The Amazon

My time in the Amazon was more like my Contiki trips than the Galapagos was. And not. My head was filled with expectations. I had rain gear and good hiking boots. I had my imagination.

I also had the expectations of what I’d seen on a travel show called “Don’t Forget your Passport,” a Canadian travel show similar to the Lonely Planet Guides. I saw an episode on the Amazon, in Ecuador, where the host and intrepid explorer stayed at the same place I happened to be booked into: the Kapawai Ecolodge and Reserve. I watched him ride in the bow of a dugout canoe, slash his way through the undergrowth, sit in parley with chieftains in authentic indigenous dress. I was stoked. I just had to get there.

I completed my Galapagos tour, said goodbye to my travel companions, both New Orleanais and middle-aged alike, and flew out of the Islands back to Guayaquil and Quito. There was a delay in Guayaquil as we disembarked our plane, watched our luggage unloaded and transferred to the identical plane alongside it. We watched the passengers disembark that plane and board our plane, their luggage be transferred from their plane to ours. Only then were we allowed to board their plane. That took a couple hours. Then we were off again for the half-hour flight back to Quito.

Air Coffin

I ate supper, strolled El Rondo again, and slept. I rode and returned to the airport at the ungodly hour of 5:30 am, where I boarded the ricketiest plane I’ve ever set eyes on. Mel Gibson and Air America came to mind. I dubbed thee Air Coffin

There was a family flying out with me, a couple in their 60s, their son, his wife and the son’s boy. The pilot offered the front seat to the boy. I’d have loved to sit up front but I knew that it would be the thrill of a lifetime for the boy and who am I to argue with that. As to flying Air Coffin, it wasn’t that bad. It was loud. It rose and fell on hazy thermals, but it was otherwise a smooth 45-minute flight over mostly unbroken rainforest, a few wide strips of clear cut evident here and there. I saw a red airstrip slashed out of the crest of a hill, the thatched huts of the Achuar Indian community following its length, a river bending about the base of the hill it rose above. We plunged down on the little strip of land cut out of the jungle, landing fast, bouncing twice before fully alit, the huts but a blur until we lurched to a stop.

We were led down a steep switchback to the river where a brightly canvased river bus awaited us. The sun burned off the haze over the next thirty minutes as we wound our way downriver, the blue acrid smoke of our exhaust trailing us, the only haze remaining. The shadows shortened, leaving only the jungle closing in on either side, the canopy reaching out and scratching the striped canvas.

We arrived at the lodge in time for lunch, then spent a quiet afternoon walking along a sandbar beach at a bend of the Pastaza River, lectured on Ecuadorian rainforest and the Achuar culture. We watched the sun set, the late golden light draining fast. The sun sets fast that fast close to the equator.

Kapawi Lodge

The sun down, we hiked back to the lodge, our haven of comfort in the jungle. It boasted twenty raised cabins connected by a wandering walkway, the reeds and river grasses filling the spaces between. The cabins were what one might hope for, round, thatched, almost treehouses, the balconies boasting a hammock for those leisure moments as we waited for the triangle’s clanging, calling us to dinner. The beds were comfortable, the mosquito netting draped across the screened windows like curtains. But there was no electricity. There were solar panels that lent limited light to twenty-watt bulbs that were good enough to guide one to the washroom but not for reading. There was no running water. There was a basin and ewer. There was a shower of a sort, as well; Each day sacks of water were laid out in the sun to be heated by day and hung in the shower for a nighttime wash. In the mornings there was the basin.

Days of canoe trips and hiking followed. I had to laugh at how I was misled by “Don’t Forget Your Passport.” Where the intrepid host wore hiking boots, we had to wear calf high rubber boots, and for good reason too; mud crawled up our legs, and were we wearing hiking boots, we’d have surely left them behind in the mud somewhere. We also had to wear lifejackets, where the intrepid host did not, acting like he was exploring uncharted territory, where no white man had ventured before. And I’d have been convinced had the natives not been attired in Columbia sandals and Coca-Cola tee-shirts. The natives were depicted as secluded, but they were rather comfortable with the presence of we tourists, in my opinion. Too comfortable. It was almost like there was a tourist eco-lodge nearby. There was a lot of jungle, though.

There were macaws, there were lime green parrots. There was a flurry and crash of movement in the perpetual twilight, no more than four feet from me when we startled some bird in the undergrowth. After whatever that bird was had escaped our catching sight of it, I spotted something at my feet, something I’d seen a few times on the tube, a line of leafcutter ants crossing the trail at my feet. I called out to our guide who retraced his steps to where I guarded their passage. We crouched low and were treated to the ecology of the ants. Then we were on our way, too busy rubbernecking to note where our Achuar guide was going, at least until we reached a fork in the trail, our guide nowhere in sight. The only prudent thing to do was wait and call out. I saw a silhouette resolve from the undergrowth, one led be a gleam of teeth as he chuckled at our obvious discomfort.

One afternoon we kayaked the Kapawi River and the lagoons nearby. We were told to keep an eye out for river dolphins, but we didn’t see any. I didn’t see any catfish or piranha, either, although we did have catfish for dinner once.

There were night walks, bats flittering overhead, insects and snakes scurrying and slithering about. Frogs chirped and croaked all around us.

One thing I really wanted to see, and did, was a sloth. We heard him first, hooting and howling from out across the river that rounded the lodge. He was hard to spot; he didn’t move much; but once I caught sight of him in my binoculars, high in the trees across the way, I spent a few minutes each morning and evening seeing what he was up to, which wasn’t much. Sloths are slothful by nature, no more than couch potatoes in trees, really.

But what would be a trip to the Amazon without a little cultural exchange. We visited the nearest Achuar village, scaling the switchback to where it perched high and dry like all native villages in the Amazon. We saw chickens, we saw pigs, we saw children running and hiding as children do. And we watched the art of Achuar face painting.

There was lots of bird watching. There was a lot of bird watching in the Galapagos, there was a lot of bird watching in the Amazon. I wondered if it were a middle-age rite of passage. I was treated to their book of sightings, too, much as a I’d been in the Galapagos.

The boy was not interested in bird watching. He was interested in football, and my being the only person present that he wasn’t related to and wasn’t staff, he talked to me about it, a lot. He talked to me about just about everything: his friends, his school, his sports, his favourite football team. He’d flop over the couch in the lounge, practicing his preteen postures with abandon; he saddled up next to me at the bar, always asking me what my favourite NFL team was. His grandfather laughed when I said, “the Edmonton Eskimos.”

“Who are they?” the boy asked, his face squinted up in question.

“My team,” I said, “they’re in the CFL.”

“What’s that?” he asked.