Amazona Adventuras

At the Colombia Ecuadorian border I met a Spanish guy traveling to Quito, he had no English and I have very poor Espanol but sure we were both going in the same direction. That night after a few beers we decided on a whim to make our own “Amazonas Adventura.” I left my lonely planet behind, looked at a map, pointed to Tena a large town on the outskirts of the Ecuadorian Amazonas and off we went. He would haggle every price down, even the busses. We had no tour group and ended up in a little village called Misahualli and it was all addictively exciting. We walked around the village and I found out about a Quichua village called Chichicurumi which was further into the Amazonas beside the famous Napo river. The next day we got a guy to drop us out to Chichicurumi and we saw there quaint little museum and understood how the Kichwa people lived and live. Two guys agreed to bring us on an adventure through the Amazon and arrange for us to stay with different Quichua communities. The communities speak Quechuan as their first language but many have Spanish. When we turned off the road and straight into the jungle, I was glad one of the guys had a machetti as it was seriously difficult to trek through the forest at times. The terrain changed many times on the hikes, and the humidity was overwhelming. It is not a trip for the faint-hearted as the rucksack on your back can be hard work. I pulled down a vine and one of our guides used it to make straps for our tough woven food bag. It was a skill in itself and soon I learned that the guys had vast knowledge of the terrain and its resources. Of course we got lost several times in the jungle but the different fruits and foods that we picked up on the way was a wonderful nature class, my favourite being natural chocolate Cocoa or Ko-ko as it is known. The first night we spent in a Quichua carpenters home which explained how the house looked so great in the middle of the Amazonas. For breakfast I shrugged my shoulders at the site of a terranchela beside the breakfast table and a poisonous snake in the outside toilet. The second night we stayed in a more typical Quichua community beside the Arajuno river and needles to say I didn’t get much sleep due to the beautiful “dormitory” that we stayed in, (see the video). After fishing and swimming in the Arajuno river we met a lady which had spent the day filtering three grams of gold. In the night we went for a midnight hike to see the different jungle creatures of the night. On the trek home I had a wonderful experience of listening and vaguely seeing a woodpecker high high up in the trees. I had a great time and the little snapshot that I saw of the Amazon was beautiful and certainly worth a visit. The Quichua people are changing with the times and who am I to say what is right and wrong but the reality is that an airport will be hear within two years and future experiences will change with the times once again.