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.