¨if I can´t see dancing elephants then I´m not interested.¨

Well, I´m in Coca all day, and the Internet at the hotel is free, so I´m jealously hogging it from the passive aggressive Frenchman lurking over my shoulder and uploading some photos for folks´ viewing pleasure.
The flooded forest of Cuyabeno.

Little caterpillars.
This was a cool tree. No one seemed to know the name of it, it was just ¨the white tree.¨ It´s white because it´s covered with a kind of fungus. It´s cool because the tree hardly has any leaves on it, so it´s as though the fungus and the tree are in a kind of symbiotic relationship with each other, where the tree benefits from the fungus and vice versa. Wow, my scientific writing is so wonderfully informative and accurate. What´s really cool about the tree is a) it glows in the dark (really! I saw it in Yasuni!) and b) when you rub your fingers against the bark the fungus comes off in a powdery, crumbly form, and apparently you can use it as a deoderant. Mmmm.
Earth tongue fungi (genus xylaria).

This fungus glows in the dark too! Bioluminescent fungi (genus mycena). The first cordyceps we found in Ecuador! Thank you Jessica (I mean, yeeeeeessica, her other alias), for being clever enough to lift up the leaf and spot it.

NOT A REISHI (a cool polypore you make tea out of it and drink for general health and well-being, following the example of the Chinese). Reishi have brown spores. Probably ganoderma applanatum.

Brian deconstructs our homemade laboratory, essentially a giant fishtank, in which exciting things such as cloning take place.
The cicada nest. You know, the bugs that are buried underground for 17 years and go EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE when they come out. Kind of like me very early in the morning.

An earthstar!

Corey doesn´t even know what this shit is.

Orange fuzzy cup happy fungi! i.e. Cucina
There are a lot of monkeys in the jungle.

A lot of pretty sunsets, too.
The yage or ayahuasca vine (the one with three leaves--Corey is mad at me for using this picture because he feels it isn´t correct, as there are three vine species depicted. My attitude is it´s in there suuuuumwhere, the shaman man told me sooooo!). otherwise known as Tori Amos´ favorite beverage. Thank you, yage, for blessing the world with such lovely ditties such as ¨Father Lucifer¨!

Also, this is a bit of a long interruption, but I wanted to cite an interesting Tori Amos quote from an interview concerning her experiences with this plant:

¨The drug which had a big effect on me was ayahuasca. It comes from a vine in the Amazon and you ingest it. You know that stuff they take in The Emerald Forest? It’s like that. I was hanging around with some medicine women and they suggested I try it. I was very lucid, but felt like I was walking around Fantasia, having a conversation with myself. It isn’t like acid. It’s more emotional, more mental. But it can grab you by the balls and just shove you up against the wall. I’ve been in a room with a woman who was literally trying to bite her own arm off. And this lasted for 15 hours. I wasn’t scared - just scared that I’d make a fool of myself. The funny thing was, I kept laughing and laughing, rather than sitting in the corner being intense. Then every so often, I’d say, I’m in a really rough patch. And one of the medicine women would come over and reassure me that everything was going to be alright. But it would keep on getting deeper. In the end, though, it was an educational experience. I learned a lot about myself. I haven’t taken it in a couple of years now. You can only really do it once in a blue moon. But the wild thing is that sometimes I only have to smell something and I’m right back there again, high as a kite. It just happens.

I’m really into moderation. Too much of anything will harm you in the end. Too much sugar. Too much pasta. I’m into drugs as a teaching tool, which is why I only take hallucinogens. I mean, it’s not like I’ve never done cocaine, but, on the whole, if I can’t see dancing elephants then I’m not interested.¨ [Q - May 1995]

Thank you for those wise and informative words, Tori. For more interesting Tori stories on journeys and more, click on the Tori Stories link at yessaid.com.

The Brian! We love the Brian! The mushrooms love the Brian too!

Moths don´t mind cigarette butts. This was at the bridge where we took the canoa into the park, mind you--not the jungle floor!

Pizza Hut takes the concept of salchipapa (french fries and sausages, fried together in the same gloriously sizzling oil) just a little too far.
Corey´s fish face.

Pipe lines running along the road in front of people´s homes, a common Lago Agrio roadside scene.

Back in Quito, we relaxed and recuperated for a few days. Corey, Chris and I went on a dayhike to Ilalo, a nearby mountain in Tumbaco. We originally wanted to go mushroom hunting but the landscape ended up being a bit too dry and arid, very California-like. Still, it was nice.

Danny and Clyde, i.e. Theresa. Danny was an absolute hero with his camera throughout the trip and is responsible for the amazing site chronicling all of our Mycotour mushroom finds, ranging from Cuyabeno to Mindo. Check it out: http://www.flickr.com/groups/mushroomsofecuador/ Rock on, Danny.
The lady who owned this donkey scolded us on our way back down the mountain for not making it all the way to the top. We bowed our heads in altitude-gasping gringo shame and scurried away.

notes from Julie´s Jungle Adventures

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.