drive to Yasuní

He will be in charge of our time for the next week. First we load a small pickup truck with food and fuel, then set off toward the forest. Halfway there we make a pie stop in Dayuma—a little town that could be almost anywhere. Featureless cube-shaped houses, tiny eateries with low plastic chairs, roadside stalls selling fruit and everyday goods in single-use plastic packaging, each stall offering the same selection. People cannot afford to buy large quantities at once.

The asphalt gives way to gravel, and with the sound of Spanish pop music we bounce along a road lined with oil pipelines, heading farther away from civilization. A well-oiled forest. Quite chewed up as well. In a couple of places natural gas burns in tall flares, roasting thousands of insects every night. Marketing the gas is not profitable enough to bother with; it is easier to release it into the atmosphere. A sense of social responsibility might suggest, for example, selling the gas locally so people could cook with it instead of cutting down trees for firewood. That would at least compensate a little for the mess that comes with oil drilling. So-called development and destruction often seem to be two sides of the same coin. We know how to send people into space, yet we cannot manage our everyday affairs on Earth with minimal damage.

We reach the Tiputini River, where one of the park’s ten ranger posts is located. We have to register. The park ranger Marco shows us on the map where the ranger stations are, where the closed area to protect the Taromenane and Tagaeri tribes is, and where rangers go to monitor caimans. In total, thirty-eight people must keep an eye over an area of more than a thousand hectares. There is no entrance fee.

We move into a long, narrow motorized canoe. Above the river hangs a dense, humid air with a sweet, slightly bitter smell; broken trunks and branches jut out of the water. Two pink dolphins briefly show themselves. Butterflies and birds flicker past. We enter Yasuní National Park, listed as a UNESCO biosphere reserve, where a single hectare contains more species than the whole of Europe. Every three days a new species is discovered somewhere in the Amazon, and every second a football field’s size patch of forest is cut down. A weird race.

We land beside a cluster of a dozen leaf-thatched huts. The entire staff has gathered here just for us: guide Ramiro, assistant Sebastian, boatman Carlos, cook Lisandro, and assistant cook Victoria. The camp can of course hold more people. There are eight two-person huts, and up to thirty students can be squeezed in if necessary.

Our hut faces the river, with towels folded into swans on the bed. On the opposite bank a troop of squirrel monkeys (Saimiri cassiquiarensis macrodon) happens to pass by.

The system here is simple: lunch is always at one o’clock and dinner at seven. Breakfast depends on the day’s schedule. After receiving our scheduled lunch, we immediately head out for the first walk. For going into the forest, everyone is gived a pair of black rubber boots. Nothing may be touched until you are sure it is not alive or covered with bullet ants (Paraponera clavata). These insects have the most painful sting in the world. We see these fearsome ants in a couple of places. Only one at a time. Otherwise in Amazonian undergrowth no plant resembles the one growing beside it. Above everything spreads a cacophony of sounds: something is constantly whistling, beeping, chirping, or croaking. It is hard to tell which sounds come from insects, which from frogs, which from mammals, and which from birds. A couple of times the world’s largest and wonderfully blue butterfly, Morpho menelaus, flies past but does not stop to pose. We pass a couple of kapok trees with enormous, bulging roots.

Later we wander around the base camp a bit more. In the treetops large bluish-black birds chatter away (greater anis), while nearby other birds weave long hanging pouch-nests: russet-backed oropendolas. One butterfly, on closer inspection, turns out to be a hummingbird.

Dayuma. At the time I did not yet know this; I would only learn it several weeks later on the Tartu–Tallinn train from Nemonte Nenquimo’s book We Will Not Be Saved. The little town is named after an Indigenous woman who cooperated with missionaries and, among other things, helped oil companies take over tribal lands. In exchange for dead children, poisoned fish, vanished animals, and constant noise, the Indigenous people received canned tuna and Coca-Cola.