a brief emergence

I bet some of you are wondering what I’ve been up to since Christmas. Basically, I have been traveling around Ecuador with the other Ecology kids to two main areas: the jungle and the Galapagos Islands. What follows is a summary of some of the best moments. If you want to know more, you’ll just have to contact me after March 4th when I am back in the states and I’ll fill you in on more details.
The Jungle
Our medicinal plants professor, Vlasti, accompanied us on a five-day journey to a research station deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Vlasti has a really good sense of adventure so along the way we crossed a canyon in a flying basket of death (literally a basket strung from a cable wire), rode on the roof of Marco Jr (our faithful bus), and spent over a day navigating the Napo river in a balsa raft.
Once we actually got to the station, we were all supposed to come up with and execute a research project. Mine was on the effects of leaf litter and colonization time on the diversity and abundance of benthic macroinvertebrates in a neotropical lagoon. Basically I played in the lake trying to avoid attacks by red-eyed devil fish and collecting samples of leaf litter (rotting leaves). Then I trudged these samples back through the jungle for an hour to the lab and sorted through all the leaves, separating out any invertebrates and identifying them. As a second part I collected fresh leaves and sunk them in mesh bags in the lagoon to look at colonization patterns by the macroinvertebrates. If you want to know more about the results, just ask me because I could talk about it for hours. We all had to go everywhere in pairs and my partner was doing a research project on leaf cutter ants so we spent a lot of time of the trails searching for nests, setting up courses, etc. Invariably, a hummingbird would zoom by my ear and I would be convinced it was a jaguar attacking. To keep my mind of the upcoming attack, I spent a lot of time commentating on the ‘races’ my partner set up for her ants.
I ended up seeing a lot of wildlife, including hoatzins, orapundulos, wolly, howler, capuchin, spider, saki and titti monkeys, caimans, herons, tons of butterflies and moths, a tapir, and millions of parrots and macaws. In the end we spent three weeks at the station but what follows is an account of one of the most interesting days:
“Could I watch them make bread?” Amelia cautiously asked Diego. “Sure” he shrugged, finding the request quite odd. Angie and I were interested so we tagged along to observe too. The head cook, a large Ecuadorian who like to dance along to regatón songs during dinner took several shovels of flower from a plastic oil barrel and piled it on the stainless steel counter. Making a large crater in the center, he dumped in some yeast and warm water and when we entered the forbidden kitchen the bubbling grey center of the flour mountain seemed to glare at us. The cook was making our peanut butter and jelly sandwidches for dinner and breakfast to eat that evening in the canopy tower. He handed us a bucket of eggs and butter to dum in the angry caldera. Angie timidly poured it in the center and the cook nodded approvingly, saying only “Amasa”. Kneed. Amelia was brave enough to start mixing the mountain but as soon as her fingers touched the flour the cook threw down our dinners shouting “No! It’s going to spill!” He proceeded to show us the ‘proper’ way to mix our tower of flour—something that to us was no different than what Amelia had been trying to do. We tried again and he seemed sufficiently satisfied that we weren’t going to completely ruin the bread because he went back to packing our lunches. As we continued to knead the doungh we heard shouts of approval, “Eso, Eso”. Then before we really knew what was going on the entire kitchen staff was in the room, either sitting on the counter across from us or hanging out in the doorway drinking coffee and laughing at us. They made fun of absolutely everything we did calling us the famous “panaderas de Kalamazoo” and laughing even more as we struggled with the tough dough. Now I make bread rather frequently by hand but I was completely unprepared for the vast quantity of dough we were dealing with. At first, the head cook told us that we were making 150 rools but by the time we were finished we had 250 balls rising in the tropical sun. The head cook alternated between teasing us and helping when we were on the verge of diasters. We couldn’t do anything right: we were too weak to knead correctly, too slow at making balls and our balls always ended up different sizes and interesting shapes while in half the time he would turn out two rools perfectly round and exactly the same size. What we really wanted to do was eat warm bread so we sat around the dining pavilion playing euchre and staring at the oven until the bread finally came out of the oven and the head cook, getting our blatent clues, asked us if we wanted to taste some. It was the best bread I have eaten in a long time.
That evening we hiked out to the canopy tower to spend the night. Armed with two mosquito nets, three sleeping mats and four stolen blankets from our cabins we steeled ourselves to stay up all night. People had told us that it was so loud up there it would be impossible to sleep. Climbing up we saw wolly and howler monkeys playing all around us. The closest one was probably only 10 meters away. We set up camp one floor from the top by tying our mosquito nets to the branches jutting out from the top level and layed out tarps to sit on and keep out the rain. We watched the sunset together and were attacked by wasps that live in the abandoned carcass of a weather station at the top of the canopy. After the sun went down we played Scum, Princess and the People, and the Ecuadorian card game Animal. We had an interesting dilemma regarding how to pee without climbing down the whole tower (it was 40 meters high). After several trials we finally decided to pee down the trunk of the tree from the top of the tower. Finally our dinners and candle were attacked by flying insects, one of which ‘peed’ on Des’ sandwich, and we retired to the netting underneath. We talked for a while about the future amidst eating oreos before falling asleep. It got a little windy during the night but overall I slept fairly well. There was however a strange light in the tree to the left of the tower. Maybe the moon. But I prefer to believe that it was a monkey conference. The stars were amazing for about the first hour after the sun had set but then the humidity from the forest floor rose up and blocked them. The sunrise was just barely visible before it started to pour and we packed up to head back to the station.
So we got back to civilization and had to write a paper and present on our research. A couple of days after the presentation, we headed out for the Galapagos.
The Galapagos Islands
We spent two weeks on them and honestly I was a little disappointed. I really wanted to love the islands and the research that is going on there, but the people doing the research have really awful relations with the local people and that was very frustrating.
Our first week was spent on San Cristobal taking an intensive seminar on the ecology and sociology of the islands. We had four hours of classes a day and the university was on a beach so that we would have breaks every hour where we would go for a swim. I usually spent the morning running with Angie then went to a local vet clinic that was having a spay/neuter campaign to help out. I really liked San Cristobal; it was safe enough for you to walk alone at night and because there is really nothing there for tourists it actually looks like an Ecuadorian town. Angie and I ran a 10-K race sponsored by the government on the island the last day we were there and it was so wonderful because everyone was out of their homes cheering for the competitors and offering water and snacks.
After a week we embarked on a cruise to discover some of the other islands. I was very disappointed with this part of the trip. I thought we were going to get to see basically every island but we were only on the boat for four days then we spend three days in Santa Cruz. Our guide did not accept evolution and had a poor concept of the complex biological interactions going on the islands. He misidentified a lot of animals and kept trying to change our itinerary so we wouldn’t see cool things. I did see some amazing wildlife, though. I think my favorites were the marine iguanas and how their pigmentation changed so drastically on the different islands. I really enjoyed snorkeling though, where I got to swim with sharks and sea turtles and saw an amazing array of tropical fish and rays as well as played with swimming sea lions and penguins. We ran into lots of pods of dolphins on the boat so I spent a good deal of time sitting on the bow of the ship with my feet dangling off the front of the boat staring into the water and searching for everything from turtles to rays to dolphins and jellyfish.
We only got to visit Floreana, Seymoure Norte and Española on the cruise and I think we went to the most popular tourist sights. I was honestly kind of glad to get off the boat though because I hadn’t been able to sleep at night due to the noise and heat from the engine.
I really didn’t like Santa Cruz. It seemed like a tourist town in the US and the amount of money that was flaunted around was disgusting and created a shameful contrast with the local population (who still earns more than double of the average Ecuadorian salary). More than anything I was frustrated with the Charles Darwin foundation. Although I think they are doing a better job now, initially they really screwed with the local populations and it is hard because they have so much money and power that the locals basically can’t do anything. The one really cool thing about visiting the foundation however was meeting Peter and Rosemary Grant who were preparing for a month-long trip to Daphne Major. Otherwise, I was really conflicted the whole time on Santa Cruz because I thought I would love the foundation but I found it very superficial.
Now I am back in Quito once again for two weeks before finally leaving for good. My plans are to spend a lot of time with my host family, continue my aviculture internship, and travel to Guaranda and Guayaquil for Carnaval with a couple of friends.