Around Tena: Parque Amazónico La Isla and More Buses

Parque Amazónico La Isla

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. 

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. 

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.

Photo by Ramona McCabe

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

I've arrived!! The plane flight was long and grueling. My observations are as follows: TACA is nice because they still show free movies and give out pillows and blankets and food. El Salvador is pretty and green at least what I could see while landing. The Lima airport big and impersonal. Andres is awesome and I can't say how happy I was to see him after such a long day of travel. Now I am recuperating from travel and caffeine withdrawal (drinking coffee isn't something most Ecuadorians do everyday so I've decided to quit to make it easier, but in the shortrun, did anyone else know caffeine withdrawal can make you nauseous? the internet knew.) I am settling in well and all of my stuff fit into the drawers! Which, I admit, I was a bit anxious about. Hurray and tata for now!

Adventuring outside of Quito

I'm doing an independent study project that correlates with my internship and focuses on the experiences of women in indigenous organizations in the Indigenous Movement of Ecuador (Movimiento Indígena del Ecuador). I have done a few interviews, on trips with my boss or here in Quito but last week I made the trek out to a different town to meet with a couple of women there. This is how my very long, exhilarating, adventuresome day went...

I woke up at 5:45 to get ready to leave the house by 6:45 with my host sister, Lucía, who was heading in the same direction to go to class. After Lucia's stop, I rode the bus to the end of the line, to one of the big bus terminals in the north of Quito (Quito is extremely long and skinny, so everything is delineated by being north or south). When I got off at the end of the line I went to one of the kiosks and asked for a bus to Otavalo or Ibarra, both of which could get me to my final destination, Cotacachi. However, the women at the kiosk informed me that I was at the wrong terminal and I had to go to one farther north. I didn't even know another one existed up there! She kindly put me in a taxi and I arrived 10 minutes later at the other terminal, feeling slightly harassed, for something already having gone awry. Well I managed to buy my ticket and the helpful security guards ushered me to the appropriate bus. First challenge surmounted.

I asked the bus helper dude (most buses have a driver and someone, usually a man, collecting money and shouting out the destination from the door) to let me know when I should get off to go to Cotacachi, which he did about a 3 hour bus ride later. So there I was, gotten off the bus outside the entrance to Cotacachi with rather vague ideas about how to proceed. Luckily, a friendly indigenous woman had gotten off with me and helped me take another bus 10 minutes into town. I could have taken a taxi, but it was nicer and cheaper to take the bus with this woman. Having arrived in Cotacachi, I didn't really have a destination in mind because I was supposed to call the woman I was meeting, Magdalena, to set up the interview. So I hopped across the road, recharged my minutes on my phone and called my interviewee who told me to meet her at her house in 1/2 hour. This gave me just enough time to register for classes at the internet shop (my registration had opened at 845 that morning) and hail a cab to take me out to her house. When I arrived, she wasn't there which wasn't totally unexpected because she said she was out and would be arriving around the same time as me (also, I was functioning on US time and she on Ecuadorian time). But there was a cute 11 year old girl and her dog hanging out in front of the house, so we chatted. For 15 minutes. and then 1/2 hour. And then 45 minutes... Meanwhile I am playing games with this girl in my notebook that I don't know the rules to and calling other phone numbers of people in Cotacachi to try to set up more appointments. Well, an hour after our meeting time, she shows up carrying a shawl full of beans on her back and apologizing for not calling, but she had no minutes on her phone.

After finally making contact, I was very happy to get down to interviewing. We sat on her cement porch and I offered to help shell beans (I probably shelled one for every 5 that she did) and set about interviewing with my handy voice recorder. We talked about a number of interesting things including her experience becoming a woman leader in the local indigenous organization but because I have to write a 20 page paper on that soon, I'm not going to go into it here. She cooked us some choclos (a kind of corn) and we shelled beans and talked about politics. Then she gave me some more numbers of women in the area and sent me on my way with best wishes and a recorder full of experiences.

It was then about 1 o clock and it was time to call one of the women I'd already gotten ahold of. She had to decline because she was too busy, but the number Magdalena had given me turned up a meeting at 3 o clock right in town. I went to town and got lunch, two great cups of coffee and purused the multitude of leather stores Cotacachi boasts of. Then at 3 I headed down to the office of the main indigenous organization in Cotacachi, UNORCAC. There didn't appear to be anyone in the open office so I poked around a bit and then waited in one of the chairs by the entrance way. A few minutes later a woman and a little girl wandered in. We small chatted a little and it turned out she was the sister-in-law of the woman I was hoping to meet, Luz Maria. While we waited, two women wandered in from the back of the office and asked us to help them with something. Turns out they were taking promotional photos for the organization and needed us to sit at the computers and look useful. So maybe I'll make it into the promotional material for UNORCAC, who knows.

Eventually, the photographer helped me find Luz Maria and we had an intriguing interview about her own process of becoming Leader of Women (Dirigenta de la Mujer) in UNORCAC, punctuated by various children playing in the office and asking their mothers for money for sweets. Luz Maria introduced me to two other women who I may be able to interview, and I got the number of one of them. I may be making this trip again this week.

Then, at about 4, I walked over to the bus stop and grabbed a bus to Otavalo, where I grabbed a different bus to Quito, to get back by 7. Whew.

Lost in Quito

So for the most part I have a good sense of direction once I get oriented. I was lucky enough to have almost a week to settle into Quito before the program started, so I got to know a lot of locations in my friend Anna's life. This has served me pretty well so far, and I have been expanding my knowledge of the city and how to get around it every day.
Today my compañeras and I took a new bus to a newish location and it all went swimmingly. This was not the case on the way home. Whitney and I took the same bus back, but it being 6 o'clock, there were a thousand people crammed onto one tiny bus, and it was raining so all of the windows were completely fogged up. We couldn't see the street names to save our lives. Eventually, we said enough was enough and figured we were sort of close to our houses (we live in the same neighborhood), and forced our way off the bus (easier said than done). Unfortunately, once we managed to squirm off the bus with our belongings, we didn't recognize any of the streets. Poo. So we started walking, hoping we would recognize something soon. As we were walking (and not recognizing anything) it was beginning to get dark, and one of the main rules is not to walk at night. Sooo we started trying to hail a taxi, to no avail, then tried calling taxis, the numbers of which we were apparently dialing wrong, all the while having forgotten our maps at home. Finally we saw a taxi on the corner with no one in it, successfully talked down the outrageous price of 3 dollars to a more reasonable 2 dollars, and were on our way home.

Things are fine now, and I have something to write about for my homework assignment "una experiencia en las calles." Also, I am safe and dry in my house well before the streets got too iffy and have survived getting lost in Quito.