It's a Jungle out there

Text & Photos by Kateri Drexler

Deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest, tapiers and capybaras (the world's largest rodent) pad down into the Tiputini river to drink. Jaguars glide silently through the underbrush. jungle-pic Ten kinds of monkeys hang from the giant ceiba treetops, and more than 450 types of birds sing overhead. No one has ever lived this far into the jungle. No one's around to play with the pink dolphins that swim in the remote waters of the Tiputini.

The Huorani, the local group of Indians that own territory close by, come through here occasionally, but apart from them, the flora and fauna have pretty much been left to themselves.,until now. It's possible for the tourist to reach this well-hidden region, to see the parakeets eat the fruit off the trees, to watch monkeys swing from vines with their young clinging to their necks. The venue is the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, owned and managed by a private Ecuadorian University, La Universidad San Francisco de Quito.

The Tiputini Biodiversity station is located in a region known as Amazonia or El Oriente, about 150 kilometers east of Ecuador's capital, Quito. Here, one of the major tributaries of the Amazon River, is the Napo, flowing northeast before turning south to the Atlantic Ocean. At the town of Coca, the Napo River joins the rivers Payamino, Coca and Yanayacu, and opens up to a thousand feet in width. lodge

Journeys to the station start in Coca after a 40-minute flight from Quito with dazzling views of snowcapped volcanoes

or a 9-hour bus ride in and around the mountains. From Coca, visitors travel in a motorized dugout canoe for one and a half hours down the Napo river, past the villages of San Carlos and Primavera, until they reach the village of Pompeya. Here, you board a bus that crosses the jungle on a well-maintained dirt road. Tapiers, with their elephant-like snouts, are sometimes seen, standing in the middle of the road, motionless, for fear of being seen.

After the hour and a half bus ride, and after crossing the Indillana and Rumiyacu rivers, travelers once again get into dugout canoes to ride three and a half hours down the Tiputini River to the Biodiversity Station. Here, the river is narrow and almost a tunnel through the jungle. Giant flourescent blue morpho butterflies flit about and turtles sun on logs at the river's edge. Egrets fly overhead and monkeys chatter nearby.