We drift downstream
along the river again, spotting an anhinga and a large bee.
After a while we go
ashore and let Carlos head off to pick up some new tourists. From here we have
to make our own way back to camp. The trail is very hilly. It gets hot almost
immediately. And there are mosquitoes.
The mosquitoes are forgotten when we spot a woodpecker on a tree trunk by the path, with a yellow throat and a red crown: a yellow-tufted woodpecker. The bird tolerates a certain amount of commotion but then flies a little farther away and higher up. It pretends not to notice the people waving cameras and clings to the tree. Perhaps it is still young and hasn’t yet learned how to behave in situations like this.
Ramiro has a pleasant habit of stopping from time to time and giving us the chance simply to be there, to listen and to look around. Nor does he grow impatient when a tourist takes the twelfth photo of the same grasshopper. He himself picks up orchids that have fallen from the trees and places them on a trunk somewhere so they can keep growing. From the swamp he brought along a long vanilla vine to plant around the camp.
Among other interesting creatures we see leaf-carrying ants, a blue-crowned manakin, and various beetles. Spider monkeys can be heard but not seen. Of wild pigs there are only tracks. What I really want now is a shower.
After lunch the other tourists arrive, a couple of Italians who live in England. We take them and their guide by boat to the start of the trail on the other side of the river, and then we go fishing ourselves. Fishing looks like this: you throw a hook with a sinker and a piece of fish attached to the line wound around a spool into the water and then watch the river flow by. The bait comes from the boatman’s net. We soak pieces of fish in three different places, and eventually the boatman pulls out a small catfish. The sky turns purple. Meanwhile the Italians are waiting to be ferried back across the river.
In the evening there is more noise and chatter in camp than usual. The Italians talk nonstop. They haven’t even been in Ecuador three weeks yet, but they have already been everywhere. We have spent the whole time crouching in the forest. They recommend that we go to Costa Rica if we like “this sort of thing.” Costa Rica has of course done many things right, but is it worth flying that far? It is also hard to explain what exactly “this sort of thing” is. What the Amazon rainforest has in common with the Greenland ice sheet, the glaciers of Iceland, the Alps and the Himalayas, small islands and coastal landscapes, coral reefs, the birdsong of Estonian forests, snowy winters, and old wooden churches in Poland.
After dinner we go back into the dark forest to look for spiders. There is a large Brazilian wandering spider, the kind often transported from banana plantations. A bright green frog sits neatly between the branches of a leaf, though it normally lives high up in the trees. We also see a molting grasshopper, a butterfly chrysalis, and a prehistoric-looking whip scorpion. Beside the trail a four-eyed opossum scurries about, some sort of rat-like creature with markings above its eyes that look like an extra pair of eyes.
Later there is a great deal of scuffling and wing-flapping around the hut.
The mosquitoes are forgotten when we spot a woodpecker on a tree trunk by the path, with a yellow throat and a red crown: a yellow-tufted woodpecker. The bird tolerates a certain amount of commotion but then flies a little farther away and higher up. It pretends not to notice the people waving cameras and clings to the tree. Perhaps it is still young and hasn’t yet learned how to behave in situations like this.
Ramiro has a pleasant habit of stopping from time to time and giving us the chance simply to be there, to listen and to look around. Nor does he grow impatient when a tourist takes the twelfth photo of the same grasshopper. He himself picks up orchids that have fallen from the trees and places them on a trunk somewhere so they can keep growing. From the swamp he brought along a long vanilla vine to plant around the camp.
Among other interesting creatures we see leaf-carrying ants, a blue-crowned manakin, and various beetles. Spider monkeys can be heard but not seen. Of wild pigs there are only tracks. What I really want now is a shower.
After lunch the other tourists arrive, a couple of Italians who live in England. We take them and their guide by boat to the start of the trail on the other side of the river, and then we go fishing ourselves. Fishing looks like this: you throw a hook with a sinker and a piece of fish attached to the line wound around a spool into the water and then watch the river flow by. The bait comes from the boatman’s net. We soak pieces of fish in three different places, and eventually the boatman pulls out a small catfish. The sky turns purple. Meanwhile the Italians are waiting to be ferried back across the river.
In the evening there is more noise and chatter in camp than usual. The Italians talk nonstop. They haven’t even been in Ecuador three weeks yet, but they have already been everywhere. We have spent the whole time crouching in the forest. They recommend that we go to Costa Rica if we like “this sort of thing.” Costa Rica has of course done many things right, but is it worth flying that far? It is also hard to explain what exactly “this sort of thing” is. What the Amazon rainforest has in common with the Greenland ice sheet, the glaciers of Iceland, the Alps and the Himalayas, small islands and coastal landscapes, coral reefs, the birdsong of Estonian forests, snowy winters, and old wooden churches in Poland.
After dinner we go back into the dark forest to look for spiders. There is a large Brazilian wandering spider, the kind often transported from banana plantations. A bright green frog sits neatly between the branches of a leaf, though it normally lives high up in the trees. We also see a molting grasshopper, a butterfly chrysalis, and a prehistoric-looking whip scorpion. Beside the trail a four-eyed opossum scurries about, some sort of rat-like creature with markings above its eyes that look like an extra pair of eyes.
Later there is a great deal of scuffling and wing-flapping around the hut.
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