It´s a five-day weekend for the country. We´re sitting on a main street as a constant stream of cars, trucks, and motorcycles pass by. I´ve never seen such organization in this country before, with two or three white-gloved crossing guards at each intersection.
Wé´re not in the highlands around Quito anymore and the heat and humidity are strong. When the truck picks us up, the windows are down and I close my eyes and enjoy the wind pushing against my face.
We drive further from civilization. The road narrows and the lines begin to fade in and out. For a while we travel through a landscape familiar in all of Ecuador: hilled country with grass and tress, spotted with the occasional family farm, a few cows, once in a while some power lines. But the trees begin to take over. More ferns appear. The trees are slender and wiry, and reach their witch´s finger high above the ground.
We pass briefly through a two-road village. I count as many canoes as cars.
The ferns are growing larger. The difference between tree and bush and weed blurs. Leaves begin to take on prehistoric proportions.
We finally stop at a bridge where we meet up with others in our tour group. From here we take eight-person motorized canoes down the river to the lodge. The water is mud-colored, and the water level is low right now. The banks are lined with twisted and entertiwned dead wood. The guide at the front of the canoe constantly scans for a glimpse of wildlife: monkeys leaping from branches, tucans, river dolphins, aligators. The glimpses are fleeting.
The trees that line the river seem more like vertical ecosystems. Branches creep out in every direction, clothed in fantastic vegetation, and adorned with vines that drop into the river and teardrop birds´ nests that hang like earings.
***
It´s night at the lodge. There is no electricity: we use candles. The jungle outside our room is dark, but not quiet. Forget the gentle chirp of crickets. The night is full of the rattle and hiss of insects I can only imagine being the size of rodents. For a moment I think I hear the patter of rain. But it is the flapping of hundreds of bats, swooping in every direction, feasting on the flies and mosquitoes, and the dozens of what-have-you little bugs that fill the air. There is a bug net to cover the bed, which is essential if you don´t want to wake up covered in a thousand little bug bites. There are also cockroaches, tarantulas, and scorpions to think about. A part of us is glad for the darkness.
***
The roar of downpouring rain washes out all other sounds. Lightning flashes and thunder rolls over us. It´s been raining for hours--all night as far as I can tell. Sometimes a light rain, sometimes, like now, the sky opens and turns the dampness of humidity into a purer sort of wet.
The green of the jungle is dense. It hides the birds and the insects and monkeys that usually fill this world with the wall of sounds that comes always from everywhere and nowhere. Now it stands, not against the rain, but absorbing it, accepting it without fuss because the rain is simply another part of it.
The rain is slowing, but not stopping. The thunder moves slowly away, but it doesn´t move on. In a moment the rain thickens again. It ebbs and flows. The distant runbling gives way to a closer booming. This storm must stretch for miles.
And so it does. It rains nonstop until midafternoon. But this doesn´t matter. There are jungle hikes to take, with exotic animals to see, and giant ferns and trees to marvel at.
Our tour group is a mixed bunch. With so many tourists, I´m surprised I´m the only one from the U.S. England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy. One man from New Zealand looks a decade older than his twenty-two years, but acts sixteen. He talks non stop and seems incapabable of moderating the volume of his voice. He´s one of those who has to be making noise, so he fills up the space with the sort of culturally deaf joking that gives us foreigners the epithet of gringos. He belongs in a pub, and here his irreverance chafes.
But there is no taking the awe out of 15-foot ferns that arch over the trail, and massive sequioas that tower far above the rest of the jungle, with roots that we do not step over, but climb over. I press myself against it just to be able to touch such a being.
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We swim in Laguna Grande, the largest lagoon in the area. The water is a dark tea color due to the acidity of the vegetation that falls and decomposes there. We don´t know it now, but there are pirhana here. Generally, they stay clear of something as big as a human, unless you have an open cut, in which case you´re in for a bad time. But there are no problems this evening.
We watch the sky paint itself with the setting sun. It sits atop the silhouette of the jungle. I stop swimming for a few moments to watch. It´s impossible not to enjoy such a sunset.
When the fire has put itself out and the short twilight begins settling into the darkness of a night outside the city, we once again begin boating down the river. The guide stands at the prow, sweeping his flashlight back and forth along the banks. He looks for the tell-tale eye reflection of aligators in the water and boas in the trees.
When he sees something, we head toward it, straining the whole time to see in the dark what the guide spotted a hundred meters before. He points toward black logs in black water which are aligators. He points to grey blotches in the grey mud, which take to flight, seeming to tranform into something alive from nothing at all before our eyes. We come within a few feet of aligators that, all of sudden, seem huge and powerful so close up. Small boas hang in branches a few feet above our heads.
The driver speeds us down the river without light, into the wall of black jungle in front of us. He knows the river in a way that seems almost mystical to me. And that´s the way everything is down here. A world with a sort of magical purity. This is God´s prayer to us, and sometimes all you need to do is listen to feel clean agian.
***
A Note:
This blog is an attempt to capture a tiny piece of the atmoshpere that I experienced. It is not a detailed itenerary of the things that we did and saw, and often leaves out entire activities, like visiting a local community and playing with their pet monkey. Some more detail might be gathered from the pictures I have uploaded to facebook, so please feel free to look through those as well.
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