Jungle Bunnies

  Tena, Ecuador
Thursday, October 12, 2006

There now followed a hairraising drive over the Andes for a two night saty in the Amazon rain forest. - or so we thought. It seems that big brother Peru had stolen all the amazon territory from Ecuador in a war in 1995. Again, we were ignorant of this and of the fact that Peru and Ecuador are the best of enemies. Ecuador does however have the river Nappo territory and, thankfully, that is where the oil is.

It was a toss up between arriving at our jungle lodge in the dark or encouraging our driver to speed up on the hairpin bend dirt roads decorated with crosses where others had gone over the edge. We took the safest option, but it was a little tricky negotiating the Nappo in our canoe and arriving at a place with absolutely no electricity both in pitch darkness.

There were huge bugs around and as we quickly tucked in our mossie nets , we saw a giant cockroach on the bedside table ( two of them - adds Gill) and at dinner we were regularly bombed by a variety of insects. Trousers were tucked into socks and collars buttoned up as we had no idea what was appearing under the table. Having said that, we nearly found out every time Gill tried to upend the furniture by leaping up shrieking with another direct hit from the kamikaze insects. She did however take a crumb of comfort with the news that the bats were not going to poo on her head as they had left the restaurant roof at dusk on their feeding mission.

We had been disappointed on the drive into the jungle by the level of deforestation but after our canoe ride up river we had found enough jungle for our liking.

Chief and Squaw

We managed a trek of only 1km in about 3 hours. Hardly a trek, scrambling in our wellies up and down muddy banks trying to keep up with our machete weiding guide,

Machete Man

who only let us hang on to the occasional branch which was not covered with poisonous spines, poisonous conga ants, or poisonous snakes.

As if this wasn´t enough, we volunteered to try river tubing. This involved sitting in an inner tube and being swept helpless down a brown eddying river towards the Amazon, with goodness what lurking beneath. The fear must have got to us, because we both admittted to a small fart, but even though we were drifting for over an hour, neither risked a wee, having been shown by Perfect 10, a picked specimin of the fish that swims up your willy when you wee and has to be removed by surgery. I made sure I had two pairs of trunks on just in case!

We thought we had survived all the perils of the jungle until we boarded the motorised canoe for our journey out. It had rained all night, and the river was racing, and full of large floting tree trunks, which even the boatmen seemed to be worried about. I am pleased to report that we kept upright and wern´t holed below the waterline.

We now learn that our next stop, in what was beginning to become an adrenalin fuelled holiday, was a night right underneath and exploding volcano.