I never thought I´d be ringing in a new month in Coca, another dusty, dirty oil town with some important redeeming qualities that sets it slightly above Lago Agrio: there are less Colombian prostitutes here, for example. There are a lot of jungle tour chivas rattling down the unpaved streets in the morning, with giant capital letters proclaiming ¨JUNGAL HABITAD¨ and inexplicable pictures of tigers. I´ve been working as a translator for visiting tour groups and have been in and out of the jungle. The jungle! You just never know where you´re going to end up a guess... write a thesis, graduate... move to the jungle... all in a life´s work, I suppose.
Corey flies in from Quito later this afternoon to accompany me with the next group (some Frenchies) to the lodge, which is right on the border of Yasuni National Park, the largest national park in Ecuador with a lot of unexplored territory. There are two tribes that are considered to be uncontacted here and two more whom no one is sure really exists at all. For a good read and introduction to the history of this area and the Huaorani tribe´s dealings with the oil company, read Joe Kane´s Savages. Anyway, Corey is going to be compiling a basic info sheet about mushroom species in the area to serve as a reference for both the guides and the tour groups. In exchange, hopefully the tour agency will provide some good contacts in terms of hunting down potential donors who´d be happy and enthusiastic about funding some oil-munching oysters in Lago Agrio. Ah, networking.
Here are some photos from the jungle, then:
What is this mushroom? Is it even a mushroom?? It´s a total mystery to me. It smelled very mushroomy. It was also huge by rainforest standards--from the tip of my fingers to the inside of my wrist. The stalk was very thick and white on the inside, very plant-like. Help me out here, smart plant people!
Stalking wildlife at the hotel in Coca with the offensive Huaorani statues.
I´m pretty sure these mushrooms were the same kind our guide Don D´leo pointed out to us in Cuyabeno, the kind that cure earaches.
Amanita!
Going through these photos, I find a lot of pictures of trees. I have to keep stopping and zooming in and wondering what it was about so-and-so tree that I found so interesting that it became imperative at the time for me to take a picture. I was impressed by the roots on this one, I believe.
Abundancia!
Awesome cortçdyceps. I didn´t even notice it was growing out of an ant at first, I thought it was just a speck of dirt. It wasn´t until I went back to the cabins that someone pointed it out to me and I let out a nerdy squeal of delight, and then went around waving it under the tourists´ noises trying to make them see the wonders of the killer zombie mushroom. My token explanation of cordyceps to people is that they´re mushrooms that take over insects´ brain, making them climb really high up in trees, where they die when the mushroom grows out of its body and disperses its spores. Paul Stamets discusses the use of cordyceps as a natural pesticide in every mushroom picker´s favorite book ¨Mycelium Running.¨ There´s a neat montage in the jungle episode of the ¨Planet Earth¨ BBC series, that shows a series of insects dead from a cortycep specific to each respective species. For me, it was really exciting to find cordyceps in the field, having only read or heard about them before. Man, it makes me nervous to think of some crazy people figuring out how to use them as a biological weapon against humans. It would be a scene straight out of a science fiction movie, all of us staggering towards trees and ascending them slowly, fungus stems poking their way out of our skulls.
Another tree in my series of ¨what did I think was so cool about this tree?¨photos. This was a cool tree whose bark peeled off, in order to protect itself from lichens and other unwanted growths.
A poison dart frog.
The conga (bullet) ant whose sting is said to hurt for hours, hence the name. I didn´t get bitten by any, though I did get stung by wasps when the guide accidentally hacked their nest open with the machete. I screamed at the tourists to get out of the way and shamelessly pushed a Swiss girl uphill away from the onslaught, placing my hands over her rear end and giving her a huge shove. They were a type of wasps that local people call ¨los pepsis,¨ because they´re shaped like a pepsi bottle and are kind of brown. However, their stings are not sweet and sugary--rather, they gave me goosebumps of tingly pain all over my body.
There has been surprisingly (to me) few orchids in the jungle, I guess because it´s the dry season.
The tree ferns made me nostalgic for a ¨Land Before Time¨ viewing session.
On the canoa, heading down the Shiripuno river. Getting to the lodge involved a three to four hour bus ride from Coca (depending on whether or not it rained), followed by a four to seven hour canoe ride (depending on the lowness of the river).
The awesome French Canadian guy attempting to ascend the ginormous capoc tree. I loved the Canadians.
The lagoon where we took folks pirana fishing, though people ended up catching mostly sardines.
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