Amazon Queens

It’s fascinating how history throws up someone like a President Correa, who, despite their class background, has some slack, and principles that aren’t satisfied with the business-as-usual-fiddled-expense-account brand of politics. Foreign oil companies and other big businesses are being forced to cough up the back taxes they’ve spent years assuming they didn’t really owe to the Ecuadorean people. 16 year olds have been given the vote. Teachers who can’t, face re-training. The poor can expect their voices to be heard, and the corrupt, to lose their jobs. Correa sacked nearly all the country’s top judges after being elected, as backhanding their way to retirement had become a way of life. Moving against the entrenched interests of those represented by the judiciary, before they move against you (as ex President Zelaya of Honduras discovered to his cost), was a master stroke. It feels as though Ecuador hangs between the forces of Bolivarean socialism and the business-as-usual right who think nothing of the fact that in 2005, five former presidents and vice presidents were either in exile or in jail. The right – in the name of the “democracy” that had Honduras’ newly unelected President announce that kidnapping the elected Zelaya in the middle of the night whilst still in his jimjams, and dumping him in Costa Rica, was NOT a coup – are using the media to try and re-assert themselves. In this way they hope to discredit the socialist experiment. So Correa’s businessman brother is being pilloried for fraud, some dodgy video has been released, apparently “proving” that Correas’s last election campaign was financed by FARC, and (you know when the right are under pressure), there are even rumours that Correa is gay... Will Ecuador go the way of Honduras, or find its own path to socialism (with a little help from old hands in Cuba and Venezuela, and newer hands in Bolivia and Brazil)?

Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest no longer hangs between left and right, because its very existence is in jeopardy thanks to the twin actions of oil and logging. It’s still magnificent, one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, but it’s disappearing faster than you can read this. Some Indian communities (the Cofan and the Secoya), have almost been wiped out by 30 years of oil extraction, spillage, deliberate dumping (some estimates say more than 30 times what the Exxon Valdez spewed over Alaska has been dumped), and the creation of a toxic environment that has caused cancer rates to soar. Why is it that oil companies only ever find oil in the world’s most pristine places, and never under the corridors of Whitehall or the White House? Of course there’s a fightback, albeit a somewhat unequal one. The Indian nations whose land this is have developed different strategies for dealing with the multi-nationals, from sometimes lethal confrontation, to lawsuits, to deals whereby oil company X agrees to leave so much land alone, in return for mining the crude in another area. In the past the oil companies and the government have been too busy greasing each other’s palms to give a fig for the local people or what was happening to their Garden of Eden. With Correa it looks a bit different (Google Yasuni Green Gold), but it’s early days.

Someone asked us why, given the oil, was Ecuador so poor? After 3 months we’re on the way to at least one answer: *In 1970, just before the oil boom, Ecuador’s national debt stood at less than $300 million – not solvent, but manageable. In 1990, after the extraction of $1.5 billion of oil, the national debt soared to £12 billion. Why? The then Ecuadorean government had signed a contract which basically allowed the oil company to recover the cost of their investment before Ecuador saw any of the money. All well and good, except that the company, a few months after its first well became operational, announced that its costs were going to be much higher than anticipated, with the result that the money the government had borrowed on the strength of its supposed oil wealth couldn’t be repaid in the short term; interest accumulated and the debt grew. The more oil that was extracted, the further the country fell into debt. More than a quarter of every dollar earned from exporting oil went to service the debt. Ecuador then had no choice but to keep producing as much oil as it could in the shortest and cheapest possible time, on the strength of which it could borrow more money. To remain eligible for credit from those bastions of first world thoughtfulness, the World Bank and the IMF, successive governments imposed austerity measures. Prices for cooking oil and fuel would spiral overnight leading to strikes, unrest and coups. The $12 billion debt was run up paying for petroleum equipment, services, supplies and servicing the deposit accounts of petroleum executives and corrupt Ecuadorean government officials.* [*Savages, Joe Kane, 1995, Vintage Books].

The descent from the heights of Quito, with its cool, Spring-like climate, over the eastern precipice of the Andes, into the steamy Amazon jungle, brings many surprises:
1) It’s steamy
2) It’s jungley
3) It’s a rainforest so it rains like you’ve never been wet before
4) You can climb stairs (if there were any), without running out of breath, and
5) This river is definitely not the Thames. Think fast-flowing, the colour of toffee, with whole trees hurtling downstream and VAST. It would take a channel swimmer at least half a day to cross. It’s called the Rio Napo and I’m thinking, crikey what must the Amazon itself be like, if this is a mere tributary?
Celine and I race down this monstrous river in a motorised canoe for three hours and admire what we think is unbroken rainforest on either shore, but it’s not, it’s secondary forest, i.e. what has regenerated after the devastation wrought by the oil companies’ roads. A road doesn’t just destroy trees, it maroons wildlife (animals won’t cross it), and it brings settlers – landless folk from other parts of overcrowded Ecuador, who destroy even more jungle by planting land-hungry cash crops such as coffee and bananas (for guess who??), to make a living. Only after we transfer to dugout canoe, hang a left by an island, stick on a sandbank, from which we dislodge ourselves by rolling from left to right in unison, do we meet primary rainforest. Everything is transformed: the 100 lane sky-embraced Napo motorway becomes a twilit country lane of shadowy water, with light excluded by battalions of massive trees marching down, and into, the river. Some trees have fallen right across, making lichen and moss covered bridges. A symphony of crickets, cicadas, birds, leaf rustle, fish plop and wing beat accompanies us into this new world. We glide along (think Amazon Queens), and slowly, patches of sky can be glimpsed through the legions of palm, tree fern, bamboo, you name it, until our new world lightens and brightens, glint of evening sun on water, and we are soundlessly paddled by Kichua Indians into their beautiful Challuacocha black water lagoon. We are to spend 4 days in Sani Lodge, owned and managed by the local Kichua community. All profits are ploughed back into the Lodge and the community itself which, as a result, has its own primary school, health clinic, community centre and, perhaps most importantly, football pitch and spectator stand!

I think this lagoon and its attendant jungle the nearest I’ve been to paradise. Celine is more reserved; she, after all, she has had to undergo aversion therapy in Quito’s snake house in order to brave the jungle’s reptile population. Strangely, we are the only visiting gringas who get even close to seeing where a snake once slithered by – we step over its outgrown skin. The group who went for a nightwalk in search of an anaconda had to settle for half a tarantula (the other half sensibly refused to leave its hole). We attempt to pass ourselves off as twitchers and are rewarded with Guillermo, Sani’s number 1 leading bird expert, as our guide. He sees through us straight away, but that doesn’t stop the most phenomenal number of birdies – over 100 – dropping by to aggravate us by never staying still long enough for us amateurish types to locate the correct tree, let alone the precise branch and leaf behind which the little buggers chortle away! My favourite was the Rufous Potoo (think orangey owl), and not just because it was fast asleep and thus relatively easy to locate. It rocked gently back and forth on its branch, a breeze ruffling its coat of feathers, totally oblivious to Celine and I crashing around on the forest floor below, trying to ‘fix’ it with my Christmas cracker standard binoculars. Celine’s favourite was the darling little Purple Honeycreeper who (and this is rare in bird nomenclature), actually is purple with a natty turquoise head. Mrs. Purple Honeycreeper, on the other hand, is green, but sports a matching turquoise moustache.

Birds apart, for me, it’s the assault of greenery that takes my breath away. There are shades, shapes and textures of green I never could have imagined. The forest floor is dark (if not exactly cool), and mountains of dead leaves crackle underfoot. Here, the gloomy greens hold sway. 30 metres above the earth, up a tree tower built into an even higher Ceiba (Capok) tree, the zingy yellow greens clash with the mustard greens, the blue greens, the grey greens and the emerald greens. It’s magical – a rolling, spikey, jagged ocean of (yup! you guessed), green. Do not be tempted to wander off on your own. 10 metres from the lodge you could be utterly lost, as to our untutored eyes, one part of the shadowy forest floor looks exactly like another. I ask Guillermo for handy orientation tips. “The sun,” he says pityingly. “But,” I venture, “At the equator, the sun doesn’t vary much from the 12 o’clock position.” (This completely ignored the more obvious point that we were in thick jungle and couldn’t actually see the sun). Undeterred, Guillermo strode off into the undergrowth, found a patch of sunlight, snapped off a twig and thrust it into the ground. A slight shadow was cast since, fortunately, we weren’t dead on the equator, and from this Guillermo was able to declare “North”. As I looked none the wiser, he explained that North was where Sani Lodge was. I mentally make a note not to lose Guillermo, ever, and definitely not at night. He tells us there is no danger of dying of thirst in a rainforest, and that the dead bark of certain trees, which you hack off with your machete, makes a brilliant water carrier. Plus the place is absolutely falling down with edible fruits, provided you have a penchant for shinning up trees which are branchless for the first 30 feet or so. You use your machete as a handhold to assist. “There’s always mushrooms,” he added, clearly doubting my tree-climbing and machete-wielding abilities, “but not those ones”. If you crave fish, just spin a line from a particular palm fibre which, handily, doubles up as a razor. You can carve a spear (with machete) from the wood of a Chonta Palm (don’t ask) or, if there’s a blowgun handy, your chances of fricassee of howler monkey are greatly increased. You can save yourself from death by mosquito by doing something with termites (it probably involves a machete), and for desert there’s the reputedly delicious lemon flavoured ant. The bottom line for survival in the jungle, as you’ve probably gathered, is don’t, whatever you do, lose your machete. To improve sour breath, chew the leaf of a pretty, mauve climber, and if accompanied by gurney infants, there’s any number of plants that will improve their humour. That’s about a zillionth of what’s on offer if you’re in the know. We are walking through the world’s largest larder and pharmacy, and it’s completely free. How anyone could possibly, even for one nano second, destroy it, is totally beyond me. The dawn and dusk sounds of jungle-wandering are unforgettable. The air is heavy with bleeps, crrks, whirrs, plops and reddits. Occasionally, we hear the eerie growl of the red-eyed caymen that lurk in the lagoon. Then there’s the smell. It’s so heady, I just want to sniff all day, because we are walking through the planet’s most brilliantly managed compost bin.

Everyone who visits the jungle has a jaguar story, or rather an absence of jaguar story, since they’re rare, very shy and nocturnal. The luckier tourists may see a muddy paw print on one of the remoter trails. We, too, have a jaguar story. Floating down the Challuacocha at 6.00am with the mist rising, the leaves dripping (all specially adapted to drip barrel loads of water onto the tree below), with the flycatchers catching flies, the kingfishers fishing and the Golden-headed Manakin showing off, there was an enormous SPLOSH! A jaguar, still dreaming of last night’s supper, had fallen off an overhanging tree trunk into the river, right beside our canoe. I’ve never seen anything streak so fast through the water, up the bank and into the dark stillness of the jungle.

From sleepy jaguars and mysterious rainforests, it is a mere 18 hour bus ride (we flew!), to the Pacific Ocean, and the dusty, half-horse fishing village of Puerto Lopez. It was shocking to hear cars and helicopters and see piles of rubbish everywhere. We take a bus through one of the world’s last remaining coastal dry forests. It certainly lives up to its name. There’s hardly a hint of green anywhere; just a skeleton army of bare branches, a giant tinderbox. Compared to Puerto Lopez, Quito seems almost a first world city with its paved streets, flashy nightlife, copious high rises and busy, purposeful crowds. Here, nothing rises above 2 storeys, streets turn to sand and if anyone was busy, they did a good job hiding it, swinging in their hammocks. Nightlife was concentrated on the beach in the early hours when the fishermen brought home their catch to a raucous but appreciative gathering of pelicans, frigate birds and fish-eating humans. To this scruffy, sleepy village came President Correa for one of his Saturday morning question and answer sessions with the people. A few white canopies were erected beside the beach, there was a conspicuous absence of red carpet or freshly painted loo, but there he was, and there they were, the people. They got up from their white plastic chairs when they saw him arrive, sang a patriotic song and clapped, (whilst Celine and I cried). Bus loads of school children arrived and listened with rapt attention, whole families gathered in their Sunday best, elders nodded gently in the sun. Armed police milled about. One burly, automatic machine gun toting corporal had to wrestle his weapon aside in order to try on various pairs of sunglasses that were being hawked around. It was pretty relaxed. The President talked a lot, the people listened. They asked questions, he answered. He made them laugh. They liked him, you could tell. I liked him, and I couldn’t even understand what he was saying! Maybe, despite what the right wing press would have you believe, Correa’s on a roll, because what the forces of reaction in Ecuador have never figured out, is how to talk and listen to ordinary working people, let alone make them laugh.