Jungle

It’s amazing how close the jungle is to Quito. The drive takes about 5 hours, but it’s less than a hundred miles away as the crow flies. Quito is in the mountains, and both the native and modern cultures are mountain cultures, so it is amazing that the jungle can be so close. From our home on a clear day, we can see the giant, snow-capped mountain, Antisana, which separates us from the jungle. People normally think of the jungle as being a low altitude place, but I guess when the Amazon River flows all the way from here across Brazil, it has to start pretty high.
For our recent trip to the jungle, we stayed right on the Napo River, which flows into the Amazon. We stayed for three nights in screened-in wooden huts with roofs of palm leaves. Tesha and I were lucky enough to get one of the elevated huts, with chickens roaming around it, so we didn’t have too many bugs (just a few big spiders, a cockroach in the magazine I was reading, and a small scorpion). Our hut was close to the cliff that dropped down to the river, so we enjoyed falling asleep to the sound of the light rapids.
The area of the jungle we stayed in is 10 kilometers from the section of land found by a scientist to have the highest amount of plant species in a single hectare in the world. The plant life looks like what you’re probably imagining the jungle to be – countless types of plants growing everywhere they can, while trying to defend themselves with thorns, giant leaves and poisonous bark. We saw all sorts of poisonous spiders, scary bugs, a corral snake (one of the most poisonous snakes in the world), monkeys, a neon pink dragonfly, and butterflies of every imaginable color. We saw butterfly after butterfly, yet rarely saw the same pattern twice. Around our huts we saw a tarantula bigger than my hand, a moth the size of my face, and a stick bug the size of… well, a stick.
We went to the jungle with a volunteer group that came down to help out at the orphanage. One of the days was dedicated to helping the community there by building a Sunday-School room at a small church and building a fence for a nature preserve. Tesha and I went with the fence building group because most people wanted to build for the church. We were told that our job would be the easy one and that we would be “stringing” part of a fence together. So after putting on our shorts and shoes, we headed off to our jobsite to find out that we would be hauling 8 foot logs on our shoulders ¼ of a mile into the jungle. Once we got into the thick of the jungle we dug holes and set the mini telephone poles in the ground for the fence. If this doesn’t sound that bad to you yet, imagine that we were walking through undeveloped jungle and making our own paths, while carrying posts that will root and turn into trees, and fighting fire-ants. After awhile, one of the Ecuadorian natives asked Tesha why we were all wearing shorts. We went and found boots and pants after he explained that he would probably be dead by now from poisonous spider and snake bites if it weren’t for his pants.
Even though we slept in huts, the jungle trip has been our most comfortable trip. The luxury of riding a private bus, knowing the people around us, and trusting that our things will be safe is more comfortable than staying in a nice hotel.
You can see pictures of our jungle trip at: http://community.webshots.com/user/peteandtesha
-Pete