This activity was discovered by my friend as she browsed my guidebook, the Rough Guide to Ecuador, which was really a stroke of luck because we might never have met our tiny monkey friends otherwise. The park is at the fork in the river and though not a true island, resembles one, which gives it its name. We visited the park on Sunday before heading out on a bus and canoe journey rather more rustic than we had anticipated to get to Liana Lodge.
To get to the park, just locate the tall foot bridge crossing the river near to most of the main tourist restaurants, and walk halfway across to stairs down to the park. There was an elevator but it didn't appear functional. When we got to the entrance, there was an old woman collecting the entrance fee ($2) and I asked her if there was a map of the park, which was not small, but the only one available was on the big sign sticking out of the ground. We gave it a quick glance, hoping to remember something of it later, before we walked off towards the west side of the park.
The park is very beautiful and gives you a hint of the lushness of the amazon. We wandered around for a while, climbing an observatory at the top of a small hill, and eventually running into a small zoo with various local creatures.
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| Amazonian lushness in action. Photo by Ramona McCabe. |
But the best part wasn't until the very end when we finished our loop and came out of the trees by a large building with a deck. There we encountered three tiny, dark brown monkeys! A family of Ecuadorian tourists was trying to take pictures of them and squealing whenever they hopped suddenly, and we happily joined in.
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| Our plump friend taking a breakskie before resuming his mad hopping. Photo by Ramona McCabe. |
More Buses: Getting to Liana Lodge from Tena
Buses, as you may know, are a common theme of mine on this blog and a common theme of pretty much all budget travelers in Ecuador. Also, as I have discovered through my travels in Peru and stories from friends who have spend time in other Latin American countries, Ecuador's buses are of the very bare bones variety. You can find pretty much exclusively what my aunt calls "chicken buses." In other words, buses for the normal folk, who sometimes have to transport chickens etc. and are not comfy, air-conditioned, executive buses like those that can be found in Peru. I have ridden several times on buses with actual chicken passengers and my friend once sat next to a chicken on the way to Mindo that proceeded to fall asleep on her arm. But that's a story for another day. The bus from Tena to Puerto Barantilla, where we caught the canoe to Liana Lodge, did not feature any live chickens, but we would rather have hung around with chickens than wait in the bus stop we were at.
At first we went to the main terminal and tried to get a bus from one company, Transporte Jumandy, but they only offered buses at 12pm and at 4pm and we wanted to leave at 2pm because we had told the lodge to pick us up in the canoe at 4. So we tried the other company that had buses going our way (catch a bus to Puerto Barantilla or Santa Rosa del Napo). We had to walk off the beaten tourist path, down Avenida del Chofer, to get to the bus company, Sentinella del Tena. When we arrived we had to join a crush of people trying to talk to one woman behind a plexiglass divider. I wedged myself in with my fellow travelers to try to get some information about the bus. Meanwhile, everyone was sweaty and hot from the humidity, we were trying to avoid looking at the dirty diaper on the ground nearby, an old man with some kind of mental disability was telling us stories and asking everyone for money, and I was trusting that my friends smooshed up behind me were protecting my bag from robbery. And we had to stand like that for about half an hour while the world's slowest ticket person attempted to help people at the front of the mass of travelers.
After we finally managed to buy our tickets and extract ourselves from the group of people still waiting, we had to sit on the dusty curb in the sun and wait for the bus to arrive. Once we actually got on the bus, the whole experience started to improve because we were finally out of the sun and sitting somewhere comfortable, with the breeze from the open windows cooling us down. We got underway, and had to be very alert to our surroundings because during Carnaval people love to throw water at the open windows of buses going buy. Several times we had to slam the windows shut so as to avoid getting ourselves and our bus mates doused in water.
After about an hour and a half, the bus driver's assistant, who we had asked to help us find our stop, signaled that it was time to get off. We gathered our belongings and hurried to the front of the bus while it came to a jerky halt. We stepped off the bus and looked around. We were on the side of a dirt road, surrounded by tropical trees, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Then we spotted a big wooden sign saying Liana Lodge and Amazoonico, and decided to walk up a little gravel driveway towards a run-down house and small parking area. Down the hill away from the road we found a small dock and waited hopefully by an old canoe. After about half an hour, by which point we had started to become rather anxious, a big motorized canoe pulled up and asked us to hop on (easier said than done when you consider the slippery, river-worn rocks we had to step precariously off of on to the canoe). Then we sped off down the river to Liana Lodge.
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| Photo by Ramona McCabe |
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