The Amazon!

Hello there amigos!

I believe it’s about time I pull myself away from the beach and I tell you all what I’ve been up to in the last few weeks!  Again, sorry it's been a while...

A couple Fridays ago, on February 17^th, we left for the Amazon rain forest in Tiputini Biodiversity Station in Yasuní National Park. I was at the airport at 6 a.m. for our 7 a.m. flight (the first of many legs of this trip) to Coca, Ecuador.  We got through security without a hitch. Funny anecdote: my classmate Ellie went through security accidentally with a butter knife and scissors. They took the butter knife and let her keep the scissors. On top of that, there are few (if any) restrictions on what you can carry on. We had bottles of water and shampoo, and many of us had more than one bag. Gotta love the Ecuadorian view of the world.

We landed in Coca after less than 25 minutes in the air.  Why did we fly for such a seemingly short distance, you ask? Because the trip from Quito in a bus over the western cordillera of the Andes mountains to Coca is around 8 hours. Do your best to try and remember this little detail. It may come in handy later.  Then we retrieved our baggage from “baggage claim,” which was really just a small cut out of the wall connecting the inside of a room (about the size of my kitchen and living room) to the outside of the airport through which they threw/stacked our bags. It was the smallest airport I had seen up to that point, but it obviously did the trick.

We threw our bags in a small bus, which took us to a hotel called The Mission. I don’t know what it was about this place, but it gave us all the “heebie jeebies.” It was right on the Napo River (a tributary of the Amazon), and it looked reasonably nice, if not a little rundown. The weird part was that we didn’t see a single guest there, and hardly any workers. The only living things that we really saw around were a toucan, a few peacocks, and a few monkeys just walking around. It was super strange, and seemed a little bit post-apocalyptic to me.  We stayed there for a couple hours waiting for our boat, and played some Sheepshead while we waited.

Playing cards and entertaining the toucan

Around mid-morning, we got in a motorized canoe to head down the Napo for 2 hours toward our destination. In order to get to the station, we had to cross through “Block 16,” one of the oil concessions owned by an Argentinian oil company. The riverside entrance was guarded by a bunch of armed guards, and we had to show our passports and go through a security checkpoint. After a bit of waiting, we boarded a ranchera, which is basically a big truck with a bunch of church pews on the bed. I would have taken a picture, but the oil company doesn’t allow cameras in the block.  Part of the reasoning for the strict security and restrictions is for the protection of the Huao-rani natives (I wrote a bit about them before, if you’re curious). The other reason is to keep track of visitors; oil companies like to keep tight control over who enters the block, so as not to have their illegal practices found out by probing journalists or environmentalists.  We travelled down the Maxus Road, a road used for oil operations, toward the Tiputini River.  This leg of the trip was a 1.5 hour ride on the bumpy ranchera.

Motorized canoe #1

Upon arrival at the edge of the Tiputini River, we got in another motorized canoe for another couple of hours for the final leg of the trip. It was so cool sitting at the front of the long canoe as it was travelling down the river! Just on the trip down that part of the river, we saw turtles, caiman (a type of alligator), and bunches of kinds of birds.  Around 4 p.m., we finally arrived at the station. Tiputini Biodiversity Station (TBS) is a collaboration between Boston University and Universidad de San Francisco de Quito for research and educational purposes. They have a dining hall, kitchen, library, research offices, cabins, two permanent research plots, and over 30 miles worth of trails. For being in the middle of the rain forest, TBS was surprisingly developed! They had electricity during 6 hours of the day, wireless internet (via satellite), running water, and a weekly laundry service.  Our stay at the station was more than comfortable.

Motorized canoe #2

Gazebo at the entrance to the station

Overlook onto the river from the gazebo at the entrance

Library, classrooms, and offices building

In the days we spent there, breakfast was at 6:30 every morning, lunch at 12:30, lecture from 5 to 7 p.m., and dinner at 7. In between, we had lots of things to do/learn for class, and a small amount of free time. Some of our planned activities included:

A canopy tower. At 5:45 a.m., a small group of us left to go bird-watching in a 45 meter (around 150 feet) tower in a Ceiba tree. Although we were there early enough to see the sunrise, we couldn’t really see it for the dense fog that blankets the canopy in the early morning. We did see lots of cool birds though. If you’re like me, bird-watching doesn’t sound super exciting. I was, however, pleasantly surprised at how fun it is to bird-watch in the tropics! They’re a lot more colorful, and many of them have pretty cool songs. On the way down from the canopy, we ran into a troop of howler monkeys.

A canopy bridge walkway. This one’s pretty much self-explanatory. There were a bunch of airborne bridges in the canopy that we could walk around on. Don’t worry Grandma—we had harnesses!

Laura and I on the canopy walkway

The highest point on the canopy walkway

A canoe ride on the lagoon. There is a lagoon close to the station that was created by the flooding of the Tiputini River. We went out on the lake in a canoe that, with 7 people inside, was about an inch away from filling with water. Cue the torrential downpour, and it was quite an experience! We saw lots of really cool birds, including one of my favorites, the Hoatzin. We also learned from one of the guides about a seed whose juices natives use to paint their faces. We were told that the dye would take a while to show up, but once it did, it would be there for 5 days. He wasn’t lying.

Part of my small-group for the canopy tower, walkway, and
 lagoon hike: Laura, Whitney, Steve, and Tyler

I drew a lion on my leg with a less permanent red dye from
a different seed

Independent projects. I was in a group with my friends Sam and Amanda studying the diversity of insects in devil’s gardens. What is a devil’s garden, you ask? Devil’s gardens are places in the forest where almost no vegetation grows, except for one unique type of tree. The tree is home to a special type of ant, called the lemon ant. When the lemon ants move into the tree, they kill all the vegetation in the surrounding area, leaving a wide open gap in the forest understory.  You might also be extra curious why they’re called lemon ants.  You guessed it! They taste like lemons. Did I eat one? No, I ate three. They do indeed taste like lemons.

Trip to a río negro. One morning we went up river about a half hour in a motorized canoe to see a blackwater river. This type of river is different from the Tiputini and the Amazon because of the quality/composition of the water. Blackwater rivers drain off of soil that’s really low in nutrients. The plants that grow on this type of land have toxins called tannins in their leaves to prevent insects from eating them. When the tannins (also found in teas) drain into the rivers, a tea-colored river results. 

Our guide Santiago manning the canoe
at the blackwater river

In my free time, I did a lot of reading and hiking. On the second to last day at the station, we had our field exam (analogous to a lab practical).  Afterward, we went on a float in one of the boats down the river. I can officially say I’ve swum in [a tributary of] the Amazon River!

I’ve never seen so many different kinds of plants, animals, and insects in such a short period of time. I saw 8 different types of monkeys, dozens of really unique tropical birds, and some really beautiful trees and plants. The food was phenomenal and the staff was incredibly nice. I also got to chat with some of the researchers that are at the station more permanently. Amy Porter, who is doing her dissertation on Titi (pronounced "tee-tee") and Saki (pronounced like the Japanese drink) monkeys, has been at the station for over a year and has only left once!

Common Woolly Monkey

Sweet beetle

We were all pretty bummed out to have to leave the station on Friday March 2^nd. We did the entire trip in reverse: motorized canoe, ranchera, motorized canoe, sketchy hotel, airport. But alas, things do not always go as planned. Someone had mistakenly booked our return flight to Quito for March 5^th instead of March 2^nd, and the plane we were supposed to be on was full. So, we took a bus from Coca back to Quito, for a total of about 8 hours of bus ride over the mountains instead of the half hour plane ride. It sounds bad, but with a little bit of patience and light-heartedness, it wasn’t bad at all. We got back to Quito at 2 a.m. or so, and I crashed right away.

I spent Saturday hanging out with my host family and unwinding from the two weeks prior.  Saturday night, I went to La Ronda (see my previous post if you’re curious about that) for a burger and a canelazo (citrus-cinnamon adult beverage) with my friends Tyler and Hilary. I spent a large portion of the day on Sunday writing a rough draft for a paper that was due on Monday.

The week preceding spring break was, to be [over]dramatic, a week from hell. We had a rough draft of a paper due, a midterm exam, a final exam, a presentation, and some other miscellaneous assignments due throughout the week. On the plus side, we started the marine biology part of the course with a few lectures pre-spring break to get us excited about our coming trips to the southern coast and Galápagos Islands.

On Thursday evening, I spontaneously bought a one-way plane ticket for Manta, Ecuador, a town on the coast of Ecuador. The plane left on Saturday morning at 9:30 a.m. And there I will leave you, until next time when I’ll tell you all about my incredible spring break.

Fun facts:

-Runways are extra long in Quito and other cities in the mountains. This is because there are less air molecules present in the air, and the plane has to gain more speed over a longer distance in order to have enough buoyant force under its wings to lift it off the ground.

-70% of the rain in the rain forest comes from the rain forest itself. In other words, instead of being blown across the landscape in fronts (like it does in the Midwest), water escapes from the leaves of plants of the forest in the morning in order to help draw new water/nutrients from its roots, and this water condenses and rains back down onto the rain forest. Cool huh? That was probably a bit confusing. Sorry.

-Just like in the States, people from South America, and even within Ecuador itself, have very different accents even though they all speak the same language. For example, people from Quito speak very clearly and enunciate well, while people from the coast or from Argentina and Chile speak with very slurred accents, and often skip lots of the sounds in words. For people learning Spanish, like yours truly, these accents are quite a bit harder to understand, and even harder to replicate.

-Dung beetles interesting creatures. Male dung beetles dive into a fresh pile, role the dung up into a perfect ball, and leave it for the female to lay her eggs in it. The ball of dung that is the most perfectly round gets picked! How's that for sexual selection?

I'll leave you all with that. Happy Tuesday!

P.S. A few of these pictures I've borrowed from my friends. Thank ya friends!