Wildsumaco Lodge

Just arrive back in Quito after 4 days in the Amazon. It was truely amazing...once I recovered from the most horrific bus ride ever. The bus bus was due to leave Quito at 9.30pm to drive through the night...I arrived at the bus station in a state of panic at 9.35pm. My host family got a little confused where the bus station was, oops. So after running like a mad woman through this massive bus terminal I step on the bus to be confronted with a terrible smell...I think coming from the ...

... all his savings to buy a small piece of land in Ecuador. It's actually pretty inspiring. He started with absolutely nothing, and now it's a big, fairly comfortable station that attracts many biologists and students and artists. There are a lot of major projects going on here.

The station has electricity, but if you use too much, the power will go out, so we try not to use the lights much. It has wifi. But it doesn't have any refridgeration (the bug freezer excepted), and the ...

I Lago Agrio, som er en lille bitte korrupt by meget lig gamle western, paabegyndte vi den alletiders tur mod den 1, 76 pct. af Amazonas, som hoerer under Ecuador. Det lyder ikke af meget land, men det kan vi love jer for, at det er!!! Godt vi havde guide med!!!

I store kanoer sejlede vi floden i omraadet tyndt og paa lange afstande kunne guide-Juans oejne fange enhver lille fugls blik eller slanges hvislen ...

This was the first place we took Mom and Skippy to in order to experience the cloud forest. To get there, we travelled along winding mountain roads that seem to be fairly familiar with landslides and complete with precarious bridges. Although we are used to buses zooming along these roads, Mom and Skippy quite rightfully were not, and kept reminding themselves that the ...

This town looks like it is being bombed there is rubble everwhere. we had a 4 hour canoe ride and 2 hour bus ride and iŽm sweaty and hot and not allowed to take pictures because i will be mugged for my camera.... We are going up to the mountains tonight on a night bus. It sounds super sketchy, even our bus driver was like why are you taking it because tourists donŽt usually go that way... eh

...my return from Banos oh-so-conveniently coincided with another free rum and coke night at the Centro del Mundo hostal. I was half expecting to find someone from the farm there...and I did. Dave was there getting plastered. Within a few hours weŽd hatched the plan to head into the jungle (put into my head by Sabrina, the Swiss girl i met in Banos).

By the next afternoon weŽd hammered it down from $50 to $42.50 a day and then got ...

The melting glaciers of the Ecuadorian Andes are forming the Rio Napo, a tributary to the Amazon, that lead our nowhere near boring 10 days journey to Iquitos in Peru, the largest city in the world unreachable by road.
When we decided to take the cargo boat from the Equadorian border to Iquitos, we expected only a 3 days adventure on the Rio Napo swinging in a hammock, fighting with mosquitos and cooking with river water. But the journey ...

On Sunday morning we left Quito to travel to the town of Mishualli where we stayed the night before we began our jungle tour the next day. Not much in Mishualli, just a small beach, but we did get to see loads of monkeys in the town square. On Monday we got a small dug-out canoe and travelled up the river for twenty minutes before disembarking in the jungle. We hiked for five hours through the jungle with our ...

The jungle portion of my trip started with some unexpected delays.  I flew from Quito to Lago Agrio two hours late and met the group I would be spending four days in the lodge with at the airport.  We climbed into two separate vehicles and headed down the dirt road toward the Cuyabeno Reserve.  The small bus I was riding in broke down very shortly after we began.  As I stood by the side of the road baking in the sun I realized it would be necessary to succumb ...

... on down towards the amazon basin we arrive at a biggish town Archidona and just a few miles out of town we spotted a sign for Hakuna Matata. Graham recommended that we stop here so we thought we may as well check it out. A long drive down a narrow lane and a low narrow swing bridge and thanks to Eve's size we passed through to another paradise. This paradise is a jungle lodge belonging to a Belgian couple who are travelers and fell in love with ...