Going deep - Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve

Of the many awesome places in Ecuador, one of the places we have been most excited to visit is the jungle. The eastern half of Ecuador is part of the Amazon river basin, and is home to an amazing array of plants and animals. I had wanted to go as deep and far out as possible, to get the most authentic jungle experience. Amy was arguing for a slightly more safe version, with easy access to medical care (if needed). We ended up, as usual, meeting in the middle. We settled on visiting a place called the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve. It is basically in the northeast corner of Ecuador, and basically borders both Columbia and Peru. It is made up of a system of rivers and swamp with water that eventually flows into the Amazon River and out into the Pacific Ocean.

We started off early one morning and drove the 8 or so hours to Lago Agrio (not much to see other than oil industry), and stayed there for the night. The next morning we met our guides, which are pretty much necessary when heading out into the jungle. We then left for a three hour ride out to the edge of the Reserve, often stopping along side the road to see some interesting plant or animal. One time, we stopped to see some wild cacao growing, and the guide told me to go ahead and pull a pod down. So here I am harvesting a cacao pod, the first step to some delicious chocolate. We opened it up and sucked on some of the seeds and remembered our visit to the chocolate factory in Mindo!



















Three hours later, we ended up at the edge of the Reserve. There are no roads into the Reserve, and no roads heading any farther east. The only road from here went north, where it entered Colombia and served as an exit point for cocaine.  We pulled all our stuff from the van and loaded it into a motorized canoe.
















Here you can see us all loaded into the canoe and ready to head out. There were supposed to be a couple of other people on this trip out to the lodge with us, but the airport in Lago Agrio was shut down, so they couldn't get out of Quito. This was nice, because we had the boat all to ourselves!
















Finally, we were all set and took off down the river. The view here is pretty much what we saw for the next 4 hours as we floated downstream towards the lodge where we would be staying for the next week. We were visiting the jungle during the rainy season, and much of the area was submerged under water. There were no longer any banks to the river, and thousands of hectares had turned into a flooded forest. I think the only unfortunate thing about this is that the piranhas are harder to see, and we didn't catch any when we went fishing for them.