Ecuador

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Overview

Unfortunately, we weren’t in Ecuador long enough to get a real feel for the place. It was a bit of a whistle stop tour – only in the country for 10 days and five of these were in the jungle. Having said that, what we saw through the windows of various buses looked fabulous and much greener than Peru. Ecuador is another place to which I’ll definitely return one day.

12 November

•   We took an overnight bus to the pickup point for our jungle trip. No-one slept much because the road was bumpy and windy and it was a local bus which stopped literally every five minutes to pick people up or drop them off. When we finally got where were going, we were an hour late and there was no sign of the guide who was supposed to meet us there.

•   Let me just paint a picture of this place - there is only one small shop on one side of the road and a not very much bigger office the other side. It starts raining, so we sit inside this shop thing for a couple of hours. Neither the shop nor the office has a phone that we can use to phone Quito to find out what is going on.

•   Suddenly someone turns up, trying to explain in broken English that the tourists who are on their way back down the river and the drivers who are supposed to be taking us back up have been held at gunpoint and relieved of all their valuables. As you can imagine that’s not really what we want to hear. Nor is the fact that we have to wait where we are until the police to turn up before we can go to the lodge – a three hour boat ride upstream. In the end, we had to wait at the bridge for about five hours.

•   Not a promising start to our trip. However, the guys who were robbed weren’t hurt – by all accounts the robbers were very polite – and they all seemed quite relaxed about it.

•   When we finally got to our lodge, all the stress and worries of the journey melted away. The Cuyabeno Reserve is a national park and the only way people – other than the few indigenous populations that have been there for four thousand odd years – are allowed to build lodges for the ecotourism is to use local material which is biodegradable and will eventually be recycled in the jungle. So, our lodge was a series of bamboo huts, set back off the river and it was lovely!

•   Our guide had eagle eyes and spotted the most amazing animals as we cruised up and down the river in the boats. I can’t remember them all to list but we certainly saw seven different species of monkey (capuchins, red howlers, and the smallest monkey in the world, the pygmy something!), an anaconda, loads of parrots, parakeets, toucans, herons, kingfishers, something the locals refer to as a stinky turkey – it apparently has a stomach like a cow so food ferments before it is digested and the meat smells and tastes horrible – thousands of huge, beautiful butterflies, pink fresh river dolphins, bats, leaf cutter ants and much more. His enthusiasm and obvious love of the jungle were infectious.

•   We went fishing for piranha, but only the guide caught any because they eat the bait before you have a chance to pull them out of the water. We swam in the same river a little way upstream from where we had just been fishing. Apparently piranha only come after the smell of blood but nevertheless we let the guide in the first.

•   One night we camped out on a little island about twenty meters long and not much more than five or six wide. Eleven tourists, a guide, the boat driver and two cooks – we were really snug.. We had just been out in the dark to see caiman. Then we were told spooky shaman stories round the campfire, so it’s a miracle any of us slept but we did.

•   We were up at dawn to go on another bird watch - the colours of some of these things are incredible. Even the "common" ones are brilliant fluorescent colours.

•   We also tramped through the jungle on a couple of walks to get closer to the plants more than the animals and learnt lots about the medicinal use of some in the local communities. One evening, we went on a night walk to see all the insects and fortunately, we didn’t see too many big spiders and not a single tarantula. There were a couple of poisonous frogs and things, but apparently you have to lick or cook them, and there was no risk I was going to do that.

•   We have of course both been bitten to bits by mosquitoes, and the journey back to Quito last night was almost as long and painful as on the way out, but it was all very, very worth it.

•   Off to Miami tomorrow for a couple of days of lazing on the beach and shopping and just hope the US can swipe Catherine’s card, because getting money out of the banks here is a real pain.

6 November

•   We arrived in Quito yesterday, after being stuck on a bus for seven hours rather than the three and a half the journey is supposed to take - apparently because the road was closed for hours to accommodate a bike race, but nobody bothered to tell us.

•   On our arrival we went to the American Airlines office first thing this morning feeling like a right pair of oiks walking into the Hilton in our backpackers gear [Editor’s note: the American Airline ticket desk in Quito is in the Hilton Hotel – should you ever need it] and they reissued our tickets at no charge. I suspect this has a great deal to do with whatever Dad said to them when he called, so thank you muchly.

•   To wrap up our incredible year, we have just booked a trip into the Cuyabeno reserve in the Amazon for a few days. The lodge we will be staying in looks fantastic and the itinerary includes fun things like fishing for piranha, jungle treks to see the snakes and spiders, maybe some caimen, and birds. We are also visiting a local village and meeting the shaman if he’s around. Can’t wait!

•   We had a fun few days in Banos before we came up here. The first day, we climbed as high as you are allowed to climb on the Tungurahua volcano. There has been a volcano alert since 1999 when the city was evacuated, but as nothing had happened by Jan 2000, people have defied the army and flooded back in, and slowly the tourists have been trickling in behind them. Unfortunately we couldn’t see a thing because it was so cloudy. Still, it was a lovely walk - until we had to scarper up an embankment to escape from a mad cow. That evening, the clouds had lifted a bit, so we went out to the local viewpoint where you can watch the volcano erupting and spewing out ash and lava. It was the first live volcano I have ever seen and even from a distance, it was awesome.

•   The next day we just wandered around town and didn’t do too much. After our mammoth bus journey, and in preparation for our jungle trip, we treated ourselves to a massage. It’s such a hard life.

•   I can’t believe this time next week we will be in Miami and then it’s only a matter of days until we’re home. Where has the year gone?

3 November

•   Several buses and about 32 hours after getting on the bus we have arrived in Banos – shattered, but glad to be in Ecuador at last.

•   There was a bit of a hairy moment at the border when the guy wouldn’t let us out of the country because we didn’t have an entry stamp in our passports - course we hadn't as our passports were stolen. It was midnight, we had been on a bus all day and that was the last thing we needed. He was saying we would have to go back to where we had just come from, go to immigration and get them to issue the stamp. Luckily, there was a girl there who spoke Spanish and English and she helped out with the translation as our Spanish really certainly wasn't up to immigration stuff. Finally he gave us the stamp we needed but it cost us $12 each and another bizillion forms to fill in. I suspect the forms went straight in the bin and the money straight in his pocket, but at least we escaped and have a valid entry stamp for Ecuador. So apart from fact we don’t have any tickets, we should have no problem getting out