Into the Heart of Ecuador’s Amazon: My Cuyabeno Visit

Ecuador is named for the equator but it could just as easily be named Aguador, the land of water, for the beauty and music of water is everywhere here from the Galapagos and coast over the mountains to the Amazon basin.

In the deep valleys of the Sierra water has left its fingerprints in rock channels and melted the mountains, for what, after all, is a landslide but a waterfall in mud and rocks. Even the tiniest stream throws itself recklessly down the hillside with the vigour of a puppy and the menace of a mouse, dreaming of growing into a great waterfall that commands wonder, of flying through the air, water itself taking flight, like their parents the clouds who ever so slowly tumble over the highest mountains like cream in the greatest waterfalls of all. But the mountains, overcome by clouds, still mould them to their own shape as if pulling a shawl over their giant shoulders.

Journey to the Amazon

The Cuyabeno Reserve in the east of Ecuador near the border with Colombia looks on the map like an endless forest but feels like a river delta with islands dotting it though on closer inspection they lack solidity being swampy groups of trees and vegetation. After flying from Cuenca to Quito I dined and waited at the hostel for the overnight bus to take me to Lago Agrio. The driver wanted me to pay the return fare which I did but received no receipt. I asked: “So if I die before then I will receive a refund?” The Ecuadorian ladies beside us chuckled. We arrive at 6.30 for breakfast with llamas on the lawn and a caged monkey with an earnest expression on their face as if they were going to ask a question but couldn’t think how to formulate it. Then a two hour bus journey to the river where we embark on a canoe for our two hour journey to the lodge. The highlight is watching three tiny chorongo or woolly monkeys cross the river jumping from the high branches of a leaning tree to its fallen fellow almost blocking the river. The second monkey is quite reluctant but the third is terrified but could not, simply could not be left behind by their companions. We cheer them on.

There are no roads here and if there were they’d need a hundred bridges each so canoe with motor or paddles is the only transport. At our jetty a tree is home to a family — or should I say a gang — of hoatzins, a bird slightly larger than a chicken with a flashy display of bright feathers all duckbrown and maroon and yellow with a beady red eye in a blue splotch as if it dressed in the bird charity shop. They cluster on the branch panting like big dogs we can hear from across the river or sit going “Heh, heh, heh” like annoying schoolboys waiting for their prank to mature, gaudy, noisy, and wanting to be seen, like bikers. After a short while when we’d head out looking for birds and hear them we’d sigh and say, “Not those idiots again” like jaundiced guides.

Amazon Lodge Experience

My solo cabin is made of local materials and thatch — ragged and faded, not quite as pretty or tight as Irish thatch — but more than satisfactory. And that too is the opinion of the giant cockroaches so eager to share my accommodation. I swear if I could have put a saddle on one of those buggers I could have ridden him round the compound. But as I chased them off my bed and round the room I grew concerned they might turn round and chase me round the room so we agreed a truce whereby they vacated the bed and I granted them the freedom of the corners. They were not to be my smallest visitors.

We spend our days floating along brown rivers scarcely breathing as we sneak up upon flying monkeys, rufous herons, an anaconda thicker than my arm snoozing on a sunny tree trunk, redthroated turkeys, swallows shooting 1.738 inches above the surface of the lagoon like something from a crossbow. A recapped cardinal, a tanager with black and white body and head dipped in blood, has speared a juicy larva for breakfast but is figuring out how to get it from its beak to inside its beak, which, with some gymnastic maneuvering, it does. Nine point five. The Morpho butterfly flickers like a fluorescent light but with an enchanting melting blue calling to another dimension. I don’t know the opposite of camouflage but this electric blue in a green universe is it. In a particular corner of our compound a dozen yellow Morphos — what’s the collective for them? a carnival of butterflies? — are chasing each other around in their very own aerial conga line, like the souls of children; I can almost hear them laughing.

Hiking and Wildlife

Hiking in the forest is a trail-free experience here. Our guide Luis says he’s forbidden to bring a machete on pain of three month’s suspension so we circle back and forth to find a way forward. He describes some tiny ants as a natural insect repellent and claps his hands outside their nest till they swarm outside to protect it. He places his hand on the nest, gets covered in them and crushes them releasing a surprisingly aromatic scent. The ‘walking tree’ puts out supports like legs or a tripod and manages to ‘walk’ 50 centimeters a year. We’re ready to believe anything now. The lodge supplied us with Wellingtons for the pantano or swamp though it’s more mud than water and a mud that gives way the more you stand in it so it’s important to keep moving. Which I don’t do when the mud comes over the top of my wellies and traps me. As both feet sink deeper I — quite reasonably, I think — reach for a nearby tree not noticing the three inch spines that cover the trunk. I’m eventually pulled to safety taking a little of the swamp and a few spines with me. When I see the trees adorned with lianas like tinsel I immediately think of Tarzan and suspect I’ve received more images of the world from cartoons and pop kitsch than from educational institutions. Indiana Jones has a lot to answer for.

The group I’ve been placed with is half my age so when they go for an insect tour one evening I opt out to rest because I’ve never liked insects and had a childhood terror of spiders. My plan backfires when Luis appears later in the dining room with a giant black tarantula on his rucksack and puts it on one of the posts which it climbs and then crawls along the horizontal beam until it’s poised over my dinner table. Reluctant to reveal my fear to the young people I keep glancing upward as I eat the dinner of Damocles. I retire early to bed and am snuggling to sleep when I hear a thumping on my door. “No thanks, guys. I’m beat.  I’m already in bed. See you tomorrow,” I say thinking they want to party. “No, Mick. The tarantula has just gone into your cabin.” I won’t repeat my exclamations here. They saw the spider climb the steps and walls and enter the roof cavity but assure me it’s afraid of humans and won’t bother me. I sleep like a man facing the guillotine in the morning and rather miss my cockroaches.

Siona Community and Shaman Visit

We visit a Siona community even deeper in the river delta and for $5 we are welcomed by Signora Gabriela and the skinniest friendliest dogs I’ve ever seen. She’s dressed in clothes as bright as her smile and takes us to make casabe, a yucca bread. Outside the village she swiftly chops down a small yucca tree and invites the young men to uproot the stump to which are attached two tubers the size of balloons which we skin to their white hearts. In the village kitchen we grate them in a trough and sweat and feel a sense of accomplishment while Gabriela smiles and shows no trace of scorn. She wraps the soggy mass in a straw mangle she twists and twists with a lever till she has basins of juice and a dry dough that she pats down on the cooking plate to make a flat white yucca pancake. Returning we stop off at the home of a shaman who’s not there while his neighbour is. “The Shaman Is In.” For $5 we sit in a large thatched area listening to a man in his 30s in an elaborate dress and face paint warn us of the dangers of witchcraft and witches who cannot change their nature he informs me after I ask about the possibility of rehabilitation.

I feel I’m visiting the Middle Ages. A century ago in Sudan the English anthropologist Evans-Pritchard found that the Azande thought everyone was a witch sometime or other, sometimes even against their will. Because everyone had been a witch the process was one of rehabilitation not exclusion or worse. Their boundaries were porous and reciprocal; people, even children, moved in and out of zones of inclusion but were never beyond the pale. The shamans here take a harsher view. I realise the only men in dresses and face paint I want to listen to are drag queens. Afterwards by way of recreation we practice with a six-foot blowpipe as we hit our targets within an inch at 20 feet. The monkeys don’t stand a chance against the local hunters.

Paddling the River

The group I’ve been with leaves a day before me so Luis and myself take a small two-seat canoe with two paddles to a more distant protected lagoon with manatees where motors are forbidden. We make our way along streams almost tunnelled by trees and bushes, nearly blocked with fallen branches over which we try to thrust the boat. One channel is so narrow there’s no water on either side, only land as we paddle the banks till we broach the silent expanse of the lagoon dotted with waterlogged trunks, a struggle between water and forest. Herons gaze at us as we at them. The Amazon Kingfisher is a gorgeous bluegreen that lowers my blood pressure on sight by ten points and its long beak is a truly awesome weapon. The sense of privilege is ever-present. As we head back the clouds come out of nowhere and soon the lightning is over our heads and the thunder immediate, torrential rain dimming our view. My rain jacket is useless but it’s warm so being drenched is not the worst. The endless paddling is another matter for this old man and we have to stop at one point to bail out the water sloshing round our feet. The river is a series of infinite meanders and after rounding the 100th corner I think I’ll burst into tears if our jetty is not round the next one. But as we rest now and then and drift along in the warm rain I’m smiling at this new experience of weather and forest in Cuyabeno.

I go piranha fishing before breakfast. (Not a sentence I ever thought I’d write.) I can feel them tugging on the line but they always steal my bait. Only Luis is able to catch one, show us those sawteeth and release it. He says they mostly keep to the bottom of the lagoon and pose no danger to swimmers unless there’s a large body of blood in the water and then everything changes.

Perhaps the most enchanting presence is the river dolphins we briefly glimpse at the edge of vision after they slice the water quietly and submerge once more, too swift for photo or binoculars, evading our scrutiny like a premonition, haunting the river and being ever-present by being invisible. Not seeing them we imagine them everywhere.

Final Thoughts

Travel is a time machine, not into the past but into the hidden present which it takes the microscope of travel to reveal. We promise we’ll never lose sight of this again but we do. My five days in Cuyabeno felt like a dream that you know is a dream but don’t want to wake from, a weeklong pinching of myself, my smiling self. At the risk of being smart — a risk I always take  — I’d say what pleased me most was . . . nothing, the intense pleasure of gliding in utter silence, with not even a wake on the green glass of the lagoon past the witness of the chaotic forest under a sky of clouds and blue into the next curve, the next meander, never wishing it to end.