It's a jungle out there
Ecuador Rainforest
by Sarah Shuckburgh
Ecuador’s teeming rainforest is noisy, steamy and just a little scary. Sarah
Shuckburgh doesn’t
mind a bit.
Everything is warm and damp in the jungle. Our clothes,
hanging from pegs, hang limply in the humid air. Shoes
gather mould; towels are clammy. And the temperature hardly
falls at night, when the squawks, croaks and chirruping of
the rainforest merge with our dreams. But Sacha Lodge is as
comfortable and luxurious as a jungle hotel could be. From
the hammock on our verandah, spiky fronds of palm-thatch
frame a vista of a million shades of green. A purple
hummingbird - one of Ecuador’s 123 species - darts through
the undergrowth, its delicate tongue zipping in and out. A
huge turquoise butterfly lands on my book, fluttering its
iridescent wings. Tiny black-mantle tamarin monkeys leap
through quivering branches. Behind me, in our wooden cabin,
a large fan hums.
In the small departure lounge at Quito before the flight to
the rainforest, we filled in a questionnaire about our
interests - a cunning ploy to identify like-minded guests,
and to separate fanatics. I wondered whom I would get. Not,
I hoped, those bird enthusiasts, binoculars at the ready,
boasting loudly about rare sightings. Nor that gloomy Swiss
couple in black lycra. But I didn’t want to be with my
fanatical husband either - Guillaume is an entomologist, and
will spend the whole time peering under logs and sifting
leaf mould.
The flight is short but dramatic, with breath-taking views
of the vast Amazon jungle. Looking down on such fecundity,
it is easy to believe that it is home to half of the world’s
species. We land at Coca, a shabby, steamy frontier town,
where barefoot children play in the dust outside corrugated
shacks. Salsa music blares as saucy prostitutes loll in the
shade of thatched cafes, and off-duty oil-workers drink
whisky and beer. We travel on by boat down the turbid Napo
river, weaving between sandbanks and over small rapids,
passing riverside hamlets with narrow fields of crops, and
rickety dugout canoes full of children. Eventually we see
nothing but dense, uninhabited jungle.
After nearly three hours we clamber ashore, shed our
lifejackets, and proceed on foot along wobbly boardwalks and
muddy jungle paths, as dozens of squirrel monkeys jump from
branch to branch above our heads. Then we glide across a
black-water lake in canoes, watching turtles swimming
beneath the water hyacinths. And finally we arrive at the
cluster of thatched, stilted cabins where we will spend the
next four nights - ‘Sacha’ means ‘jungle’ in the local
Indian language, and you can feel the brooding, timeless
presence of 2.5 million square miles of Amazon rainforest
all around.
Beneath the boardwalks, the shallow swamp shelters baby
caimans from their older cannibalistic relations in the deep
lake. Dozens of cylindrical nests dangle from a tree - home
to a colony of yellow and black oropendulas. Extraordinary
hoatzins, looking like colourful dinosaurs, clamber along
branches, chewing leaves. A tame grey-winged trumpeter
tiptoes right up to me and pecks at my feet before feasting
on a banana.
As predicted, Guillaume spends his days erecting gauze
flight-interception traps and collecting species of beetle
previously unknown to science, but I am lucky. I join a
group of three elderly Americans, who prove to be excellent
company. We are issued with Wellington boots - a precaution
against snake bites - and, as darkness falls, we set off for
our first wildlife walk with our two guides - Richard, a
young South African, and Sergé , a local Indian. Within
minutes we have spotted a mouse-like opossum huddling in a
hollow log, two huge hairy tarantulas, emerald-green
crickets, spindly stick-insects, an elegant salamander on a
leaf, and a wide-eyed marmoset only a few inches long, with
an even smaller baby clinging to its back. Richard points to
a procession of insects at our feet:
“One bite from these conger ants and you’ll be ill for 24
hours,” he says cheerfully.
“Muy venenosa,” agrees Sergé .
My torch casts a weedy beam, which only intensifies the inky
blackness all around me. Every fallen log looks like a
deadly snake, and I imagine a jaguar eyeing me from the
shadows.
Each day starts at 5am, long before dawn, with a knock on
our cabin door. One morning, we paddle through a swamp of
freshwater mangroves to a narrow creek - a green tunnel of
hanging creepers and dense undergrowth. Black and red
dragonflies hover in the shafts of sunlight which dapple the
tannin-black water. It is utterly silent apart from the
splash of the paddles and the occasional song of a bird.
Tree-trunks twist and coil round each other, the bark
festooned with tumbling yellow orchids, sprouting
bromeliads, and dangling hummingbird nests, made of a mesh
of gossamer spiders’ webs. We hear the call of the dusky
titi monkey, and eventually see one, scampering down a tree,
its long dark tail curling.
We climb a wooden ladder which winds round the trunk of a
giant kapok tree, emerging high above the canopy. At 150
feet, this is the tallest tree for miles around. The massive
trunk is supported by surprisingly slender buttresses, and
its branches produce delicate balls of white fluffy kapok
which waft away, following thermal currents. Richard sets up
a powerful telescope, and focuses it on black vultures
hunched on a branch, and burly howler monkeys eating fruit
at the top of a distant tree. Clumsy-looking toucans reach
to the tips of branches with unlikely yellow beaks to
swallow fruit whole. On the way down, we spot a black
striped owl on a branch three feet away. It stares at us,
and we stare back.
We follow winding trails through the tangled forest, and
Sergé introduces us to traditional medicines - white lichen
from a tree to keep snakes away, bark tea to cure headaches,
palm fronds which aid digestion, a red antibiotic sap for
infected cuts, and purple palm fruits which cure baldness.
He points out treatments for malaria, cholera, sore throats
and toothache. I munch half a dozen menthol-flavoured ants -
effective breath-fresheners. Then I try some white rubbery
sap oozing from a slit in the bark of a tree - the local
chewing gum. Most daringly, I eat some wriggling maggots,
which pop when I bite them and taste pleasantly of chewy
coconut.
The forest supplies every need. The stones of palm fruits
are as hard as ivory, and make buttons, brooches and
ornaments. Vines can be twisted together to make strong
ropes. A favourite meal is the agouti - as large as a hare,
with a rat face and long back legs. But the jungle is also
full of perils. Of the thousands of types of mushroom, only
four are edible. We admire a jewel-like frog, with blue
belly, red back and yellow armpits, which is used to make
deadly poison darts. Sergé traps a six-foot rainbow boa and
Richard picks it up, its huge shimmering body tightening
round his arm and torso.
This is one of the greenest places on earth, but the soil is
poor and thin. Fallen trees have roots only a few feet long.
Jumbled aerial roots in unlikely shades of orange and red,
or covered in white lichen, fan out like wigwam poles around
sturdy trunks. Buttress roots spread like folds of a heavy
curtain, or form arches - flying buttresses - which we walk
under. The symbiosis of the rainforest flora and fauna is
more incredible than fairy stories - we learn about a frog
which lives only on debris created by leaf-cutter ants, and
about figs which are fertilised by the burrowing of a single
species of wasp.
At mealtimes, each group sits with their guide, and a strong
sense of rivalry develops. The three Americans and I agree
that our guide is the most knowledgeable, the bravest, and
the most handsome. The bird watchers look suitably peeved
when we tell them that we have seen a rare agami heron. And
we’re sure the lycra couple haven’t spotted seven species of
monkey, as we have.
One afternoon, we hear thunder grumbling in the distance.
Dark clouds loom, and the air becomes stultifyingly humid
and close. Tiny midges buzz round my face. Suddenly the rain
starts; huge splashes leave circular splodges on our
clothes. Squelching through instantly-deep puddles and
slithering down slippery mud slopes, we return to our cabins
and watch as sheets of rain slice through the air, bouncing
off the boardwalk, and forming ribbons of water on the tip
of each frond on the verandah. When the rain stops, the air
feels thick with moisture, but the forest glistens, and the
rising arpeggios of the screaming piha birds soar through
the pristine air.
In the evenings, Guillaume reappears, covered in mud from
head to toe, but triumphant at his day’s discoveries. As the
sun sets, we swim in the silky black water of the lake,
mercifully ignored by the carnivorous caimans and piranhas
lurking below. The oropendula’s two-toned gloop-gloop merges
with the chirps of crickets and frogs, the yelps of the
white-throated toucans and the strange wind-like roar of the
howler monkeys. Huge fishing bats swoop overhead as we sit
on the jetty and watch as dusk turns rapidly to cacophonous
night.
Our time in the Ecuador rainforest has allowed us to glimpse
a profusion of life that is rapidly disappearing elsewhere
in the South American continent - four days to see a natural
paradise of unparalleled biodiversity, unchanged for 400,000
years.
Sarah travelled with
www.sunvil.co.uk
First published by the Telegraph
©SarahShuckburgh |