More Monkey Mayhem

Trip Start Jan 03, 2007

Trip End Nov 03, 2007

Loading Map

Map your own trip!

Map Options

Show trip route

Hide lines

Where I stayed

Tunari Villa

(Puyo hotels)

Flag of Ecuador Puyo, Ecuador
Monday, July 30, 2007

I had earlier decided to take another 2 weeks out of my busy travelling schedule to dedicate to the main reason i love South America, the jungle. I thought it would be exactly the same as the first time in Villa Tunari, but everything was different. The conditions were cleaner, it was much smaller scale, the presence of tarantulas and the absence of sand flies was even a welcome change.

A typical day would be to get up at 8 to feed and clean all the cool animals. They had several types of monkey, wild pigs or peccaries, a coate, a very beautiful and deadly margay (like an ocelot), dozens of maccaws and parrotts, and the kinkajous (see this website). http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0310/feature2/?fs=www3.nationalgeographic.com&fs=plasma.nationalgeographic.com

Youd get an hour to have breakfast, before starting on some project or other

Drinking pura

. When i was there the work was fairly hard manually, like digging and carrying rocks up to the site of a new cage in the highly tropical and intense ecuadorian sun. After a long lunch break lounging on hammocks and playing with the kittens and maccaws, we`d do some more before feeding the creatures at about 4.30. For the rest of the time we would be swinging in the hammocks and drinking run by the fire. We did have a couple of games of footy with the local family on the worst pitch ive ever seen, and one evening we got invited to dinner and a look round a nearby crude oil processing plant. This was pretty interesting for me, having worked on a much later part of the process and i was really pleased to see what good systems they had in place, and what (they said) they were doing to compensate local communities seemed acceptable. Obviously i was glad to see a modern well planned project, where a lot of care had been taken to minimise environemntal impacts, it is hopefully moving in the right direction over here...

During my time there I had to head back to the nearby town of Puyo (1.5 hours by bumpy bus ride away) a few times to get to the internet. By this stage the whole trip to the Galapagous was hanging by a thread due to poor planning, so i had to rush around getting something organised last minute.

I really liked my 2 weeks at Santa Martha http://www.santamartharescue.org/amazonia.html
and would urge anyone coming this way to sderiously consider taking a few weeks out of their busy schedules to do something like this. Its like an exotic petting zoo. I even had to feed a live chicken to the margay one day, and had a capuchin monkey p�ss down my neck... youd never get that back home!!!!