A Week in the Amazon

One of the highlights of our program, especially while on the mainland of Ecuador, is the trip to Tiputini, Biodiversity Station. This is a very unique station affiliated with my university here in Quito, that is located deep in the Amazon Jungle, 2 hours away from the nearest village. Because of this, you can only imagine how extensive our travels were to get to Tiputini.

We had to meet at 5am last Monday morning at the school where we had a 30 minute bus ride to the airport. From there, we took a 30 minute flight to Coca.

Coca was the last civilized village we saw on the way to Tiputini. This was a pretty typical small town in Ecuador. There were plenty of street vendors, and it was muggy and hot. Of course, the second we step off of the plane it begins to down pour. We thought it was rather fitting as we were headed to the rain forest.

When we arrived to Coca, we dropped our bags at this random hotel. I think our professor had stayed here before or something because he knew many of the people that worked here. This hotel, however, was very strange. It had many random animals that just ran around the hotel, including peacocks, rabbits, exotic birds, and monkeys. This particular monkey decided it would be funny to attack us foreigners and even bit several of us on the hand. It didn't hurt, but was just very random and kind of freaky.

After dropping our bags, our professor took us to the Coca Zoo. This was a zoo he took his classes to every year, so he worked this little stop into our itinerary of our travels to Tiputini.

We saw several large mammals in the cat family. I believe this was a black jaguar, or as we call them: a panther.

This is a tapir, a peacock, and a coati (similar to our squirrel). The zoo was a very open zoo where we were able to just walk up to just about all of the animals. Some were in cages, but most were wide open.

Here is a couple of sloths. I never realized how slow they actually moved. It was so funny. 

This is a peccary. Similar to a pig, you can smell these things (in the wild), way before you can see them. They smell HORRIBLE. It was rough, just trying to get this picture. All of these animals were animals that could be found in the wild in the Amazonian region of Ecuador. Aka- we would be around these animals for the next week, while at Tiputini.

This last picture, I just thought was cool. We were walking out of this huge bird cage, and this monkey jumped on the fence right above us. He was a very playful guy.

Anyway, after the zoo we all boarded our first boat of our travel. It was called a 'motorized canoe' and we sailed down the Napo River for two hours before our next check point.

We also got a bagged lunch and eat that on this boat. After this 2 hour drive, we were dropped off at a security checkpoint. This was similar to an airport check point. They were just checking to make sure we were not bringing drugs, alcohol, weapons, or any sort of foreign species that could kill the natural species of the Amazon. We then took a 2 hour bus ride on an open-aired bus. This, however, was very different then any bus ride I've ever been on.

 The bus just rode along a gravel road for 2 hours. It was a fun ride, but we were beginning to feel the fact that we woke up at 4:30am. 

After the bus ride, we hiked down to the Tiputini River, where we boarded another motorized canoe, for our final leg of the journey. This trip was much more scenic and really showed us what the Amazon looked like.

This is (from left to right) Quinn, Dana, Grace, me, Dave, and John-Michael on the boat. We're getting pretty ancy to finally get to Tiputini!

After a long day of traveling, we finally made it there. This was the view of the stare well as we docked the boat, what looked like a never ending trail up to the biodiversity center.

Now, it'd be impossible for me to go through the entire week of exciting things that we did, but I'll try to pinpoint some of the highlights, with some pictures.

This is my friend Kelsey and I walking across the canopy walkway about 40 meters above the ground. Such an awesome time!

Me at the tallest point of the canopy walkway. Notice that flimsy latter I had to climb to get up there. This was the tallest point for days. This entire week, I kept feeling like I was thrown into the movie Tarzan. It was awesome.

This was my group and I canoeing through a little hidden lagoon. Try not to notice all the sweat covering my body. The humidity here was ridiculous. I was sweating the ENTIRE time I was in the Amazon. I can now appreciation what it means to be a rain forest.

Oh these were the three other guys in my cabin, aka- the only other guys in my class. For our third day of adventuring through the Amazon, we all decided to rock the bandana-head bands. Not going to lie, the girls all took notice. Oh also, we were required to all wear these knee high rain boots the entire time we were out doing field work. This certainly didn't help the sweat-situation.

We got a little bit of fishing in. This one actually just jumped in our boat on the way there, but hey,that still counts. Our professor kept using the fact that there were just soo many fish there as the reasoning for the caymon's not wanting to attach us. They swore that the water's were perfectly safe.

Of course we had an entire night time activity dedicated to searching for these little beasts. This one was actually a pretty small one. They can get up to 4 meters long!

And the very next day we got to do a river float. What fun! It actually really was fun, and definitely refreshing. I want to say we floated down the Tiputini for something like 2-3 km. It was great.

This was us "birdwatching" at the top of this observation tower 50km up in the Amazon canopy. Great view all around. 

As much as I want to continue telling the endless stories of my week in the Amazon, I feel like there has to be some sort of limit to this post. So I shall end here, and leave you with the fact that I am now posting this from San Cristobal, Galapagos Islands. It's day 3 here, and I'll definitely be posting some sort of post about the islands soon. Got to get home for dinner, but you'll hear from me soon!