I am back in Coca, the same place i wrote from a couple of days ago, as we are returning to base camp from Hector´s Island ("Sumak Allpa" - google it!), which has been really cool.
Hector is a 40-something Ecuadorian who made money by various ways and means, but has spent a lot of his life living in the jungle with tribes, tour guiding, and doing goodness knows what else - he was full of fascinating stories but i imagine we only scratched the surface! He bought an island in the middle of the Napo river (tributary of the Amazon) which is hugely wide (about a kilometre(?) where his island is), and his island is 150 hectares. he bought it to have as a monkey sanctuary, although he has made it clear that it´s not a sanctuary as sanctuaries generally put the animals in cages and rehabilitate them and they are still mostly tame, but the only `cage´ his monkeys have is the island itself, and they can (and do) swim to other islands or the riverbanks if they want to. Monkeys are at risk of deforestation, killing for bush meat, or being caught for the pet trade. he gets hold of them and brings them to his island and sets them free, and there are currently six species of monkey there, along with whatever other wildlife happens to be there - birds, snakes, frogs, and a million billion sand flies, which land on you all the time and bite you, and you look like you have chicken pox. i had over 100 bites on one forearm - crazy shit!
monkeys we saw while we were there include, tamarins, saki monkeys, capuchins, and marmosets (i think). it´s really cool, as we haven´t seen any monkeys yet in Ecuador, even though they are all around us, i´m sure. they are beautiful and it´s great that they can live a natural life without the risk of being killed (well, except by boa constrictors or birds of prey). We went on a walk round the island which was blissfully flat after weeks of hiking up and down and up and down all the time! Hector was full of interesting stories about how the native people make clothes out of this tree, and they eat the sap of that one to cure stomach problems, and they eat this one for its hallucinogenic effects or when they want to get an answer to a question they can´t decide in normal life. he lives on the island with his wife, kids, and a teacher, plus 2 GVI volunteers who follow the monkeys, and he also educates about 20 other local children who can´t get to school elsewhere because they are so remote.
our purpose there was partly for our own enjoyment, and partly to ´do a minger´ as they say. god knows why it´s called that, but it always makes me laugh. i told Galo, one of the Ecuadorian lads, that in England a minger is a slang term for an ugly person which he thought was funny and every time someone mentioned mingers we had a laugh about it. so on Hector´s island, we were there to plant some mahogany trees which can be harvested in 50 years time or so. it´s a shame to plant trees in the rainforest so they can be chopped down, but doing what´s best for the community isn´t always the same as doing what´s best for the environment. most families are really poor and have their own farms to run, and that´s why they are chopping down their own bit of rainforest, so organised money from anywhere will actually help preserve the forest in the long run, as opposed to selling it to oil companies who fell the trees and dig for oil, which they are doing all over, and for a poor family with 8 kids to be offered good money for their farm by an oil company, it´s no wonder they accept. but hopefully education and money can all work together to preserve the communities and the rainforest.
there was a massive storm the night before last, and everyone was sleeping in tents and hammocks, and every single person except me and Sasha, who were in a tent together, plus the 3 members of GVI staff who were in hammocks, got drenched. people moved to under any of the buildings - the classroom, the port, the dining room - so that we looked like a bunch of refugees sleeping in a makeshift shelter. also during the night, Hector´s water tower collapsed, and in the morning, we had an impromptu minger, and we all worked together to dismantle the remains of the tower, removing the nails, and all the pieces of wood, and some people pulled out nails, others carried wood, others sorted it into what was salvageable and what wasn´t, some used stones to hit the nails out (we only had 2 hammers and a crowbar between 25 of us) and others used the tools to prize the wood apart. i got absolutely filthy and looked like an Ecuadorian street urchin, all muddy and grubby on my shorts, sleeves and belly of my tshirt. it was like when there´s a natural disaster in a third word country and everyone pitches in to find survivors, with not a great deal of organisaiton, but things get done and everyone has a part to play. indeed, we found one survivor in the carnage - a 50cm tree snake, god knows how it had survived! it took us all about 3 hours, but we got it done and it was good to feel like we´d helped him out. i guess he and our GVI volunteers will have to rebuild it at some point.
he´s not without water though, being on an island, and it´s lovely to swim near to the island. however, we didn´t have showers, and it{s weird washing in the river (which is fast flowing so that if you don´t hold on, you´ll get swept away. if you´re a good swimmer, you can swim faster than the current, but it´s hard work.) so river washes aren´t really my thing, and you don´t feel clean when you get out, trudge through the mud, and within minutes are dirty and covered in sand flies again. maybe the freezing showers at base camp aren´t so bad after all!
all in all it was a great weekend, even if there was a slight natural disaster, but the place is so serene and beautiful i could happily live my life there, i think. but it is nice to get back to civilisation with its icecreams, chocolate and cybercafes.... and poorly treated animals and the smell of sewage and rotting food.
we are near the end of the first five week phase now, and i´ll be online again soon, as we are going to Baños via Tena - where we will hopefully go mountain biking, and go in the natural baños which give the place its name, while the five-weekers go back to Quito and then home. Then the next people to go home after that will include me!!! Eeek!!
So only six weeks left here for me, and it feels like i´m near the end. I´m not really missing much about England, and I have to say I´m not loking forward to going back there. But here is a list of things I am missing to a greater or lesser extent, then this might make me change my mind a bit:
- Family and friends (obviusly)
- Barney
- Not being sweaty
- Warm showers
- Cadbury´s chocolate
- Fruit other than bananas - the Ecuadorians eat about 5 to 10 bananas a day, and i probably eat 2 or 3 a day. they´re ok but i miss plums, nectarines, strawberries, grapes, and even the humble apple (we do have these occasionally though)
OK, that´s all i can think of for the moment. Hopefully when the time comes i will be happy to go back to England. Feel free to suggest some other things I might be missing. :D
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