rivers and nearly everything in-between
After reaching the Reserve entrance and eating a quick lunch of rice and chicken that the bus driver provided each of us in little Tupperware containers, I walked towards a group of German tourists that had gathered around a few benches and were taking pictures of some animal that looked like a cross between a monkey, rat and squirrel. The animal kept moving between some apple pieces that had been laid on the ground and, much to the delight of the Germans, would sometime start nibbling on a piece of apple, creating a perfect photo opportunity. All of the Germans seemed to have very expensive, professional-looking cameras.
I later learned there were eight different jungle lodges operating in Reserva Cuyabeno, and while this group of Germans turned out to be staying at one of the other lodges, we ended up passing them at least four times over the next few days as we zipped down the river in motorized canoes.
Walking back to the bus, Andy and I helped the driver unload the provisions into the boat, and then we began the two hour boat trip from the Reserve entrance to Jamu Lodge. After about 30mins had passed, we opened a box of cheap Argentinean wine that was left over from the bus ride the night before, drinking it out of a water bottle as we traveled deeper into the jungle.
Ecuadorians resemble Central Americans or Peruvians in appearance much more than the more European-looking Argentineans, Columbians or Chileans. Around 30 percent of Ecuador is set-aside in national parks and preserves, though many of these preserves, including Reserva Cuyabeno, have small indigenous populations living within the borders. Thinking of Ecuador as the densest country in South America while we continued down the river, across mangrove-lined lagoons and through virgin rainforest to Jamu Lodge was a living reminder of just how “wild” this continent remains, nearly 500 years after Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors first marched through. In fact, it’s probably this very wilderness that explains the huge variance in development between North and South America that persists today. Traveling down the river towards Jamu Lodge was like going back in time, and peering alongside the riverbanks looking for wildlife presented the same opportunities for discovery that had greeted Francisco Pizarro when he arrived in Ecuador in 1532 with his small band of 180 Spanish soldiers, a journey that ended with the conquering of the Inca’s.
After finishing the wine, Andy and I spoke with Cristinia and Miriam until our canoe motored up in front of the lodge. It was now late in the afternoon, and we learned the other visitors (there were others here!) were already split into two groups with about 8 people each. A few of these people were sitting under the main cabana, and we all exchanged the typical travel introductions (name, occupation, country of residence and purpose/duration of their time in Ecuador). Some of the lodge workers were playing soccer on a makeshift field near the main cabana.
Each of the guest rooms at Jamu Lodge was named after a jungle animal, and our room, Tarantula, came to life later that evening when a full-grown tarantula was chased out of the kitchen and towards the dining tables. The lodge could accommodate about 50 people and was designed to leave a minimal environmental footprint. River water was filtered and used in the sinks, toilets and showers, a few solar panels provided guests with a battery charging station each morning from 8-9:30AM (this was the only time electricity was available), candles were used for light and each of the cabanas was designed to fit in with the surrounding rainforest. A natural extension of these design principles meant that many of the forest animals viewed the lodge as part of their habitat as well, and giant spiders, geckos, bats and frogs and other creatures would routinely pass through. Each bed had an accompanying mosquito net, though the mosquitos were surprisingly few and far-between.
After dropping our packs off in the Tarantula Room, Andy and I joined the group that was preparing to go piranha finishing and would then stop at the Laguna Grande for a pre-dinner swim. During the 20 minute canoe ride, our guide, Rodrigo, mentioned that Cuyabeno has both wet and dry seasons, and during the dry season (mainly December), the laguna we would later be swimming in would be completely dry. The lodge was open year-round, but the dry season presented numerous other logistical challenges as travel within the Reserva was all done via canoe or foot.
With reeds outfitted with about six feet of line, a basic hook and using raw meat for bait, we caught a number of small white river piranhas – the most common of the three different types of piranhas found in Cuyabeno – as we stopped at various points along the river. At some point during the fishing I scraped my little toe, causing it to bleed. Once back at the lodge, I convinced the people sitting around me at the dinner table that the wound came from a bite from one of these little piranhas. A few days later we would return and catch larger piranhas that were more reminiscent of a National Geographic special than of the little ones we caught before and were making fun of.
Being completely off the grid and not tied to the hands of a watch, days are divided into a four basic sections : breakfast, lunch, siesta and dinner. Between each of these daily benchmarks, time was spent either on the river or walking through the forest looking for wildlife, or lounging in one of the numerous hammocks reading, journaling or napping. As I was able to complete each of these activities in a swimsuit (adding a pair of hiking pants when trekking in the jungle), I didn’t change my clothes once. This is why I hadn’t realized before arriving in Quito that I needed to wash a pair of underwear prior to heading home.
While the wildlife and complete integration with nature were the most obvious benefits to staying at Jamu Lodge, interacting with the other guests provided a similar source of constant inspiration (and interesting stories). While each of the guests at Jamu had started their trip the same way (booking through a travel agency in Quito, Cuenca, Guayaquil or Banos and selecting either a 2-, 3-, 4- or 5-day option), they were all drawn to the rainforest for different reasons. Germans, Swiss and French were the most common nationalities, collectively comprising about half of the all the guests. With Andy and myself representing the US, we were also joined by at least Canada, Spain, Holland, the UK and Ecuador (Ecuadorians are naturally very proud of their beautiful country and I met a number of them who were in the middle of their own touristic activities). Across this diverse, albeit Eurocentric group, visitors to Jamu were coming from and going to other locations in Ecuador (Cotopaxi, Banos, Galapagos Islands, etc.), or were just passing through while learning Spanish, volunteering, taking time off or just traveling for the sake of traveling (at least three people at Jamu were in the middle of year-long, round-the-world trips).
The conversations we had around meals and in-between our activities were inspiring in all of their possibilities. Some of these conversations didn’t progress much beyond the typical travel introductions (recall: name, occupation, country of residence and purpose/duration of their time in Ecuador), but even these provided interesting insights into what had driven each of these people to trade two of their most valuable resources (time and money) to travel to the remote Amazonian basin. Of course, it was the conversations that progressed beyond this point that were most memorable.
Boarding the canoe back to the Reserva entrance on Friday morning, Andy and I each had a ceremonial Pilsner (one of the two national Ecuadorian beers) while we reminisced over the last four days in the jungle – hiking (both day and night), swinging Tarzan-style from tree vines, finding hyper-poisonous frogs in a swamp, watching a group of spider monkeys swing through the canopy and leap across the river, visiting a shaman in a local indigenous community, and of course, the conversations that progressed throughout. Because of the overlap involved with many 2-. 3-, 4- and 5-day visitors leaving together, we were spread in two different canoes as we headed back to the waiting van, this time carrying the empty cartons, bottles and provisions with us to be recycled and reused.
After a quick lunch that consisted of tuna pasta in the same Tupperware containers and on the same picnic tables our visit began with, our group boarded the van for the two-hour bus ride to Lago Agrio. A final seven-hour bus ride to Quito then brought Andy and I to the hotel I was now drying my underwear in.
Later that evening while walking around Plaza Foch (the central square in Quito’s Mariscal Sucre, or “new town”), Andy and I ran into two people we had met at our hostel in Banos, and then shortly afterwards saw a German couple who were on the shuttle back from Jamu Lodge with us earlier that day. This was the only representation I witnessed of Ecuador’s apparent density, and as I boarded my flight back to DC the next day, seemed a fitting conclusion to my Ecuadorian experience.
