The Boat Ride In
The boat ride up the river to the cabanas was fantastic. The boats are long dugout canoes with a small motor bolted onto the back, the same kind the local people have been using to get around forever. There's been a recent push to teach locals how to build these dugouts out of fiberglass instead of wood. The trees they traditionally use are enormous, hundreds of years old, and each dugout only lasts about 10 years, so the old growth forest is getting cut down at a pretty alarming rate. Just another quiet piece of the deforestation story down here. The tourist boats are still built the old way, to add "authenticity" to the tours. Hopefully that changes soon too.
The boats themselves are about 20 feet long, wide in the middle and narrow at both ends. They sit very low in the water and leak massively the moment they lean to one side, which happens constantly since the river curves the entire way. I was in the back seat on the ride in and was soon scooping water out of the bottom of the canoe with my hands.
Riding the river was like something out of a movie. Dark, dense jungle pressed in on both sides, packed with an enormous tangle of plants all fighting each other for space and sunlight. It's so thick that everything winds and twists around everything else, plants rooting directly into the branches of other plants. Orchids were growing everywhere, balanced precariously along the branches overhead. Thick vines hung down into the water all along the banks, and I was surprised to learn they weren't vines at all, just an extended root system reaching down from the trees above. Tarzan would have been very, very happy here. Just beyond the edge of sight you could hear birds screaming by the dozens, though funnily enough the tour groups sell you on all the wildlife you'll supposedly see and there's really not much of it right at the water's edge. The boats are loud enough that the birds all clear out further inland the second they hear us coming. Whenever we actually spotted something, it was a whole event. "Look, a bird." Every time.
The river eventually opens into a large lagoon that floods this time of year, and it's actually on its way back down right now. In the dry season there's no water here at all, the lagoon bed, somewhere between 10 and 30 feet below the current surface, becomes jungle floor. The effect right now is that you're cruising along the very top of the jungle canopy. It's a genuinely strange, beautiful thing to see.
Camp sits right on the edge of the lagoon, and at first I couldn't believe our driver knew the exact, unmarked spot to steer the boat into. Within a few days I could pick it out myself, once I'd gotten to know the lagoon a little better. In the dry season the dugouts stop a good distance away and tourists walk about an hour through the jungle to reach camp instead.
The days here settle into a rhythm: guided jungle walks in rubber boots learning about the local plants and animals, fishing for piranha, canoeing from lagoon to lagoon, cruising the river hunting for birds and monkeys that mostly refuse to show themselves, swimming (yes, in the same river we'd just caught piranha in), and watching the sun go down from the middle of the lagoon.
Fishing for Piranha
A day or two into camp, the guide, named Washington, took the whole group out in the boats to fish for piranha, and it turned out to be one of those activities that sounds far more dangerous in theory than it actually is in practice. Line in the water, a little bait, a little patience, and one by one everyone in the group started pulling piranha up over the side of the boat, small silver flashes of teeth and fin that we'd swing in and drop into a bucket before they could do any damage to a finger. Every one of us caught at least one.
Fishing for Piranha
That night, camp cooked up everything we'd caught, and we ate our own piranha for dinner. They cooked it over an open fire and it was delicious. There's something satisfying about eating a fish you pulled out of the river with your own hands a few hours earlier, teeth and all.
And then, because apparently none of us had thought it through, we went swimming. In the same stretch of river. Where we had just spent the afternoon dangling bait and pulling piranha out by the mouthful. It didn't occur to anyone until we were already in the water how insane that actually was, splashing around in the same current we'd just been fishing out of a few hours before. A few of us hesitated but eventually almost all of us entered the water. The water was cool and a nice change from the heat and humidity. Nobody lost a toe. Crazy, but nobody lost a toe.
Swimming with piranhas
What's Next
Since then, we've been to the Galapagos Islands, spent way too much time on more buses, and had more adventures in the south of Ecuador and now in northern Peru. Hopefully more stories about that to come.