Wild in the Amazon - photos— and some amateur anthropology

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A recent trip to Ecuador included a five-day adventure at the Kapawi Ecolodge in the Amazon basin. I'm still digesting the experience. I feel somehow shifted.

PK and I have traveled to many developing countries and have seen poverty. The indigenous people in the Kapawi area of Ecuador have little, if any, money. But they're not poor.  Photos below demonstrate some of the richness of the flora and fauna of the unique environment into which they're totally integrated.

Maybe that's what touched me: Being in a diverse and eco-rich environment—the Amazon rainforest—where people are part of the scene, not taming or conquering it, but living as one with it.

To a large degree, I think that's what many of us - people who live in urban or rural neighborhoods in developed countries try to do when we escape to the mountains and rivers to hike, camp or sit by the water watching insects skim and birds fly.

We long to be part of the natural world. Some people already are. 

It was a good thing to see.

B I R D S

The hoatzin, AKA stinky turkey, has a disagreeable manure-like odor because of aromatic compounds in the leaves it consumes and the resulting bacterial fermentation in a ruminant-type pouch. It is hunted by humans only in times of dire need, according to Wikipedia. It's common, large, noisy with a show-off Mohawk top notch and is featured on the Kapawi logo.

Aww, the toucan! Much sought by camera carriers. Bonus that this one was about to eat a nut. The Kapawi area was thick with birds. All photos were shot within a few miles of the lodge.

Seems like wherever we are on the planet, we see birds that look like great blue herons. This is actually a cocoi heron, common throughout much of South America and closely related to the grey and great blue herons of North America, Central America, the Caribbean and the Galapagos Islands. (Wikipedia.)

   Horned screamers, large heavy birds, occupied space around the lodge and screamed often. Rude at night. 

Laurie Gerloff and moi. Also large and
 heavy, hanging around the lodge
screaming and were rude at night.
 Not to be mistaken for birds.

Masked crimson tanager. These tanagers feed in groups near water, and we saw plenty of crimson crowds from our cabins-on-stilts on the small Kapawi lagoon.  

Old blue eyes with white bill, AKA yellow rumped cacique, a regular at the lodge lagoon.


C R A W L Y  T H I N G S 

a

.My favorite caterpillar. What's with the white strip down its back? The fronds at each end? And the blue wiring? 

This one apparently got into some Styrofoam.

Ordinary spider but unusual circumstances on a night walk through the rainforest.

Tiny termites used by the Achuar as insect repellent. We joined our guide in smearing the termites onto our upper extremities. They had a pleasant cedar-like aroma. Regardless, mosquitoes were mostly no-shows.

A stick, walking.

                             F U N G I

Our guide was encyclopedic, but unless a fungi was medicinal, he didn't necessarily know its name. Case in point, this hooded monk with a curly black beard and a crocheted shawl, dancing in rotting leaves on the rainforest floor. Hmmm. Could have phallic implications. 

The black fungi fingers sticking out of sticks are medicinal. 

Guide Diego explaining that black fungi to us during our medicinal plants hike.

With a stiff wind I believe these ultra light shrooms would flutter.

Grains of rice stuck atop black wires?

Miniature marshmallows. But don't taste!

    R A N D O M  S T U F F

Red monkey spotted during our canoe ride into the Kapawi Ecolodge our first day in the Amazon. Monkeys are often present but are difficult to see, unless, of course, you're an Achuar man with a blowgun and poison dart, precision eyesight and dead-eye aim. Stores don't exist in this remote part of the Amazon, and monkeys are on the menu. (Not at the Kapawi lodge.)

A walking palm with colorful legs.

Twenty-foot tall tree ferns almost get lost in
 the rainforest's awesomeness.

But here's the most splendid tree of all. The giant kapok rivals the California redwoods, and is sacred to the indigenous people. Our Achuar guide Diego, pictured, has one foot rooted in the rainforest near this tree where he came of age in a three-day ceremony, and the modern world, which is encroaching.

Our trip to the Amazon basin opened to me a different reality. Simple yet complex. Raw. Exquisite.

I saw with my own eyes, and learned on a heart level, that people who look as if they've stepped from a National Geographic page are intelligent, resourceful, intuitive, skilled, creative, spiritual, and intrinsically wired into their natural world. Tourism, technology, missionaries and a hungry oil industry threaten their way of life, and together those threats create pathways to inevitable change.

Oil is Ecuador's number one economic driver. Tourism is second, and as tourists arrive with fancy phones and demands for hot water and wifi, and exotic cocktails with ice, we create little bumps of cultural distress that may one day become upheavals.

The oil industry has already engineered upheavals in numerous Amazon locations, and many more are in transition. But the Kapawi preserve area is, so far, mostly protected. Encroachment, I believe, is mostly in the form of big white people wearing khaki and carrying expensive cameras.

We're accommodated by Achuar guides who know and love the forest and river creatures and can imitate hundreds of bird and animal sounds. They make poison darts and blowguns from forest materials, and after felling a monkey or wild boar, can whip up a sharp "knife" from a slice of wood to dress out the prey and carry it home. 

Diego has made for us fishing line in about five minutes from fibers in a palm leaf. None of us could snap it.

Many others also possess these skills, he says. And I believe him. We didn't see even one store in five days because there aren't any. We did see a small market canoe that motors over from nearby Peru on the Pastaza River and stops at villages along the way. I regret we didn't go aboard.

Hunting. Communal gardens. If you want something, make it. Self sufficiency to the max.

But Diego also has a cell phone and a Facebook account and uses the lodge's feeble wifi to dawdle online. He's fluent in Spanish, and after a year of study, speaks competent English. He's studied in naturalist programs to be a guide, and he's excellent.

Kapawi Ecolodge reviewers on Trip Advisor rave about the guides. 

Most of all, he knows the language of the forest and draws wisdom from a tribal life we can only imagine. I wonder what he thought of us. I'm not sure I want to know.


 Note: PK read this post and calls me a romantic. True. My opinions and feelings are based on just five blissful days. I'm an amateur dabbling in anthropology, and an optimist who seeks and sees the positive. Nothing scientific here. I don't know enough about the status of women and children, for example, or education or healthcare beyond what the shamans provide with rainforest medicines. All I know for sure is that I was touched by a place and its people.

EARLIER POSTS ABOUT THE AMAZON

Amazon Adventure - Kapawi Ecolodge  - All about tramping around in the rainforest, gaining insights into Achuar culture, and seeing how various rainforest plants are used for just about everything from housing construction to medicine to spiritual enlightenment.

Off to a shaky start at Kapawi Ecolodge   But it was all good, even the fishtailing bush plane and the drink made from manioc and spit.

Amazon Adventure - Kapawi Ecolodge and Reserve

In December 2016 PK and I, along with our Oregon friends Laurie Gerloff and Steve Lambros, spent 3.5 weeks in Ecuador. Our journey included eight days in the Galapagos Islands and five at the Kapawi Ecolodge and Reserve in the Amazon Basin. This is the first of several blog posts about our adventures, diving right into the heart of Kapawi - a place out of time that PK and I agree provided  over-the-top travel experiences. That means good! We've seen places that were more breathtaking but few where we were invited into an unfamiliar and fascinating culture. We caught glimpses of the rainforest and Achuar people as interpreted by our indigenous guide, Diego Callera.

Each day in Kapawi included a guided hike or two. Our guide spoke two local languages, is fluent in Spanish and competent in English. Most of all, he was fluent in the language of the rainforest, communicating reverence along with deep and ancient knowledge.

Our Achuar guide Diego at the sacred kapok tree where he was initiated into the spiritual heart of his culture. Now 30, he was a preadolescent at the time, 10 or 11 years old, and spent three days using local hallucinogenic plants, which enabled him to encounter the Achuar's spiritual guide, Arutam. According to Diego, one of Arutam's primary messages is about how to be a good person. (Later I learned that part of being "good" means showing self restraint in all things and not being lazy.) The experience may be repeated later if a person is having marriage troubles, or is having a hard time being "good." Arutam's spirit is embodied in this tree, and in many other extraordinary forms, and appears in dreams. I copied the statement below from a narrative about the Achuar in the anthropology museum in Cuenca: 

There was a time in which all living things were human, but by their good or bad behavior, Arutam converted them into different animals and plants and for this reason we consider them our brothers. 

We learned later that we could have spent time with a shaman and taken hallucinogens. It was too late for serious consideration, but I wouldn't rule it out if ever there's a next time. 

This was the trailhead the day our objective was to learn about the rainforest's medicinal plants.

A motorized canoe transported us to trailheads. Rivers are the roads in the Amazon Basin.

PK gets a hand with a mud landing. Rubber boots are essential and provided.

Diego went before us with his ever-present machete, an extension of his right arm, its edge honed to a glint.  With a flick here, a chop there, vines and  limbs fell alongside a muddy trail through Ecuador's lush rainforest.

Diego's orange-handled machete is a blur as he clears a path. 

The rainforest is mostly flat but rises sharply from rivers. We scrambled to keep up with Diego, then the going got easier.

Forest  music - birds, insects, frogs, moving water - was our soundtrack as we followed him in alternating states of fascination, disbelief, wonder, and sometimes fatigue. It's hot and humid! We stopped often as Diego signaled silence and pointed out something in a tree, in the air, on the ground, or in the river. And we, with untrained eyes, sought to see as he did. Not a chance.

     This video, less than a minute long, shows Diego calling in a pygmy owl. Please turn up the sound
     and listen carefully so you can hear the owl's response. The dang owl actually relocated to be closer to Diego.

Binoculars helped. Laurie Gerloff, our own birding and nature nerd, documented more than 100 individual species of noted birds and other critters during our 3.5 weeks in Ecuador. Most she'd not seen before.  

Speaking only for  myself, I could have walked the rainforest trails for hours without an interpreter, and thought, "Wow, that was cool." But I would have missed 95 percent because I didn't know what to look  for or how to use all my senses, including a sixth one I'm not sure I possess.

I may also have been stung, bitten, stuck in mud, and for sure, lost. We were often warned not to touch certain trees as they were crawling with red ants or other mean little biters. Occasionally Diego hurried us through places where unfriendly flying insects were buzzing. Oddly enough, we were not bothered by mosquitoes. Maybe a dozen times he led us across half submerged logs, boards or makeshift bridges that kept us from sinking into mud. We saw no venomous snakes, although they're present, and the only evidence of jaguars were claw marks on a tree that Diego spotted. 

Diego's oneness with his life's landscape, his knowledge and command of it,  and his enthusiasm for showing us made the difference between a regular well informed guide and one who was forged by his environment. He wanted us to know how the Achuar, reportedly among the last of the Amazonian tribes to be contacted by outsiders, live in harmony with the forest. He never boasted, but it became clear that he knew every tree, snake, insect, mammal, fish, monkey, mushroom, bird, bird call, and everything else, including what's unseen. There are layers of reality, after all.

A few things he demonstrated or described the day that our hike centered on palm trees and their myriad uses. For starters, the Achuar construct houses entirely from palms without the use of nails. Various parts of different palms are used to make arrows, blowguns, knives, fishing line and snares. 

• 

  This tiny "knife, made on the spot from the stem of a palm frond, easily slices through
   a cotton tee shirt hem. In the absence of a "real" knife, it is used to gut animals such

   as monkeys or wild boars, which are hunted with blowguns that project arrows
   with tips sweetened by the poison-dart frog or, more likely,  the curare plant.
  
  

The only tool Diego used to craft the items mentioned above: his machete. This is impressive when he's shaping something as small as a toothpick, such as an arrow-point, or that tiny "knife" he's using to cut up his tee shirt.

He's making string, often used as high-test fishing line. It is

strong! I have a strand of it around my wrist. I expect it

will be there for years. Might outlast me. 

I was pretty much bowled over and asked Diego  if others possess the knowledge he's demonstrated. He said, "Everyone can do what I do." By "everyone" he meant the Achuar men, but the women have another set of skills critical to group survival. And both sexes meet Arutam at the sacred tree around the same age.

Not sure what he's cutting here. Maybe a gem? NO'!
It's a stem with lemon ants, which we will soon taste.

He's fashioning a palm leaf into a miniature "backpack"

to demonstrate how to make a carrying pouch for game killed

in the rainforest. 

Here's a parting shot for this post, from our first day in the Amazon. We'd arrived at Kapawi mid-afternoon and after a late lunch, Diego escorted us on a motorized canoe to the Pastaza River to watch the sunset. The river is wide here, and we're on a huge wet sandbar, which will likely be covered with water sometime soon. We learned that the rivers rise and fall, responding to daily local rain but also to what's happening in  the Andes, not far away. The Pastaza River is a tributary of the Maronoa River, a direct tributary to the Amazon, the largest artery in Earth's anatomy. They seem alive, those rivers and sands, inhaling and exhaling, swelling and shrinking, with the rain. A few days later we'd slipped into the rhythm. This photo reminds me. 

Coming soon: 

Getting to Kapawi was half the fun; the lodge and its surroundings; everyday life as a tourist at Kapawi.

Things we saw in the Amazon rainforest: photos 

What it's like to tour the Galapagos Islands on a 16-passenger yacht.

What we saw in the Galapagos Islands: photos

Diego in his element.