La Selva -- The Amazon Jungle

I then flew from Quito into the city of Coca in the Amazon (then traveled six hours by motorized canoe down the Rio Napo and Rio Yuturi to the Yuturi Lodge http://www.yuturilodge.com/ ) for my third and final short week. Arrangements for both my trip to the Galapagos Islands and to the Amazon were made through the Simon Bolivar school's in-house travel agency http://www.ecuadorexplorer.com/columbus/ under the superb direction of Luisa Cordova, a thoroughly delightful and extremely talented person. I highly recommend that if you want to experience these destinations, that you work with Luisa.

My exceptional tour guide in the Yuturi jungle was the lovely multi-lingual (English , Spanish, German) Laura Fernandez Laura used to run Amigo-Travel in Quito, and now works with amil.com.

Yuturi jungle tours typically include one or two hikes and/or canoe trips each day and night. Here is the group actually finding 30 monkeys on an island in the Rio Napo .
There was a great 85 foot high bird observatory built around a grand tree near the Yuturi Lodge. It was not exactly built to USA building codes, but served its purpose. I counted one nail per join. At the base of the observatory, we tried to "kill" orange with a blowgun . During hikes through the jungle, we were amazed at how wild, twisted and thick the growth was . Because water levels vary dramatically, and the jungle soil is so fragile, many of the trees have no clear separation between what is normally above ground and below ground. What appears to be a root might well just hang in the air, as seen here.
One type of these trees, shown here, is called, in all seriousness, a "dildo" tree by the locals
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