Deep dive into the Rainforest

• Ukcat's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Coca

Trip Start Feb 02, 2012 Previous
Entry Trip End Feb 17, 2012 Next
Entry

  Coca, Orellana, Ecuador
Saturday, February 4, 2012

Rainy, warm, virtually 100% humidity, beautiful birds, rainy, lots of insects, caimen and piranha in the black water lake, slithery things in the swamp, rainy, flowers, medicinal plants, red howler monkeys and oh yes, did I mention rainy. That describes the Amazon basin rainforest.  Sound appealing?  It should be, because it is a place not to be missed.

Saturday morning and we were pulling out of Quito with a flight on Tame Airline and their Embraer 190.  Security is a breeze.  In other words, not very secure.  With a 30 minute flight and a change in elevation from 9,600 to around 900 feet sea level, we are in the Amazon basin.  Arriving in Coca, a small community at the point the Coca river intersects the Napo.  About 4,000 miles downriver after crossing the Columbian, Peruvian and Brazilian borders and intersecting the Amazon along the way, the water passing Coca would dump into the Atlantic with a whole lot of rainforest in between.

At Coca we boarded a motorized canoe for our 1 ½ hour trip down the Napo River to Sacha Lodge .  The Napo river is wide with light brown water produced by runoff from the Andes Mountains.  It has lots of current and is full of sandbars and other river traffic with people and freight.  Along the riverbank there are several native family settlements with the real dugout canoes as their form of transportation.

The boat landing at Sacha Lodge is only the first step in arriving.  A 30 minute walk through a rainforest path and then a 10 minute canoe ride across a beautiful blackwater lake and you arrive at an impressive lodge that has all of its supplies coming in the same way we arrived.  There are no roads.

Sacha Lodge is owned by a Swiss national that fell in love with the ecology and decided to build a lodge.  The lodge has 26 cabins, no air conditioning, generator power, no telephones, no TV and a staff of guides and support staff that are 90% Ecuadorian and mostly indigenous tribe people.  To sum it up, if you are looking for a rainforest experience, this is a place to be.

We begin with a lecture on the area and then on to a fitting for rubber boots that will be your best friend for the remainder of the stay.  Did I mention it rains a lot.  We are assigned our nature guide Sebastian, a college grad in Eco-tourism who is leaving with us to take a job as head of bird research for Ecuador's rainforest and a native guide, Adelmo, a member of the Quichuan indigenous Indians.

An evening hike in the rainforest with flashlights is our first outing.  While Sebastian had an unbelievable scientific knowledge of birds, reptiles and insects, Adelmo had an uncanny ability of knowing where things were supposed to be, spotting them with a vision level I wish I had and a wealth of knowledge of the folklore, medicinal properties of plants and basic crafts used in everyday living for indigenous rainforest Indians.   The night hike yielded lots of colorful spiders, some beautiful frogs including the frog used for making poison darts and a host of other sights and sounds you could only see in the rainforest.


Sleeping without air conditioning in the rainforest with a symphony of rainforest noises yielded a surprisingly good nights sleep.

Wake up comes early with this rainforest bunch.  The animals and birds move early before the midday heat, so we are up at 5:30 and on the trail at 6:30.  Guess what, it was raining.  But in anticipation of the rain stopping we hiked about a mile to the "canopy walk".  This is where Mary went well beyond her comfort level.  The canopy walk is comprised of 3 towers that are 140 feet tall, connected by 2 single lane suspension bridges between the towers with both spans being around 600 feet and at some places 150 foot above the ground.   Mary was a trooper and did not mention one word of fear of climbing the tower or crossing the suspension bridge.  Danny and Barbara and their friends on the trip from Wisconsin, Artie and Nancy comprise our hiking group and everyone made it to the top.  The view was spectacular and yes you are above the rainforest canopy, where all the birds are active.  The rain stopped long enough for some great birdwatching and then the reverse of traversing the suspension bridge and descending the tower.

  

Back to the lodge in time for a few minutes in the butterfly house and lunch.  Meals are at a reserved table with your guide.  The meals are adequate, not extraordinary and deserts and native fruits are great.


With a couple of hours for relaxation, we take off for an afternoon hike.  Adelmo takes us on a whirlwind tour of medicinal plants.  Our favorite was the “dragons blood”, a dark red sap from a tree with the dragons blood supposedly removing age spots on the skin.  Mary is going for this product immediately and subsequently gets 6 ounces in Coca for a clinical trial.

On our walk from our cabin to our evening meal, one of our co-travelers had spotted a small caiman (looks like an ugly alligator) in a drainage ditch.  I got some great photos of it and showed them to our guide at dinner.  This caused quite a stir.  Several guides wanted to see the photo, they debated the name of the creature and then determined it was a very rare, almost extinct Pygmy Caiman that had not been seen on the property before.  They were excited and several of the guides got their cameras to get their pictures.

The following day was up early again with a canoe ride and a hike to the river landing on the Napo.  We went by motorized canoe down river several miles to the Yasuni National Park to see a “parrot lick”.  This was a bank apparently rich in minerals that the yellow crested parrot among others really loved.  There were hundreds of colorful and noisy parrots clinging to the earthen  bank, eating dirt.  A very unusual sight.


Mary, rainforested out,  abandoned us for the afternoon outing.  We took a canoe up a tributary to the blackwater lake and hiked for a short distance to the biggest treehouse I have ever seen.   Built around a gigantic Kapok tree, the wooden stairs go up 125 feet to a wooden platform in the top of the tree.   Above most of the rainforest canopy, you are where the birds are at. Birdwatching was great.  A little fishing for piranha was next.  Using chicken for bait, the piranha are the best and fastest bait steelers I have ever seen.  Our group was outscored in piranha catching by the guides 2 – 0. 




Our last outing was a moonlight canoe outing on the lake and into the blackwater swamps.  Our goal was to spot the larger caiman but a bright moon light keeps those critters under water.  We did spot some electric eel and a beautiful night sky

Packing bags for the return to Quito was a real treat.   Everything was heavy with moisture.  Nothing seemed to be dry and everything was smelling like rainforest including us.  We packed up, said our goodbyes, canoed and trekked to our Napo river landing and boarded the motorized canoes for our return to Coca.  The rainfall up river and in the Andes apparently had been heavy for the past 3 days.  The river was full of debris and the boat trip was 2 hours long with lots of slow downs and dodging and weaving for the big trees and other debris floating down the river.


Our Tame Airline flight to Quito was uneventful.  Back into high altitude but no symptoms (we drank our cocoa tea in Coca) we boarded our bus and are on our way to Otavalo to see the beautiful weaving products of the indigenous indians in the Otavalo area.

Slideshow Share

Post your own travel photos for friends and family More Pictures

Barge traffic on the Napo	Another gnight insect	Night time spider	Gecko at night
Night Insect	Monkey - I'll remember the name sometime	Adelelmo giving a demonstration	Poison dart frog
Canoeing the swampy blackwater	Stinky turkey	Dining area of the Sacha Lodge	Swimming in the blackwater lake at Sacha Lodge
Meal time at Sacha Lodge	Well disquised lizard at night	Poison dart frog	Giant Kapok tree
Walkway at Sacha Lodge	Dragon lizard at night

Previous Entry Next Entry