As Week 2 of my Ecuadorian experience comes to a close, I realize how much has changed since I posted last. For one, I’ve completed my first full week of work. I’ve also made new friends (Ecuadorian and otherwise), improved my Spanish, explored new parts of the environment, and further attempted to immerse myself in the culture…with varying degrees of success. In other words, I’ve got a lot to cover in a single post. As I was looking through the absurd number of photos that I’ve taken in the past few weeks and deciding which ones to prioritize in my post, I found myself automatically sorting them into the categories of selva, río, playa, and bosque – jungle, river, beach, and forest. So instead of running through the events of the past two weeks in a chronological and highly boring way, I thought I’d organize them into these categories. After all, the diversity of the natural environment along the Ecuadorian coast was one of my main reasons for coming here, and it continues to play a major role in everything that I experience here. In other words, I feel like I’m interacting with el medio ambiente more than I ever have before – I work in it, spend my free time in it, and explore it whenever I can – and I honestly can't imagine anything I'd rather be doing with my summer.
La Selva
Last week, upon hearing that I was a student of environmental sciences, my host mother Liz insisted on taking me into la selva (the Ecuadorian jungle) in order to check up on the plot of land that her family owns there…which I later discovered to be approximately one half of a small mountain. Casual. It took almost three hours for us to hike from Puerto Rico to the gate that marks the beginning of the Bermeo property, and once there, the hike got real. I like to think of myself as a decently outdoorsy person, having done a fair amount of hiking and camping with my family when I was younger, but I can’t say I’ve ever experienced a hike quite like this one before. After fighting our way through densely-vegetated jungle paths (which were quite reminiscent of the ones I encountered in the depths of the Peruvian Amazon, no jokes) to reach the base of the mountain, we had to climb directly through the vegetation in order to reach the summit, using tree trunks and vines to pull ourselves up the steep incline. Not so bad, with the exception of one major problem the soil on the forest floor was so loose that I would constantly lose my footing and go sliding back down the mountain, landing ten or fifteen feet below with a face full of dirt and my clothing covered with sticks and leaves. It was a complete mess, and completely hilarious -- Liz just about died laughing every time I´d go crashing down the mountain. Needless to say, I do my best to entertain the people.
The road into the jungle
The freshest (and probably best) orange I've ever had...straight from the tree
There were a bunch of really spooky, weird-looking cows wandering through the forest...this one kind of reminded me of something out of Where the Wild Things Are
Along the way, we found about ten different places where illegal loggers had sneaked onto the property and cut down old-growth trees in order to sell the wood to furniture-builders. The deforestation sites were pretty shocking. They looked like wounds in the otherwise untouched forest -- gaping holes in the vegetation filled with sawdust and severed branches. The thing that was most upsetting about them wasn't that the trees had been cut down in the first place...it was the sheer volume of wood that the loggers wasted. At each site, they left hundreds of huge branches on the forest floor, simply because they didn't have the manpower to carry all of the wood they had cut down to the bottom of the mountain. Liz and I spent the rest of the day working to reforest the areas damaged by the loggers, which involved digging up sapling trees from different areas, re-planting them in the cleared sites, and hauling buckets of water from nearby streams for watering the transplants. I also began the intimidating task of learning the names of native plant and tree species in Spanish, which Liz told me would be very helpful at my job, where I would be doing much of the same. I found that I honestly loved working in the forest: it was solitary, wild, and unbelievably beautiful. I was reluctant to leave when it began to get dark, but was soon distracted by the daunting task of getting myself back down the mountain in one piece (which, contrary to my expectations, was even more difficult than the ascent.) After falling on my face about seven more times (my Ecuadorian modus operandi, as it would seem), I finally started to get the hang of the technique: you dash from tree to tree, crashing into trunks to stop your momentum, until you reach the bottom of the mountain. Human pinball, essentially. When we arrived back in Puerto Rico hours later, I was exhausted, mosquito-bitten, covered from head to toe with all manner of forest debris....and totally enamored with the Ecuadorian forest.
The view from about halfway up the mountain
Deforestation, compliments of illegal loggers
Rocking the hat and walking stick like a champ, of course
El Río
Only a day after my exhilarating journey up and down the mountain with Liz, I decided to accompany her and a few of her friends to the Ayampe River, which is just down the coast from Puerto Rico near the town of Las Cabañas. Their goal for the day? Fishing for freshwater shrimp, naturally. I was intrigued, and decided to go along for the trip and learn how it was done. Like the selva the day before, the environment surrounding the river was very wild and beautiful, and I was happy just to sit on its banks and enjoy the scenery as Liz and her friends worked their way slowly upstream, dragging nets through the shallow water and catching a surprising number of small fish and sizable freshwater shrimp, which apparently hang out beneath the flat rocks at the bottom of the river. Who knew?
El Río Ayampe
The shallows
A bestie of Liz's, catching mad shrimps
The riverbank
La Playa
I know I talked a little bit about how beautiful the beach here is in my last post, but I definitely didn’t do it justice. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been spending as much time there as I possibly can – going for walks before dinner to watch the sunset, swimming and sunbathing on the weekends, and even walking over to read my book and chill in a hammock there on rainy days. I honestly don't think I'll ever get sick of it.
The beach at Puerto Lopez
A fave hangout spot in Puerto Rico
An Ecuadorian sunset
Last Saturday...one of the most beautiful beach days we've had so far
Mis amigas Alisa and Alex on the aforementioned beautiful beach day
As per usual, I'm out of battery power and overstaying my welcome in a wifi area, so I'll have to save my descriptions of the bosque, and the actual work that I do there, for tomorrow or Wednesday. For now, I'll leave you with a fun message from the back of the Ecuadorian bus seats...
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