We said goodbye to Sue and Jim and had a couple of days to pack up for about 6 weeks of travel through Ecuador. The kids' school schedule had kept us pretty tied to Cuenca for the first several months after our arrival here so it was with great excitement that we flew north to Quito. From the airport in Quito we had a taxi take us to the east bound bus station where we waited several hours for an overnite carrier to Lago Agrio. Lago Agrio (Sour Lake, named after an oil town in Texas) is where we met our 7 international jungle tour companions and started our trip by small bus into the jungle.
The small city of Lago Agrio dates only to 1972 when it was carved out of the jungle by Texaco to be used as a base for their Amazon oil exploits. Ecuadorian interests have taken over the oil operations but Texaco (now owned by Chevron) remains actively involved in fighting a law suit levied against them for some of the mess they left behind. Texaco is accused of dumping oil contaminated water into the swamps and streams of the area between 1971 and 1992 and is being sued by nearly one hundred Ecuadorian plaintiffs representing 30,000 people. The town itself is strange. I read that one in five women who live there are prostitutes. The place has a sort of frontier/company town aura. Not uninteresting but we were happy to head further into the Amazon and leave it behind.
We followed a great road (presumably maintained by oil money as it follows a big above ground pipeline which disects the countryside such that if you happen to live on the backside of said pipe you simply build a stair up and over so you can get to your house) for a couple of hours to the meeting spot where our group of eleven guests boarded a 30' canoe powered by an outboard motor. Two hours into the jungle on Rio Cuyabeno we arrived at our lodge.
The experience of being in the jungle with a knowledgeable guide and an interesting group of people was fabulous. Our group consisted of a father/son from Israel, a young Dutch couple, 2 30ish women teachers from New York, and a 21 year old French girl. Liam will comment below on some of the wildlife we saw. It was a great luxury to have our day organized by professionals who knew the area so well. We hiked, kayaked, swam, birdwatched, fished (for Piranha), and thoroughly enjoyed eating and hanging out with our little group when we were back in the lodge.
Mark
The jungle was cool. We saw a lot of animals though not as many as I had hoped. There were caiman, toucans, 4 different species of monkeys, an anaconda, and we even saw a sloth. The rivers would widen out sometimes and in those lakes we saw pink dolphins. Supposedly we swam with pirahnas in those lakes but I'm not sure. We saw them in other parts of the lake. It was awesome. Where we were there was no access by road, only boat. We got to the lodge in a canoe with a motor attached to it. It was a 2 and a half hour boat trip.
The lodge was pretty. I liked the hammock room that was made out of jungle hardwoods and grassy stuff they put on the roof. Well I guess everything in the lodge was made out of that. We slept in a dorm room with someone we didn't know. That was the first dorm room Ailish and I slept in but later on we did a WHOLE lot more. . . Sharing a room with a stranger is kinda weird but then I got used to it. I can't tell you how happy I was to have my own room after more than a month of sharing one with my sister and people I didn't know.
Liam
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