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,
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
.
Here are some more photos from the Jungle. Again, just click on a thumbnail to see a larger photo.
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Bananas (platanos) and plantins are staples |
Anaconda snake (baby, 4-5' long) |
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Go back to Ecuador trip |