Cuyabeno (In the Oriente). Amazonia. The Land of the Black Water.

First Note: If you are reading this blog leave a comment so I know someone is out there

Second Note: b sharp

The Amazon is a place of wonder. On the outside, from the Rio Cuyabeno, it looks amazing and tranquil. It appears simple, a place that just works. The water flows in the tiny river with the force of a mighty storm. I takes these mental notes as I enter our motorized canoe assisted by Don Deleo our native Siona guide and his son: the deft captain of our boat. I can`t remember his name but I always greet him with a hefty ``Capitan!`` , the kid can catch piranha like a champ. I am not destined to be a professional piranha fisherman. I discover this as I flip raw hunks of meat out into to tannin stained river. Don Deleo constantly nudges me to discover if I have captured a mighty bangre` or even the lowly piranha. Ok tangent aside.

We jump into the motorized canoe and haul ass 50 km downriver from the Cuyabeno bridge to Jamu (Yah-moo) Lodge. Along the way we see the elusive yellow-faced titi monkey.

capuchins, howlers, etc. We peer upon the lankey Cecropias and various palms. We see birds and Giant Kapok trees, the monsters of this rainforest system. On the way to the lodge we cross Laguna Cuyabeno, a flooded forest basin, and get a glimpse of the pink river dolphins, later on we`ll get a closer look.

We arrive at Jamu lodge after 3 hours in the little canoe and my bum hurts. Jamu lodge is amazing and primitive.

More to come...

there will be fungus

I like the little tiger logo: ¨protege el medio ambiente!¨

THE DOMINATOR

Donald shows off the paperwork for the lawsuit against Texaco (about 1.4th of the bookshelf). Donald is one of the cool leaders of the Amazon Defense Front and the awesome lender of land for the mushroom project.

This was a cool find, mushrooms growing out of oil! Jess dug it out of a can. Unfortunately a dog was attacking me at the moment of this photo so it turned out blurry. We are excited about cloning this little fellas and seeing what kind of magic they can pop out.

Spills near people´s lands and houses. You never had to walk very hard to find one, really.

Donald digs under the ground in front of the Jaramillo family´s house, a site Texaco was contracted to clean up.

They didn´t do such a good job. Donald only had to dig 3 inches before hitting a layer of oily water. Her son or nephew came out shirtless and blinking and onto the front porch and in response to people´s questions said yeah, on hot days like this one the oil fumes definitely made you dizzy and your joints and head hurt.

This site was a recent spill we drove past in the bus. Oil was spurting out of the pipe and splattering all over the ground. Here the rate of the oil flow is being measured... about a liter every two minutes.

Mushrooms growing out of the substrate placed at the Charapa site (the 30-year-old spill).

Brian shows off the yummy gunk. This is basically the consistency of the stuff mixed in with the sawdust and the mycelium.

Our superheroes.

Some birds nest fungi growing along with the oysters as well. A good sign with other species of fungi start moving in?

Here you can get kind of an idea of the layout of the experiment site: a kind of giant chicken coop, with chicken coop wire laid on top of the sawdust-mycelium-petroleum bins.

Brian kneeling in front of experiment site number 2, where petroleum is treated in large pits of substrate.

At Donald´s house, we got to chew on some tasty cacao. We sucked the juicy white fruit (which tasted sort of like lemon ice cream) off the seeds, which were then laid out to dry on the concrete in the sun. Exciting to think my saliva will be making a trip to Switzerland and eventually into some little kid´s mouth.

Several things that need to be said: considering we were only being shuttled around for about a total 4.5 hours, I was genuinely surprised at how many people we ran into who, upon hearing our little mycotour introductory spiel, rolled up their sleeves and showed us their chemical burns and their skin fungus and told us about their mother´s skin cancer or their blood diseases that caused them to miss a lot of work and rack up a lot of bills. I know discussion this issue runs the danger of coming off as just the listing of numb statistics: a bigger oil spill than Exxon Valdez, a total site size equivalent to Rhode Island. I know a lot of this runs the risk of coming off as just another Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action sort of stories (minus the Hollywood justice ending and multiplied by 15 years of paperwork and delays until a maybe verdict in the ends of 2009?).

In the end, I agree with what Corey wrote earlier: what really ending up getting me in the end was thinking about how I (or any of my friends or family) would feel if someone came along and dumped a 3 meter pit of oil in my front or backyard or neighborhood river. Not to mention how ugly those pipes looked, by the roads and in front of people´s houses, like hard copper bones jutting out of the landscape.

If nothing else, now that the tour is over and it´s appropriate to make these kinds of sweeping generalizations and pronouncements, I hope that people return to the U.S. with a deeper awareness of what many people have to live with in order for a select few to be comfortable. Maybe there are some things we are going to have to learn to do without: our comfort, our laziness, the easy convenience of our lives. Heavens knows there are enough people, including in Lago Agrio, who have gone without enough already: their health, their lives, their dignity. It sucks to hear a woman´s story of walking down a street made of crude oil with her two kids (one of the ways la compania cut costs was not paving proper roads but pouring crude excess waste out so that it would turn into hot and sticky asphalt), losing their sandals in the goopy mess and having to walk the rest of the way barefoot. Umm yeah people should have some say in how their land and territory is used, but unfortunately stuff keeps getting in the way of that relatively simple premise. It´s a complicated issue, to say the least.

One of the cooler long-term plans for the project is implementing a community-education project, where people can learn how to use these mycoremediations techniques themselves and clean up the messes on their own land without having to wait for the outcome of a lawsuit... god knows when that will work out, not just in terms of a verdict, but in terms of when people are actually going to be given money (the current number now is 8-16 billion). One of the more vital aspects of this project is the use of local, inexpensive materials, such as sawdust from a local broomstick factory. Some vague plans for the community education element include a graphic novel explaining the mycoremediation technique and an instructional film. Ultimately, people will hopefully be able to grow the mushrooms themselves, clean up the contamination on their own land and thus become actively involved in the remediation (both literal and metaphorical) of their land, themselves and their community.

The root of the problem or A crude awakening

Lago Agrio is an oil town. It seethes with oil town agendas. Off gasing flames illuminate the night sky like prehistoric fire flies mating in Hell. PetroEcuador is the new polluter in town. The blatant disregard for people and ¨el ambiente¨, the environment, is as shocking at the 600 open uinlined waste pits left by Texaco(Chevron) and the 13 billions gallons of wastewater allowed to flow in the rivers and streams to the virgen forests of the Oriente´.

Lets start with Charapa, over 35 years old, leaching waste oil and tar into the water table for more years than I´ve been living, it´s a speck of dust in Big Oil´s wastepile. Charapa is 9 feet deep and about 10000 square feet at the surface. It´s a nightmare, the leaf litter has concealed the pit under about 4 inches of natural compost. The air here is volatile and toxic. The scent of petroleum 35+ years later is still fetid. The site is a focus of fungal remediation with some interesting succesion going on.


Random oil spill discovery on the way back from Charapa! This makes me sick. Look at the images. They tell the real story. This oil spill is the work of PetroEcuador and we clocked it at dumping about 55 gallons per 2 hours, 12 barrels a day into this stream. The cleanup effort was, get this, a stick hammered into the open pipeline. Yes, no $5 cap to stop the flow, no mending effort, just sawdust on the ground, and a big fucking leak. The leak looks small but 12 barrels a day is unacceptable. This blatant lack of regard for everything and everyone surrounding this place infuriates me. I have never experienced anger of this dimension before. How would you feel if crude oil was being sprayed on your lawn or garden, would it still be green? Think about the true price of fossil fuels as you wait to pay for the environmental damage of companies like Texaco right there at the pumps. Five dollars a gallon will never comes close to paying for the pain and destruction caused by these companies. How can we change things?

I´m too angry to continue and this keyboard sucks bad.
more soon.

I´m having problems with images so they´ll come later.

mycelium running

THE MYCELIUM IS RUNNING!

Our mycotour in entirety was completely together by Friday: 12 people who are doing the 3-week tour in full, 18 people total who{ll be doing the Galapagos leg. We met some of the folks at a big shrimp boil held at our house in Guapulo, where I had the pleasure (re)meeting some pleasing Reedies. Then on Friday we all had dinner at the big hotel in Old Town where everyone is staying. It is good having grown-ups instead of teenagers in the tour group: there is no need for me to give my speech on the dangers of purling (“if boys re blue, and girls are red, then together, they make PURPLE, and we don{t want any purple here during our time together!”). Everyone can pretty much take care of themselves and is very low key and chill.

I cannot emphasize enough how much we lucked out on the group we have. Everyone seems really varied in terms of age and ackground, ranging from two Lewis and Clarkie soph-juniors, to an adorable Scottish-Irish-Canadian couple in their late 70s and early 80s respectively. But then again, everyone is from the West Coastish (California, Vancouver, Portland, Montana), everyone is liberal and of course everyone is fascinated by fungi to one degree or another: some casual hunters, others members of mycology clubs and two involved in remediation as a career).

On Saturday (the 12th) we left to the airport to Lago Agrio and the journey contained relatively little drama. We spent the afternoon in Lago giving a tour of the experiment site which hopefully Corey will have time to write about in more detail later, when Im not rushed to head off for dinner.



Oysters peeping out from the yummy substrate of petroleum and sawdust!

entre santos, no peregrinos

I have a silly Mexican Christmas carol stuck in my head because I glimpsed a DVD in one of those illegal pirata stores that used one of the lyrics.

Yesterday around 8am Corey shook me awake out of a drowsy only-been-back-in-Quito-for-about-ten-hours slumber and asked me if I wanted to go to Mindo with Brian and Jess (I kind of want to refer to them collectively as PB&J, PB standing for Brian Pace reversed and J for Jess). One of the hotels canceled at the last minute and so it was imperative to scope out a new one. So the four of us hopped on a bus and took off for Mindo, a little town famous for its birdwatching and community-based tourism.

In one of those random turn of events that always seems to happen to us, the gentleman we were paying to drive us from hotel to hotel offered to take us to meet his brother, who had some private land with trails that were open only to researchers, not to tourists. His brother turned out to be one of the first individuals who campaigned for Mindo to transform their primary industry into tourism as opposed to hunting and agriculture (which involves clearing a lot of forests). He was a very interesting person: long hair, married to a German woman, excellent English (and German too from the little we heard!). He showed us the trail and it will be a great afternoon activity for the tour. We found some mushrooms along the trail, not too many but then again we were walking very quickly--some oysters, agaricus, shiny red ones, little white ones, a big black one that was either oreja de mico or oreja de cerdo, I can´t remember which. The trail goes all the way up one of Mindo´s highest peaks, where there is stil some ´primary´ cloud forest left (not really primary, since one of the concessions Mindo made to the government when switching over to tourism is that they cut down all the cedar trees. Lose the cedars, but save the forest--an okay exchange, I guess). One of the couples attending the tour is getting along in the years (late 70´s and early 80´s respectively) but even if we don´t hike the whole trail it´s still a great opportunity to hike a relatively unexplored area--the trail isn´t even completely built yet.

Something else that´s awesome is that Milton (brother of driver) is coordinating a taxonomy project of all the wildlife in Mindo--all of it. Daaaaayyymmmn. Don´t ask me how long that would take, since all the scientists I know always nod knowingly at comments at how complicated it is the classify the wildlife is in just a 2-meter space. For Corey, it´s a good contact to have in terms of a future volunteer opportunity... he´ll have to write about the details later, but apparently PSU has this crazy detailed moss and lichen (and-or maybe fern?) catalog... plus he´s, you know, good at all that mushroom stuff--Jess half-joked that for the tour she intends on making him a little nametag that reads ¨taxonomist.¨

So we booked the hotel in Mindo, right by the mariposeria that I visited with Laura when I was there, two years ago. Let me tell you, it was strange rattling down the same dusty unpaved road that I rode with Laura in a random pickup truck, to see the river and cloud forest that I took a picture of two years because I thought it was pretty, and yes, it still looked pretty, amazingly, awesomely so. This is likely reiterated enough to the point of stale cliche in Ecuadorian blogging, but it´s ridiculous how much the landscape changes in Ecuador, in as little as an hour and half long bus ride! I haven´t traveled enough over the land in Colombia to say the same, due to safety issues with the roads there and stuff. But that´s definitely been one of the cooler parts of our time here, just watching the landscape roll by the rattling windows of the bus, listening to either a scratchy 80´s music mix CDs or the dubbed grunts of Jean Claude Van Damme as he hacks and kicks away at the bad guys on the screen.

In terms of Quito-town going-ons, Corey and I officially have a room now in PB&J´s house as opposed to just a mattress on the floor, after one of their housemates moved out to go live in the jungle (yes, literally). So far today we´ve successfully bought all the snacks for the hike in Cuyabeno, where we´ll have three big (and likely very delicious) meals a day. Hikers will eat anything, especially TONGOS! Yummy chocolate covered mora flavored Tongo cookies, with such a special place in my heart! Oh, and we may or may not have gotten a fake $10 bill out of the ATM machine. Sin verguenzas, sin verguenzas (shameless, shameless).

Corey just saïd ¨I don´t know if I´ve been bit by bugs or if I have some kind of disease.¨ Hopefully it´s the former, since we haven´t even made it out to the Oriente yet. Mycoutour in T-3 days.

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In Cajas national park, with the prehistoric alien landscape.

What is this mysterious gloop? A new species of slime mold? An example of bacterial-fungi symbiosis? Jess solved the mystery by sticking her finger into the mess, licking it off and pronouncing it as peach jello.

Sad state of inca ´ruins´ outside of the Banco Central museum, which was very cool. Lots of shruken heads which the museum brochure was very excited about proclaiming as the main attraction.
Jess and Brian
Corey about to jump over a stream in Cajas. It was very cold.

Baños has this litte catacombs city area, with its own streets. From the mountain we climbed (yes, mountain. We climbed a whole mountain. It started off as two trails and us randomly pickin one, and then being too proud/dumb to turn back, even when we were scrambling up slopes of almost 90-degree angles), we had a nice view of the whole city, including this funeral procession.
CUYCUYCUYCUY GET YOUR CUY CRISPY BROWN AND FRIED. I actually think cuy is pretty okay, I just got a little tired of eating it the last time I was here in Esperanza. Corey is going to try cuy before we leave, even if it´s the last thing he eats, dammit.
In front of the hot baños (baths) of Baños. If you love screaming little kids with huge floaties bigger than their torsos attached to their arms and little old ladies who for some reason put on their bathing suits backwards so you get lots of wonderful shriveled balloon old lady boobies floating in the water near you, then you would love these baths! They were really relaxing and nice and brown and minerally. It was fun switching from the boiling hot to the freezing cold pool. It made your toes tingle. We all slept like dead burros that night.

View of the city from the mountain.
La Virgen. The trail began as stairs leading to her, and then afterwards it was just us, the bugs, plants and glorious muddy steepness.

The stations of the cross on the stairs leading up to La Virgen.

Downhill trail coming back down the mountain. We hiked up to the little town of Runtun, which was more like a community of scattered farmhouses than a town. It was too cloudy to see the peak of the volcano whose name I can never say, Tungurahua. It last erupted two years ago, the last time I was here, foiling me from visiting Baños then.
Mushrooms! Pollo del bosque! Polyporus sulphureus! That took a long time for me to type out correctly and it made Corey annoyed with my slow scientific name typing skills!


Thinking about the yummy mushrooms, soon to be in my belly the next day when we get back to Quito.

Wow, why are the Cuenca photos all the way down here? Never mind. Cuenca is a pretty city and has a nice river. Too bad the air is still dirty.

Corey imitating me tweaked out on pseudoephedrine. This is right when I was starting to feel a bit icky, a couple of hours before I puked on the streets outside our hostel. The guilty culprit is suspected to be a cheese sandwich, consumed in the bus station of Riobamba.
Amaranth, growing on the river banks of Cuenca.


Goodbye, Baños! You were a very pretty, nice, good city, worthy of many positive English 101 adjectives. Back to Quito now.