Everything is Oropendolas: Yarina Lodge, Part One

Captains Log (without a keyboard with apostrophes), Day 7: Amazonian life is beyond words. 54 new birds so far. I am helping guide tours and maintain Yarina Lodge, interspersed with glorious birdwatching, lagoon swimming, and owly, starry hammock nights. I am in port only briefly before I must return to my postition. All is going better than could have been imagined. 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I hope they are correct, because I do not have the time I want to write about the thousands of things I have seen and done in the last four days. Life at Yarina is a dream. I will upload some photos and caption them when I have the time later!

A little bit about Yarina: The Ecuadorian police bring animals that are being smuggled from the city of Coca to the Nature Preserve at the Lodge, where they are given a safer environment to recover before they are re-released. Currently, there are not many animals, save three parrots that had their wings clipped and were being sold as pets in Coca. They hang around the Lodge and steal things from the kitchen---one of them lives primarily in the walls of my cabin, and peeks at me from the ceiling cracks when I move around my room. The preserve is the site of an ongoing breeding project for Northern Amazon Yellow-spotted turtles, which can grow to the size of 50 gallon garbage can lids or greater, and lay up to a hundred eggs. We were lucky enough to see one of their biggest on our trip around the lagoon of the preserve yesterday (in canoes).

More on the school system of San Carlos, the Quechua culture, what we do not hear about President Correa and oil in the Amazon, and the hundreds of animals we see daily later. I promise.

The reason I wanted to come down here to see for myself what I have read about for years; Amazonian oil drilling. 

A new suspension bridge: only part of the restructuring and technological, infrastructural, and cultural boom of Coca since my last visit in 2007. The forest around the town is a little less, and the streets are paved. Tons of hotels, streets bustling and lively. 

A street view in Coca. 

Chickens and fish are often bought and carried around live. The grains, fruits, vegetables, boots and shoes, pharmacy goods--everything spilling from every store front in an attempt to rival the abundance of the surrounding Amazon--is incredible. One of the many reasons I love Central and South America: life is louder, brighter, in your face at all times. Music from every street corner. 

Yarina has their own small fleet of motorboats to take people to and from Coca and around the Quechua community of San Carlos. It was cloudy and rainy the day I arrived. 

The Napo River, one of if not the largest tributary to the Amazon. Yasuni National Park is about another hour and a half downriver from Yarina, and the lodge does not work with them much anymore, I am told. However, the family who owns Yarina owns another lodge beyond the park about six hours away on the river. I plan on visiting towards the end of my time here. 

The lodge is off the Napo. We navigate these tight, densely canopied canals to reach a lagoon where there is a hill that leads up to the lodge. Pictures in a bit. 

As I mentioned, there are some parrots recovering here. Meet El Hefe (the Boss) on the right, and La Amiga (the friend) on the left. They take parrot exercise on their own three times a day--flying 20-30 minutes side by side around the clearning where the lodge compund is located before landing on the roof of the main lodge to take a breather. 

My room, apart from the dorms where the male workers who are here most of the year stay. Yay for mosquito nets! The palm-frond roof covers me, but it's all open to the air. I have a hot shower when the generator is on from 6 to 10pm, and I have hung my hammock up outside for when I can't resist the chance to be a little closer to the MANY owls and potoos I can hear calling from every tree, most every night. 

Nikki things to feel like home. Some books, my strangler-fig printed longsleeve from my 2007 visit, and a Steelers jersey and cap for my friend Ruben, who made this all possible. 

My bag of toys and school supplies for San Carlos! Yarina actually built an entire second school for the north river bank, so now San Carlos has two schools, which both just resumed. The kids at the school appreciated the spanish-english dictionaries, many notebooks, pens, markers, crayons, stickers...and a local family with young kids received the toys, because there weren't enough for all the kids at the school. 

A view from above my shower: how all the frogs, moths, bats, cockroaches, caterpillars, dragonflies, small and curious mammals, and of course parrots--get into my bathroom. I love the surprises. 

A journal from my super tuanis friend Neha Savant!

The boat dock at the lodge, with the two mototboats visible. 

El Hefe, being a ham. 

I mentioned parrots in my shower. Meet Azulita (little blue), the third recovering parrot. Her primaries are far from being regrown, so she mostly just hangs out in my cabin and by the kitchen, chewing the walls and being adorable...or creeping on me when I am in my room. Picture to follow. 

Black agouti are common visitors to the lodge lawn. 

Really silly first day selfie that I am sure my mom appreciates me putting up. Proof that I am happy and not photogenic! Yay!

The main lodge and the hill from the boat dock!

First hike! Hard to upload the right pictures with the internet being a bit slow. Oops. There was a German couple that came in with me on the Tuesday boat, and more people from Venezuela, Switzerland, about 40 older U.S. tourists with their own Amazon tour guides, and France also joined in the next two days. 

Picture one of about 238102983 pictures of  'leaf frogs,' which I am told have been recently moved to the genus Rana. 

HUGE MELASTOME. Thank you for instilling in me an appreciation of plants and fungi, CIEE!

There are tons of well-marked trails around the lodge! They have an observation platform, a concrete above-lagoon walk, a path through some lower swamps, and just general insanely well-kept trails through miles and miles of irreplaceable primary lowland forest. 

Things I find in my shower. 

Morning Amazon mist: view from the front porch. 

Incredible flower growing from a liana. 

Trees are crazy! Thanks to CIEE, I am familiar with Ceiba. 

I lost one leg to the swamp on my first time through. Mmmmm muddy rubber boots.

More lovely lianas. 

For those of us who love ceramics: because of the constant washing of tropical soils, the ground is mostly iron-rich and nutrient-poor clay. Most of the biomass of rainforests, as I learned with CIEE, is living--in insects, vines, roots, trees above the ground. Quite incredible. I wonder what it would be like to throw with this stuff...

Giant Kapok tree, another Ceiba. This one could be 500 or 700 years old, maybe older. They grow 40 to 50 meters and have important spiritual significance in many indigenous cultures. In Quechua culture, they are a way for shaman to communicate directly with good forest spirits, and to gain power and knowledge. 

Even the roots are stunning. 

Leaf...?

...frog!

Not only is this a gorgeous flowering tree (Bombax, maybe?), but it has also been the roost of one of my FAVORITE tropical birds for the last few months. 

The Great Potoo!!! A nightjar...looks like a cross between a swift and an owl. They're awesome.

One of the lodge trail branching points: the concrete lagoon walk. This was underwater in 2007!

Really stunning dragonflies. 

And butterflies, which are often meals for stunning birds. 

Snacks for lodge workers and visitors. 

My cabin, with boots drying from the swamp! I am adjacent to the kitchen. 

For you, Jay Lempcke: Thanks from me and the Quechua families of San Carlos! You can see a more or less typical house of a Quechua family here, complete with eternally-smoking open-fire stove to keep away the bugs, smoke meats, and cook meals, which often employ yucca, or manioc. I was lucky enough to be able to try chicha this time around: a drink made from crushing and fermenting yucca and sweet potato (camote). It tasted like beer and yogurt, cool and slightly bitter. Delicious. 

The kids really enjoyed a pair of chicks I brought--the kinds you get at Easter that you put in your hand (completing an electrical circuit) to get them to make noise.

Many Quechua families are now converting to Catholocism with the efforts of the Capuchin Mission along the Napo river. They most often hold on to their new beliefs while also taking on Catholic ones. Mass is held once a month near the new school. 

A view from a small scale Quecha plantation near the river. Most families grow medicinal herbs, bananas and plantains, manioc, cocoa, and other fruits and vegetables for their own uses. Where they used to hunt and fish with traditional weapons (blow guns, bow and arrow, sharpened wooden instruments), most families are now part of westernized Ecuadorian life and use rifles to hunt and buy goods with the national currency. 

Gorgeous late afternoon on the Napo. 

So many different kinds of ants! There are ones that build paper wasp like nests that you can use for mosquito repellent (extending a hand into their nest, and crushing them against your skin as they swarm your forearm before they bite--it really works!), and ones full of sugary nectar you can eat called Lemon Ants. 

Meals are INCREDIBLE here. My personal favorites are the soups prepared by Luis, Maria, Riberto Bruna and Segundo--or the arepas in the mornings, the sweet bananas in the afternoons, the fish, the stewed vegetables, the aged rice...I am learning things from them. I love helping out in the kitchen. 

Dendrobates! Poison dart frogs.

There is a crude children's playground game associated with ladybugs in Ecuador. Ask me about it sometime. 

Completely harmless and elegant bull spider. Yee!

Toads and frogs everywhere, even in the dry season!

Eduardo, explaining something to our wonderful group of brave adventurers. 

A flower the Quechua women use for easing cramps, contraception, or even voluntary sterilization when no more children are desired. There are hundreds of plants the guides know about in the forest for most every ailment and purpose. Many of these indigenous remedies are available in health stores in Quito, and most all of them are still used by indigenous families today. 

Mating butterflies!

Afternoon spanish practice, birds, and beer. My first South American beer, actually--Pilsener, made first in Ecuador. 

This picture was stubborn and did not rotate, but this is the observation tower! Built by lodge workers to replace the seven story observation tower I remember from 2007 (which eventually was overwhelmed by termites, epiphylls, and lianas), this tower is situated on a hill with three different views of a turn of the Napo. Incredible for sunrises and sunsets, and for BIRDS. So many birds! Euphonias, dacnis, opal rumped and opal crowned and paradise tanagers, aracari and toucans....endless jewels of the canopy. Fantastic. 

One view from the tower of the Napo!

We got really lucky and encountered a rainbow boa around sunset one evening! Pete Zani, I wish you had been there to see it. 

More cool leaf frogs!

Many thanks to Mary Roll for the travel guitar, and to Alan Masters for the songbook. A lodge worker named Wilson asked me to learn a song he likes called Solo le pido a Dios, so I have been listening to it on repeat as I write. Check it out!
Solo le pido a Dios

La amiga, in her favorite roost spot on the walkway between some of the cabins. 

A huge dragonfly I wrassled out of the shower of two visiting German engineering students. 

The Nature Preserve of Yarina Lodge! Sapo means toad, and I never got around to asking what Cocha is because there were birds EVERYWHERE. 

The lagoon in the preserve, where the visiting French couple put their lives in my hands as I rowed them by canoe in darkness to Caiman watch last night. Thousands upon thousands of glowing firefly larvae at the shore, the 'WAAAAhhh' calls of potoos and washing-machine woops of owls I recognized from a bird call CD, jewel-like caiman eyes peering out from the water. 

So many BIRDS. I will do an all-bird post later. There are tons of oropendola nests everywhere, and we have seen six different species of oropendola and cacique so far. 

This is the pile of leaves outside the entrance to a leaf cutter ant nest! They can do serious damage to a tree, these little guys. 

Me! Apprentice Amazonian guide and canoe chauffer extraordinaire. I only got us stuck like, three times. Eduardo says that is pretty good for a first day of canoeing in the dry season when the water is low. 

Sandra looking out from the canoe on the lagoon!

Everyone taking all the pictures all the time. 

Interesting and incredibly silent paddle. So satisfying to row a canoe in complete silence save a small dripping of water (collected like at a leaf tip) down these deep forest canals. 

There are two Segundos at the lodge: Segundo Morales (el primero Segundo), and Segundo el Segundo. They are both very tolerant of my bad (but improving!) Spanish. 

Maria! She is the mastermind behind the kitchen, and has worked for the family that owns the lodge for 23 years. She helped redesign the kitchen after her first year at Yarina in 1998. 

Where I learn how to cook super rico Ecuadorian food and help with the dishes...or steal extra popcorn for my soup. 

We went pirhana fishing!

...and caught only two small (and dangerously spiny) catfish, which were delicious when grilled with only a sprinkle of salt. 

Some of us lost our hooks to, presumably, the desired pirhanas, and resorted to dangling bits of meat above the water to tempt said pirhanas to pass the time. It is common to wrap pirhanas or other fish in heliconia leaves and cook them directly over the fire. 

Our catfish, and beef-bit bait. 

An owl-eye butterfly. 

This was the silliest. What you do not see from this surprisingly well-composed photo is that eleven of us lined up our ten-second-timer cameras on a railing, and all raced to position ourselves before they went off. There were plenty of people around to take our pictures. This was the general feel of the group. So much fun. 

The school that my Sewickley Academy group helped de-termite and paint in 2007! Amazing how the wear of the rainforest works on non-traditional buildings. The paint from our mural is almost completely gone, but you can still see where we painted the animals and desks that bright mint-green on the inside. 

Return trip to re-paint, anyone? I will be down here for another month!

Coming into Coca to communicate, I saw this: a plane, wings cut off, on a flat boat of sorts. 

I really do apologize that I do not have more time, but please enjoy the pictures! And for those of you whom I have met in this last week--Jan, Chelsea, Matias, Sandra and Sandra, and the rest of the visitors and staff--thank you for making my first few days at Yarina some of the most memorable of my life!

Cheers to all, and a note to the homeland: the only thing you need to worry about is that I will not want to come back.
-Nikki (o Nee-cole).