Speechless...

I just got back to Coca from Sani Lodge in the Amazon, and it was unbelievable. I feel like I just went to Pandora for a week. I got the best guide at Sani lodge, Javier, and he and his brother Mizaél found some of the rarest creatures on the planet for me and the rest of my group.

On Monday I got to Coca (full name Puerto Francisco de Orellana) at 4:30 in the morning and wandered around until I found a hotel to sleep in for 5 hours until I had to meet the boat to the lodge. (I´m very glad I didn´t learn until just a few minutes ago that Coca is a fairly dangerous city at night.) The ride into the forest took 3 hours, and the lodge sits about 50 miles as the crow flies from Coca. It´s in the middle of the territory of the Kichwa people, who inhabit most of the northern forest of Ecuador from the foothills of the Andes and down. The Sani Island community is a Kichwa commune and the only community on this stretch of river actively resisting oil development on their lands. Javier told us about how the Sani community refused to let the oil companies build a road through their territory, thus forcing them to build a pipeline instead. The pipeline will become property of the community after 11 more years (it was built around 1999) and then the oil company will have to rent it. Since Sani has refused oil development, the lodge sits in the middle of a huge expanse of untouched primary forest that shelters almost every known species of the Amazon. (Ecuador is among the most biodiverse nations on earth, with over 10% of all plant species and 10% of all vertebrates.)

The lodge is about 25 minutes away from the Rio Napo, and we had to transfer to a few smaller canoes to get there. It sits on a blackwater lagoon, habitat for a bunch of unique species that don´t live in the big river channels, like the endangered Black Caiman. To get to the campsite, where I stayed, or most of the hiking trails, you have to paddle up the lake, because the edges are swampy and you can´t really walk around it. The forest is incredible. Everywhere you look is an impenetrable wall of green, with thousands of plants growing all on top of each other in a mad race to get to the sunlight.

We didn´t really do anything else on Monday other than settle in and meet the other members of our guide groups. The rest of mine were 2 guys from South Africa who've been living in London for the last 10 years and a family from the San Francisco area. They have three girls who are 14, 10, and 6 years old, and were super fun travel companions. Tuesday morning after breakfast at 6:00 we paddled and hiked to the bird tower, a 120 foot tall staircase leading up to a treehouse at the top of a 400 year-old Great Kapok tree. You could see the canopy for miles around, and we spotted red howler monkeys, a toucan, and several kinds of parrots and hawks. Later in the afternoon we hiked the loop trail behind the campsite and saw bats, a family of nocturnal monkeys hiding in a hollow tree, and tons of bugs and other birds and plants.

Wednesday was easily the best day of my entire summer. It felt like we were living out Avatar as we motored another hour downriver past huge barges loaded with cranes and bulldozers and backhoes and constructions sites where they were excavating new pipelines and roads, and just past the last site we ran into a group of bufeos, the Giant Amazon river dolphins. They´re totally blind and navigate with ecolocation, and they were swimming out of the lagoon where they eat at night into the Napo where they spend the day. But they were scared to pass by the barge and machinery, because the noise of the motors and engines made it hard for them to see as they swam by. We were headed to the lagoon for swimming and a snack break at an under-construction lodge, and on the way we saw a three-toed sloth lazing around in a Kapok tree. After our swim we went even further into the forest to fish for piranhas (I caught one!), and that´s where we saw our most incredible creatures. Mari (the youngest girl) spotted a Taira (a black weasel\racoon-like creature) in a tree, and as we watched it a group of giant river otters came swimming up the river toward us! I had asked Javier if we would see them, but he told me we probably wouldn´t, as they´re critically endangered and nominated as one of the rarest animals on the planet. We all felt incredibly lucky, and we were too embarassed to tell any of the other guests about our find, because no one else saw anything near as cool all week.

We did a short night hike that night and found tons of cool stick bugs and millipedes and spiders, and yesterday we toured Javier's uncle's farm and saw his coffee and cacao trees and got to taste the fresh cacao beans. Delicious. Our last hike we saw some more medicinal plants, a quicksand swamp, and trumpeter birds, which are very skittish and hard to find. Coming back to civilization today was a huge disappointment. But now I only have one week left until´I'll be seeing you all back home, and I can't wait for that.

More Pictures

Angelo was kind enough to give me a bunch of pictures he's taken over the last couple weeks, and they're up on photobucket. There are some of the fruit and fish markets in Puerto Lopez along with the ones from our trip to the cloud forest outside of town.

Last Friday's dive trip was awesome - we saw tons of different corals and fish. Afterward we took the kids in ecoclub out snorkeling and found an octopus and a stingray. They all loved it, but we were all freezing by the end of the day. (All last week was drizzly and cold.)

On Saturday Angelo and I took a taxi about 10 minutes up into the hills behind Puerto Lopez to El Pital, a tiny town in the Cloud Forest. Our guide was probably 17 or 18 years old, and he showed us all kinds of medicinal plants and even tracked down a group of howler monkeys for us. The uses of the plants we saw include: curing snake-bites ("if you boil just the right amount. Too much and you lose your mind"), curing fevers, stopping bleeding, and putting you to sleep, among others. It was a great day, but after hiking almost 10 miles in ankle-deep mud the whole way, we were exhausted.

Yesterday and today we've been working on repainting the mural on the front wall of the E. Azul house, which just needs a couple more details redone. And today on turtle capture I caught two more hawksbills! That brings my total to 7, and Jose Luis says I've captured more than twice as many turtles as any volunteer since he's worked at Equilibrio.

Other than that I've been wrapping up my hatchery report and some other work things, and tomorrow I'll be packing for my trip to the Andes and the Amazon. I probably won't have internet access again for about a week and a half, so next post won't be till the week before I get home.

Amazon!

Things are really picking up around here for my last few weeks. I'm working on finishing up my turtle hatchery report to submit to Gabi, and then it's full steam ahead until I come home on the 1st!

Some American documentary film-makers arrived here today to take some footage of Machalilla Park, and Angelo and I get to go to the Island with them tomorrow and be their nature guides. We'll take them to see the albatross and red-fotted boobies (really the only two birds you might not see without a guide) and show them the turtle nests we marked last week, as well as doing a quick check for other possible nests laid since we left. The two guys are from Oregon and work for a big conservation group (I want to say the Nature Conservancy but I can't remember for sure). They're going to donate all of their footage to their organization and give Equilibrio anything we want as well.

On Friday, I finally get to go diving! We're going to search for Hawksbills again, bringing the filmers along for the ride, so Gabis says I'd better catch one. Then in the afternoon we're taking the little kids from ecoclub on their first snorkeling trip, which will definitely be an adventure, hopefully in a good way ;)

This weekend, Angelo and I are planning to go to the Cloud Forest nearby for a day trip, and possibly go visit Los Frailes as well. Los Frailes is a collection of beaches a few kilometers north of Puerto Lopez, commonly said to be some of the best in Ecuador, so we'd love to go do some snorkeling there.

Halfway through next week, my big plans start. I'm going to leave on Thursday for a vacation, and I'm staying at an eco-lodge in the Amazon! My plan so far is this:

Thursday 15 - Take an early bus to Guayaquil and from there to Cuenca, a really cool city in the mountains.

Friday and Saturday 16-17 - Explore Cuenca's old town and visit the Montecristi Panama Hat factory and the Incan ruins at Ingapirca.

Saturday night - Night bus from Cuenca to Quito (12-15 hours, ughh)

Sunday 18 - Pay for my stay at the eco-lodge, night bus to Coca in the Amazon (10 hours)

Monday to Friday 19-23 - Travel to Sani Lodge by boat from Coca (3 hours). At the lodge I'm staying in their tents instead of a room for half price. The lodge is situated on an oxbow lake between two national parks. From the bar at the lodge you can see endangered black caimans and tons of aquatic bird species. To get to the forest trails, you first canoe across the lake, where you can also fish for piranhas, and the lodge provides one bilingual guide and one wildlife tracking guide on each excursion. They have a 100 foot tall canopy tower for bird watching and several trails of different lengths. You can also pay $25 extra to enter the park and visit a clay lick where parrots congregate, and $15 to visit a lagoon and see the bufeos (pink river dolphins). They also do night hikes to see nocturnal wildlife and night-time canoe trips for caiman spotting. Needless to say, I couldn't be more excited!

Saturday 24 - Hang out in Quito and night bus back to Puerto Lopez (12 hours....)

Sunday 25 - First day of my last week in Ecuador!

Back from the Island (with more pictures!)

I'm back and enjoying the weekend after another 8 days without a shower. The island was super fun this time - there was another group of biologists there with Angelo and Sandra and I, and they were great people. Diana and Felipe are from Columbia (their accents are super hard to understand) and Jacobo is from Italy. They were putting GPS tags on the Nazca Boobies to track their flights, and they got some interesting results. Nazcas are the biggest of the boobies on Isla de la Plata, and they fly 60-100 miles out to sea every day to fish. The depth gauges on the tags also showed that they can dive down 150 feet underwater! Most of the time they stay near the surface though. The weirdest thing, though, was that one of the birds flew over 50 miles in a perfectly straight line going due south one day. When we zoomed in close to its path (the GPS takes a new point every second, so you get really good resolution) we saw that it would make little sideways deviations of about 200 meters, but always return to its original line, and when you zoom out it looks like someone drew it with a ruler. All of this is without being able to see land at any point on the journey. Pretty amazing.

Every day after we'd finished our census and they'd recollected their tags in the afternoon, we went back to the house and Jacobo oversaw dinner preparations. We had pasta with fresh homemade tomato sauce, ceviche made with fish from the pescadores down the beach, patacones (fried sweet plantain cakes), and big fresh potato salads. We ate better than we do here in town, come to think of it. It was such a fun experience to be able to talk to people from all over the world working on different projects, everyone speaking sort of Spanglitalian and working on their second (and third) languages. Felipe lives in North Carolina right now, and Diana has studied both English and Italian in school, and Jacobo can also speak both Spanish and English very well. It definitely made me want to keep studying biology and to pick up another language on the way.

To top it all off, on Friday, Angelo and I's last night, a turtle came up to lay a nest! It was the first one on the island in exactly a month, and it was unmarked, so we had to stay with it from 2 in the morning till 5 while it dug for an hour, laid eggs for an hour, and covered them for another. We also had to tag it and take a DNA sample, measure it, count the eggs, and mark the nest when it was done - all by ourselves because everyone else had left already. I was super tired and a little grumpy with the turtle at the time, but I'm glad we got to mark a nest before we left.

Diana sent me some really good pictures, which I've already put up on photobucket, and I'll see if I can get some that Angelo took of the turtle, too. Hasta luego!

Plans

Things had been getting a little slow here, but it's starting to pick up now. Today I caught another big Green Turtle and did all of the measurements, DNA sampling, and tagging myself. Last Saturday there was a big parade and street party for the start of the whale season (and, more importantly I suspect, tourist season), and more and more gringos have been trickling in every day. And this Saturday I get to go back to the Island with Angelo and Sandra, and this time we'll be accompanied by a grad student from South Carolina who's studying the birds there. I get to learn how to capture and band them so I can teach more volunteers how to do the same. I'm really excited to go back, and even more excited for my plans afterward.

I talked to Gabi today about taking a week-long vacation to go do some more traveling, and she's working on getting me a sort of volunteer swap with another organization. We still have to make some calls to see where there will be a spot open, but it sounds like there are three options. One of them would be tracking bears in the cloud forest on the slopes of the mountains, and another is a science station in the middle of the Amazon! I haven't really heard what the third one would be, but I think it's also in the cloud forest.

I don't really have much more to report right now until I find out about the volunteering, but I'm sure you must have questions about things I haven't written about yet, so I'll get back online tomorrow night before I leave to give another update.

Transportation

Getting around (or watching others do the same) can be pretty funny here. The two travel concepts here that diverge most from ours are that there is no maximum occupancy for any vehicle and that no vehicle is designed to carry just one person. You might think this meant that there are strange, enlarged cars and weird motorcycles here, but that's not really the case (well, there are some interesting motorcycle derivatives, but I'll get there in a minute). Really, people here are just more creative/daring in their loading techniques.

I've seen lots of bicycles with little wooden seats added to the bar in front of the normal one, which serve both for extra capacity and to let little guys reach the peddles. Most of them also have pegs on the axles for standing passengers, and it's not uncommon to see three people on one bike -- one driving, one on the handlebars or extra seat, and one standing on the back. Motorcycles, in comparison, offer much more room, and are the ride of choice for small families. The record so far is 5 on a motorcycle, but at this point I wouldn't be too surprised to see a 6th squeezed in somewhere. Usually it'll be a dad with a small kid in front of him and a smaller one packed between him and mom on the back.

The same concept applies to cars. One restaurant owner Peter and I were talking to this week was showing us an old car he was restoring (it had a honda engine in it, but no marks on the outside, and I couldn't tell what it might have been. It had to have been a good 50 years old at least.) and explained that what he really liked about it was that even though it was pretty small, it had a lot of room. "It fits eight people! Three in the front here, and five in the back! I take my whole family to church in it." Despite the cramming of the insides, though, it's not common to see the exteriors loaded down with passengers and cargo like you see in pictures from other places. That probably wouldn't be safe. Cars really aren't very common here anyway. Most vehicles you'll see will be cargo trucks and buses, with the occasional pickup and lots of bikes and motos (all of which, despite the machismo attitudes of their riders, have at most a 200cc motor). Maybe the most common, though, is the mototaxi.

These usually use the front half of a motorcycle attached to a rickshaw kind of covered seat (3-5 person capacity) with a little cargo area in back (3-4 people once again for large parties). Some of them have the front wheel of the cycle replaced with a big cargo bin, but those are usually for carrying goods to market. The weird thing is that mototaxis are everywhere. There are 3 or 4 on the quietest streets at all times, and loads around the market or fish market on the beach -- more than you would think there would ever need to be in a town this size. But people use them all the time. They're great if you have something big or heavy to carry, but the definitions of "too big" or "too heavy" to carry. as well as that of "too far," are vastly different to Ecuadorians. For example, if one needed to transport a small dive bag with a couple of wetsuits and pairs of fins the 4 or 5 blocks to the boat, an American volunteer wouldn't think of hiring a taxi, while an Ecuadorian wouldn't usually consider walking. Just one of the many wonders of foreign travel, I guess.

Food

Ha, the food is an interesting subject. The touristy places have everything you'd expect, with the prices to match, but at the local restaurants we've been going to there isn't a whole lot of variety. For lunch and dinner they'll usually have one or two soup choices (shrimp, chicken, fish, or beef bone; all pretty similar except for the choice of meat) and one or two meat choices for your main dish (shrimp, chicken, fish, or beef; all served with rice, beans, and plantain chips). Everything tastes great, and I especially love the plantain chips, which are much better than potato in my opinion, but there really don't seem to be any other dishes. I was talking to Gabi about it on the island, and she told me what happened when she made some Indian food one time: people just thought it was kind of weird tasting and said they preferred the more traditional things.

For snacking there are a few other choices -- cheese empanadas (You can only really find one kind of cheese here. It's pretty young and soft and a little briny tasting, but I'm starting to like it), a kind of corn-flour dough stuffed with onions and cheese and then deep-fried (its name escapes me at the moment), ceviches (cold soup made with fish and tomato and lime juice), and grilled over-ripe plantains, which are delicious.

There are plenty of bakeries around too, and you can get a big breakfast assortment for 50 cents or less.

Pictures!

It looks like it's going to be pretty hard to post a lot of pictures on the blog (although I will admit I finally figured out how to do it just before I started typing this post), so I made an account on photobucket.com and posted a bunch of them. I think you should be able to look at them without creating an account. Just search for Rico221 and let me know if you have any problems.

This week we've been going turtle capturing every day, which means going out snorkeling over some of the most beautiful reefs I've seen and snatching sleeping turtles from under the rocks. I caught a little tiny hawksbill yesterday (just over a foot across his shell), which was awesome because they're hard to find (they don't eat fish, so we can't bait them in) and it was the only one we got all day. Equilibrio Azul is the first organization in the world to identify a hawksbill aggregation area (somewhere where a lot of them hang out in one place), which was so unexpected that people didn't believe them when they first announced it.

In other news, a new volunteer arrived unexpectedly a couple days ago. His name is Peter and he's from Syracuse, New York. He looks and acts so much like Jamie Muldoon it's almost scary. Since the staff has a long weekend starting today (they say since they worked on the island all last weekend they deserve one), Peter and Ailis and I are asking Gabi if we can go to the island tomorrow and hang out for a couple of days while we show Pete how the turtle and albatross patrols work. I haven't checked my email yet this morning to see her answer, but we're crossing our fingers.

Other than that, I've been working on my hatchery research (when the power's on), chatting with a long-winded restaurant owner named Ulbio over lunch, taking long walks on the beach, and reading whatever books in English I can find around the house (I actually just finished a really good one about artists illustrating a secret book for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire). If you see this in the first half-hour or hour after I post it the pictures might not all be up, but they look like they'll at least finish without incident.

Back in Town

Well, things have been pretty slow around here lately. No turtle patrol since the island is the only place where they nest year-round and the season is over here. I got assigned to my own project, which is to research, design, and build a new hatchery on the island for next year. It's been fun working on figuring that out, but also a little frustrating since the power goes out a few times a day. On Saturday night it went about 6:00 and didn't come back on until noon yesterday.

I think though that things will start picking up again this week. We're going to be out capturing turtles again, and starting Tuesday we'll be looking for Hawksbills, which are more rare and supposedly prettier than Greens. The thing is they're not attracted to fish guts as bait, so we'll be diving with tanks to go find them! I'll let you all know how it goes when I get back tomorrow night.

Isla de la Plata

So I just got back from the island Wednesday afternoon. My first shower in 8 days felt awesome, but I was a little sad to be leaving. I loved it out there. For the first two days we had to do the monthly bird census, where we try to count as best we can all the nesting seabirds. I was there during the end of nesting season for the Nazca Boobies, and there were tons. The island is about three miles long, with one trail that loops around the western half and one on the eastern half. I thought it was going to be impossible to count all the nesting birds, but it turned out to be a lot easier than I thought, because they all divide up the island into distinct nesting zones. The Nazcas only nest on flat ground on two points, one on each end of the island. Blue-footed Boobies only nest on the cliff-sides, and the Red-footed ones use trees along the cliffs of the North edge. Even though they all eat fish and are about the same size and shape, they never intermingle.

So on day one we went to Punta Machete, which is kind of the south-west corner. It took about 45 minutes to walk there from the ranger house, which is right in the middle of the northern beach. We divided the point into three zones and each marked how many nesting pairs, single birds, and chicks we saw. Punta Machete is also where the albatross were hanging out. They're beautiful birds, and Isla de la Plata is one of the only two islands in the world where they nest. (This is just for the Galapagos Albatross. There are other species that aren't so critically endangered.) On day 2 we took the other trail to Punta Escalera to count the other Nazca colony, and on the way we got to stop and see the Red-footed Boobies and the Frigate birds. The frigate birds reminded me of dinosaurs. They have long beaks that they click together and really long wings for their body size, and just the way they all sat in their trees clacking and croaking make me think of pterodactyls. Their wings don't have the water-proof coating that all the other birds do, so they have to snatch stuff from the surface or steal it from other birds mid-air to eat -- people call them the pirates of the air. Frigate males are also the ones that have the big red throat pouches that they inflate to attract females. I think their nesting season starts pretty soon, so they'll be the ones we count next month.

After the census was done, we still tried to go out hiking once a day to find the albatross. Every time you see them you have to put a waypoint on the GPS to mark where they are and record the numbers on their leg bands. Our other big job on the island though was turtle patrol. Every night you take out your red flashlights and patrol the beach at 8:00, 9:00, 11:00, 1:00, 3:00, and 6:00. Needless to say, if you're alone on the island you get pretty tired. Most of the time there were a couple other volunteers or employees with me and we would split up the shifts, so it wasn't so bad. Only Green Turtles really nest very often on the island, but it's one of the few places they keep coming to year-round. I learned how to tell all the different species apart (Ecuador has 4 of the 7 kinds of sea turtles) and what to do when you see them nesting or hatching (you have to take a bunch of measurements and check their tag numbers. If they're not tagged you also have to tag them and take a DNA sample from the skin on their necks. You can do that while they're laying the eggs because they go into a sort of trance and don't really notice anything until they've finished covering up the nest). There was only one night when a couple came up to try and nest, and those all turned back without laying. We think it was because the sand was too rocky for them to dig a good hole. But we had hatchlings coming up about half the nights I was there.

All the ones I saw came from the hatchery (or vivero in Spanish), which is where we relocate any clutches that get laid below the tide-line. When the tortuguitas (tor-too-ghee-tahs) come up you measure their shells and then pick them up (only with gloves on) and put them outside the little fence that runs around the hatchery, and then protect them from crabs as they crawl down to the water. You can't just carry them all the way because crawling down the beach is how they imprint on it and know where to come back to to lay their own eggs. Sometimes if the lights were on at the house they wouldn't know where to go, and you'd have to use your headlamp to show them down to the water. Once they've made it, they swim straight out to sea for 72 hours, and then they live out in the open water for a few years where there are fewer predators until they're big enough to come back to the coast. My boss, Gabi, says it takes them 40 years to grow to full size and sexual maturity, and the weird thing is that nobody really knows where the adult turtles live or what they do. The ones that live near shorelines aren't actually adults yet, and they leave before they're full grown. (The ones we saw trying to nest were huge, like 3 feet across the shell and 80-100 pounds!)

A couple of days before I left a few more employees, Ricardo, Luis, and José Luis, came and joined Gabi and me, and we got to take a little boat out (smaller than the one at the cabin) to catch turtles in the bay for tagging. Luis and I would hop out with snorkels and fins while the others chummed the water, and when the turtles came in we'd have to dive down and grab them by the front and back of the shell and wrestle them up to the surface where the boat crew would pull them in to take measurements and DNA samples and tag them. I got to do the tagging and sampling a couple of times, too, which was neat. The turtles are understandably not at all pleased to be in the boat, and they thrash and hiss and scramble around for a couple of minutes until you put a wet t-shirt over their heads, and then they usually calm down a little bit. You have to be kind of careful, because even though they can't usually hurt you it does not feel good to have a 60 pound turtle smack you in the ankle with its front flippers. Sometimes they try to bite, too. I've never seen them actually get anyone, but they have super strong jaws and sharp beaks with spiky teeth inside.

Back in Puerto López things have been pretty slow, since all the staff members stayed behind when I came back. I've been hanging out with the other volunteers, who are all really nice. There's Angelo from Italy, Ailis (Ae-lish) from Scotland, Jen from Eugene, Oregon, and the Canadians Connor and Nils, who live near Toronto. I think today Andrés, one of E. Azul's directors, is coming to stay for a while, and Gabi says I'll be starting on a new project soon, so I should have something new to write about by later tonight or tomorrow morning.