But Im back in Quito (again) now and I can share some of my experiences :)) ...
Just riding the motorbike along jungle roads has its own appeal its true, but Ive done plenty of that earlier in this trip. So for this little side trip Id decided that I wanted to get away from roads and see the old-growth primary jungle where its much harder for the "general public" to get to (and destroy!). So, Id organised to go to a "Jungle Camp" with a tour company. It was located a long way up a river (canoe access only) in a national park and I hoped I would thus be able to see more animals and birds etc, and less farms and plantations and destroyed jungle. :)
Well, it took me a day to ride down off the altiplano from Quito to get to a town called Rio Agrio which was where I was going to meet a tour company to get into the jungle and away from the towns.
In Quito it had been quite wet and cool for the past week or so, but as I rode down the winding paved road into "the Oriente" it very quickly became hot and REALLY sweaty... Instant "sticky lolly-pop head!"... But thats just how it is so you just have to adapt!...
So, I set about adapting...
Hmmm, Ill just think of my heavily armoured protective riding clothes as my own personal sauna suit :)
Anyway, I was to meet the tour people the next morning, so after riding to within 20Km or so of my destination I found a nice little hostel and settled into my room ... But I spent a sweaty night not getting very much sleep...
There is a reason why houses in tropical places dont have any soft furnishings like carpet or even curtains or seat cushions... Its because the humidity and heat very quickly make everything mouldy... Nothing is ever really "dry" when its this hot and sticky!
Unfortunately, the same applies for pillows and mattresses, and my room at the little hostel definitely needed a new bed and pillow!... And even though the sheets etc were freshly cleaned and it was all neat and tidy, everything smelt quite strongly of mould, and so I didnt sleep well.
Lack of sleep is not too much of a problem for me these days though... Ive spent plenty of nights in hostel dormitories now, and though I often still dont get much sleep, Ive learned to live with it and am rarely grumpy after a "restless" night. So next morning I was happily on time at the appointed place and met the small group (three others) who I would spend the next few days with.
Then the tour people showed up on time (Quite unusual for down here!) and started to get us organised a bit. For me, this involved riding my bike to a garage where it would stay while I was "up the river" (... hopefully not without the proverbial paddle!). And after that we tourists were bundled into a taxi pick-up and we were driven a couple more hours down the road... Which turned from pavement to good gravel, to dirt, to small track and finally to its end at a very small community (group of shacks really) on the banks of quite a big river called Aguarico.
You know that idea you probably have of the rivers in the Amazon being muddy and sluggish and surrounded by jungle... Well its probably about right on all counts if you are over on the Eastern side of the Amazon where the river is near its end...
And everything but the "sluggish" part is correct for the Western side too, but here where the river has just come down from the mountains, its anything but slow... The river is indeed, wide and brown and flat and surrounded by jungle, but its moving along at quite the clip... Id guess that its going at 15 - 20 Kmh cos´ youd have to run pretty fast to keep up with it! And while it is flat looking, you can see that its full of turbulence and fighting currents with the surface being covered in roils and swirls... I certainly would not want to try swimming in it... I think Id drown quite quickly!
So, the car had arrived at the banks of a river here in Ecuador that eventually drains into the Atlantic ocean about 5000Km away! hmmm... But I dont think anybody but me really gave that too much thought though. After a bit of a look at the river, we all bundled out, stretched our legs and then sat around in a little shelter and had lunch while supplies were loaded into a 10m long dugout canoe with a 70hp outboard on the back. The "supplies"included food, drinking water, some bags of cement and concrete building blocks as well as a 250 litre drum of fuel for the outboard... (Thats makes for a lot of time in a boat!!), and the tourists personal baggage too... That looks like an awful lot of stuff in that very skinny boat!
Now, when ever there is a pile of stuff to go some where and a single vehicle, there arises in my "Western" mind what seems to be the obvious question...
It matters not if its llamas in a pickup, bags of potatoes on a truck, people on a bicycle, or gas bottles on a motorbike etc... Its always effectively the same question.
..."How many of those can be put on that vehicle ?"
But, one thing I have learned from my travels over the years is that there is in fact a universal, and always correct local answer to this question that just doesnt occur to our "western" minds...
And the correct answer is...
... "All of them !" :))
Yep, no matter how much stuff there is, you can always get it ALL on... It just takes a little more time and creativity (both in the packing/stacking, and the duration of the journey :)))
.. and so it was again... After a while, ALL the stuff was loaded in the boat.
And then it was our turn to get into the dugout too...
And finally about half a dozen other people hopped in too( Just for good measure! ), who I assumed were just catching a ride in the same direction we were going.
So, now that we were all loaded up, we set off down stream in the long skinny boat that used to be a tree :) And it was a four hour ride down-stream going at about 60Kmh Id guess... The narrow canoe moved quite quickly even with the big load it had (though it only had about 10cm of freeboard!).
And the day passed steadily by with the wind and the water and the green jungle covered river banks flowing endlessly by... No one talked much because you had to shout over the sound of the out-board and the wind.
As the afternoon wore on, the weather changed from hot and sunny to warm and very rainy.
We stopped briefly a few times to let off the "hitch-hikers" here and there. We passed canoes going the other way as well as big barges with half a dozen fully loaded semi-trailers on them etc. being pushed by tug-boats going slowly up or down stream.
And we passed individual houses, small communities, and large oil exploration "compounds" on the river banks.
We passed several junctions where other smaller rivers joined our bigger river (which its self eventually joins up with the Amazon), and at one of these junctions we turned and headed up-stream on the small river. The rain eased off and we continued up the little river in the late afternoon. But there were no more little villages or even individual houses... This was pristine "Jungle. The banks of the river were festooned with every sort of green foliage you can think of and the jungle comes right up to the river banks. The only clearings we saw were from the river bank having been eaten away under one of the big trees causing it to fall and create a little zone of devastation... Not for long though, with the canopy gone, the sunlight floods in and there ensues a "grow-fest" where all the under-story plants grow as fast as they can to try to out-compete each other for the light... It all turns green again very quickly.
We were headed up a winding water highway into an ocean of green... I was happily mesmerised by it all sliding past my view despite the rain... I particularly liked the look of the magnificent Cieba trees that would sporadically come into view... They are the biggest trees in the jungle I think, and they stand head and shoulders above the rest of the trees with their beautifully hemispherical canopies, massive buttressed roots and lots of vines draped over their lower branches and hanging down to the jungle floor... I was just waiting to catch a glimpse of Tarzan swinging by on one of them :))
Eventually we arrived at a grassed clearing in the jungle with a group of little huts with thatched roofs just as the day finally ran out of light.
Then we were each shown to a room in one of the little wooden huts to put our stuff, before we regrouped in the larger kitchen/dining hut for dinner. We had dinner and then got to know a little more about who we each were and what we would be doing for the next few days while we were here... All with the exotic sounds of the jungle evening surrounding us rather than highway noise or the sound of the canoes motor :)
And then finally we all headed off to bed.
... Another full day approach successfully completed :)))
