“It matters not how far I walk or how much I discover, my mind still knows the world is growing bigger.” – Old Sean
Seeking the Jungle
In line with my last three weeks in Ecuador, I’m quickly scrambling to the last few corners I can feasibly reach before time simply flies away.
As such, a major tourist target of mine was Puyo, a concrete bastion directly on the fringe of a rapidly vanishing super-continental rainforest. Like many other places on Earth, I am very likely to see the total ecological disappearance of the Amazon within my lifetime.
So I made plans to take a peak while the fringe and interior still exist.
I was semi-successful. Unfortunately, any area that has been settled for any period of time performs devastating hack-backs of jungle foliage to make the area habitable for humans. Despite my best efforts, I ended up in thick and tamed jungle where modern humanity is firmly lodged in the crooks of wide trees rather than the true wilderness that makes the Amazon interior so impenetrable. To be fair, that’s probably all I could reasonably expect.
Reaching Puyo
I loaded myself and a single thin, waterproof backpack onto a bus late on Friday night, as bus schedules are still a slightly wonky mess with COVID diminishing regular hours. I snoozed lightly during the ride, falling back on the well-practiced art of sleeping while sitting upright.
My life isn’t the kind that lets a skill like that get rusty.
However, the drive was a bit of a nightly struggle. Roads in Ecuador are engineering marvels, not for their quality but their sheer audacity. We hugged canyon rims, challenged potholes which rose from darkness and tilted along strangely slanted roads without halting.
I arrived in Puyo near the crack of dawn, pulling up to a hostel around 5 AM. The smell of foliage struck me swiftly. Most of the area around Cuenca smells like thin, expansive mountain air with a strong dash of gasoline. Puyo leans much more towards earthy undertones and swelling scents of vibrant, incoming plants (still with a strong dash of gasoline).
Puyo Morning
I opted to walk to my hostel rather than gambling on a late night taxi. Granted, the taxi would have been marginally wiser, considering the hour, but the walk was short and I arrived intact for a four hour nap before getting my first day started.
I spent my morning wandering around, plying my gradually improving Spanish on the local populace. Puyo has a distinctly different accent than Cuenca. It’s a more robust and lower candace of Spanish, rather than the slight lilt of Cuenca.
Attire changed drastically as well. Where Cuenca has people in business casual to bachelor-nightlife-formal dominating it’s fashion scene, Puyo is flooded with comfort clothes, loose-fitting and cool to brace against the humidity.
There’s less formality on the streets and more impromptu street-stall market situations. Most buildings are dense-looking concrete structures with slightly uneven grey-cobbled roads. Anywhere where open earth appears, plants wrest forth with a vengeance, greenifying liberally and wrangling stone.
The nice feature of Puyo is it’s extreme walkability. I was able to get pretty much anywhere I needed to on foot in fifteen to thirty minutes or so. However, my main goal was to get out of the city and into the surrounding jungles, an endeavor I was partially successful with.
I asked my café owner who directed me to a friend who loaded me onto a cheap, semi-official “tour-bus” that shuttled me out of the city. The bus was crammed full of Ecuadorians, and being the last one on board, I was granted a seat at the very front, where the bus employees usually sit. The window was wide and open, so I got a lot of stares from locals as we puttered out of the city. I imagine people as pasty as me are slightly uncommon here, especially right next to the driver’s seat.
Driving Jungles
The route was flat and covered in low trees. Already, true jungle had been battered back and this area was a sort of lush parody of itself. Many of the more dominant trees are tall, spindly things that poof like a dandelion at the top.
Small, square ponds were used by locals as potential rain catchers and fisheries, complete with nearly-invisible netting across the top to prevent leaves from falling in. Sugarcane, sliced liberally from home gardens lay in large stacks, awaiting the chance to be ground into local candies and drinks.
We drove for an hour, passing another bus which has slipped a tire and was dangerously dipped into a small canyon. A construction vehicle, one of Ecuador’s emergency mountain services was doing it’s best to shore up stones under the bus wheel to prevent further tipping.
River Ride
My small group was eventually loaded onto narrow dugout canoes (canoas) and shoved off downstream with a guide. Our boat was an extremely long and narrow wooden contraption with ancient flecks of white paint desperately clinging onto the hull. The areas without paint were deeply scarred, as the river was shallow and much of our time was spent scrapping round stones.
Locals paddled around in the water as it washed past, and the river was crammed with small bits of colored flotsam, like green twigs, stray flowers, curling bark, great, green leaves and the occasional dark-scaled minnow. Unfortunetly, my compatriots in the boat were absolutely hopeless tourists from Guayaquil.
Every time the boat tilted, squeals, giggles and exclamations echoed forth and everyone on the narrow craft struggled to reassert themselves. The slapped their hands in the water when trying to regain balance, causing even further shifting. I was at the very back, meaning I simply had to sit up straight for the ride to prevent us from capsizing. It wasn’t much of a peaceful float down a sunny river, as it was an acrobatic exercise of quietly correcting an intoxicated tightrope walker.
A Tunnel for Tourists
From the river, we walked a little further towards a very clear tourist zone. Here, a large swath of cliff surface had been shorn clear of foliage and the brown dirt was deeply carved with Incan symbols, the faces of suns with open mouths. The mouths themselves were narrow, darkening caves of earthwork extending back into the mountain.
This particular feature wasn’t the main attraction, however. A steady ramp lead upwards, eventually arriving at a huge house with a non-railed balcony overlooking the river we had most recently left. Hammocks hung over the enormous drop and a sort of boardwalk into nothingness was being co-opted for photos by other tourists. On the opposite side, there was a cliff swing allowing people to experience an adrenaline re-creation of childhood activities.
The crowds didn’t really appeal to me, so I sauntered back down the mountain and spent my time exploring the manmade caves at the base. The rim of each cave entrance was caked in a serviceable amount of slick moss.
The tunnels were impressively difficult to get around with relatively few entrances and a complete lack of light. My phone’s flashlight was broken, so I spent most of my time wandering around the interiors, blinking at nothing. The walls were soft earth, giving me a bit of apprehensions about stability, but I managed to avoid becoming entombed for the day.
I did, however, run into various critters that have adopted the caves as home. Chickens, ducks, dogs and a rather ornery turkey squawked, barked or quacked whenever I got too close to treating them like a soccer ball in the pitch darkness.
Mud Stomper
At this point, I got myself some lunch while reading a few books and asking about the local area. I was told to check out a famous waterfall in the area. I was beginning to get a bit pink, so some locals offered to smear my face with grey-water-clay as sun protection, allowing me to march through the jungle with a grim, dirt-and-beard visage.
With this look, I ended up hiking along a narrow forest trail to the north for an unnamed waterfall. It bears mentioning that there was a place I was allowed to rent water-boots for the muddy hike, which I initially did. However, the boots proved slightly too large and the trail was mostly mud and leaves, so I ended up completing the hike barefoot. No snake found my ankle, so I suppose I won that gamble.
I was grateful to eventually reach the waterfall, but there was such a large swell of tourists there, it sort of defeated the purpose of being in nature. I petted a couple of tourist dogs, made awkward eye contact with the only other two white people in the crowd and marched back the way I came, pausing occasionally to splash around in the nearby creek for some private wading. This was probably the closes I got to a real portion of the Amazon jungle, but it would be unfair to say that I’ve experienced even an iota of the real thing.
An Introduction to Cocoa and Kichwa
After this, I wandered to a cocoa creation site which made a rediculously bitter chocolate paste and a strong alcoholic beverage made from fermented sugar canes. Once here, I hooked up with another tourist group that was heading to a ceremonial dance headed by Kichwa people, one of several notorious tribes in the area.
This was at a place called Sacha Wasi, where the community provides education, tours, blowgun lessons, traditional medicine and food insights, local dances and lodging. The Kichwa put on a familial performance, consisting of three adults, several daughters, and two sons, ranging from infants to young teenagers.
The women wore long grass skirts with torsos covered in colored beadwork made from dry bright beans. Men had animal fangs on their necks, bare torsos, crowns of parrot feathers and long, swishing pants of linen.
The entire ceremony, which was entirely in heavily-accented Spanish, was held in a wall-less building with a dried-palm leaf roof called a choza (or chota, the accent was a bit difficult for me).
The building was decorated with hanging herbs, a well-swept earthen floor, a small, smoky fire in the center and an unusual amount of parrots and parakeets hanging out in the rafters. Everyone present was granted a small drink (Fermented Chicha) from a shallow bowl that tasted a bit like beet juice (though sweeter and yellowish).
Meanwhile, the youngest girls walked around the room, using achiote. This is a thin, spikey pod of red seeds which offer a strong color. Ground up, the paste is applied in tribal geometric patterns with a thin, straight twig. A young girl painted my face, giggling a bit when the red melded slightly with my beard.
I asked her what my symbols meant, but I didn’t understand the meaning clearly. It looked pretty cool, though. The rest of the time involved a Kichwa dance where several tourists were brought into the show. Girls swing in sideways hopping, sliding circles, their grass skirts flying as they rounded the fire and the men walked in an inverse direction, slamming on narrow drums, shouting “whay!” in blasting baritones.
I spent a little more time walking around the village, but eventually ended up leaving before dark. Supposedly, people are allowed to stay the night for a small fee, but I didn’t see anywhere that wasn’t occupied. The rest of the night had me chatting with locals, until I finally caught a bus in the midst of a rainstorm which took me back into town.
Day Two in Puyo
The following morning, I forged further north, making a special point to pass Malecon Boayaku Puyo, a sort of walking-park area along Rio Puyo with lots of restaurants, outdoor hangout places, a strangely colorful overlook, numerous jungle-animal statues and Lego colored bridge. My first desired stop of the morning was to be Parque Etnobotanico Omaere, an old sugar-cane plantation that had ben successfully rehabilitated into a sprawling jungle zone for education.
My original intention was to spend a few hours here, before moving on, but it turned out to be so interesting, I had no need to leave for the day. An extremely knowledgable man named Chris from California with a fantastic wizened bears and a large group of young student interns hailing from South America say on wooden benches inside a traditionally no-wall Amazon house, happy to teach me more about the Amazon jungle than I’ve learned in my previous twenty-eight years on earth.
Tales of the Shuar
The majority of my rapid education consisted of stories, beliefs and lifestyles of the Shuar people, one of the seven main dominant tribes in the area. The Shuar people hold the singular honor of being one of the only indigenous peoples on Earth that actively traded with the Spanish without ever being colonized or conquered by the empire.
This was, in part, due to being an extremely spread out cultural civilization (one family usually had hundreds of hectares of jungle range they called home). It also helped that they were truly devestating jungle warriors with a vast, unequal knowledge of local poisons. Heavy razor spears decorated the dwelling, made from the sturdy structures of fire-hardened palm-branches.
Marriage ceremonies were unique to the culture, with a young man taking an apprenticeship with a new father for over a year to prove himself capable of raising a family Provided the young man successfully impressed his potential-father-and-mother-in-law, he would be engaged to the eldest girl in the family, with her sisters becoming additional wives as time passed. As such, all wives were blood relatives of one another, and the death of their husband would result in his brother stepping in to care and provide for the family.
The familial structure was rooted inside large homes, made from pillars of trees and caked on the roof with palm-leaves. A fire had to be kept burning constantly in order to harden the leaves and prevent jungle-moisture from eating the dwelling. The house was separated into a frontal receiving area for guests and menfolk of the house whereas the back zone was private and belonged entirely to the women of the household.
When the house grew old or leaky, the tribal family would wander off into another portion of their range and set up shop once more. Tribal rivalries were common, though expansive space, the family structure and the density of the Amazon mitigated large-scale conflict somewhat.
The household of each family was exceptionally egalitarian, but women had a sacred “garden” somewhere in a private place in the forest that she alone was allowed to enter and invite her husband within. This garden is where the majority of cultivated foods came from, where a woman would give birth and perform other rituals.
The Shuar are generally spiritualistic, believing in a non-form-oriented higher power and energy that permeates balance and natural ordinances of the universe. Men generally walked around nude with a bit of string used to tie up their gentiles, while women were similarly dressed, using their bands to hold pouches like a belt.
In contemporary times, the lifestyle has changed somewhat dramatically. The Shuar people are now primarily based around deep-jungle landing strips that drop in supplies and offer flights to the wider world.
Due to the infrastructure, many of the Shuar stay in a somewhat more centralized location, though there are many other related (and non-related) tribes and Shuar members who continue living an entirely traditional existance, wisely shunning our modern mess.
Jungle Secrets
Crash course on the Shuar barely completed, I spent the rest of my time learning about various plants of the forest. Something called Monkey’s Tail is a furry plant that curls at the tip with perfectly soft brown hairs and a unique pattern inscribed on the interior.
Another tree, known colloquially as a cross tree has a perfect cross in the center of each trunk. Chontacuro worms, great, fat, orange squirming things, are a popular local food with lots of protein, vitamin C and known for healing properties. They tastes a bit like gushers made of slightly bitter tea.
I learned about a subspecies of a local banana with thick, black seeds that taste slightly sweeter than their bright yellow counterparts. Some fuzzy leaves had purple juice squeezed out of them to help settle a stomach.
Uayusa tea was grown locally and I was introduced to several vines of Ayahuasca, the legendary hallucination experience and religion plant on South America. I was shown trees which have branches that dip out in deep, hanging spirals only a few days a year in a process called “pouring out,” a phenomena which only occurs in the tropics.
I was introduced to trees that walk two meters within their lifetimes, trees that hosted monkeys, straight palms that could be fused together to make blowguns for hunting said monkeys, herbal remedies, compost bathrooms, narrow Spanish hikes and great straight-bark trees with bases like an upside-down pineapple leave, covered in spikes.
My guide managed to lodge a splinter from one of these trees into her finger, so it was lucky I had some tweezers in my nail-kit on hand. Finally, back at the shelter as rain rolled in, I was given a form of liquid-treated tobacco, snorted slightly to clear sinuses.
Last Moments in Puyo
It was at this point, my stomach gave me a very pointed nudge. I had spent most of my day in the park, and I finally said my farewells to go explore elsewhere. However, I had a bus to catch back to Cuenca fairly soon, so most of my time was spent eating the traditional “Wow” Chocolate found at Huella Pastaza Ecotienda. (“Wow” has a different meaning in local dialects, it’s just a strange phonic equivalent to the English exclamation). I chatted with some people at the local park, stuck around to see the colored-night fountain Parque Central 12 de Mayo and finally got a burger for the drive home.
Overall, Puyo was a pretty strange experience. It was a completely unique and new biosphere and education I’d never received before. I was practically floundering in new experiences, especially once I got outside the direct tourist-sector. However, Puyo isn’t exactly the Amazon, not by a long shot. As such, the Amazon rainforest remains on my bucket list. I’m sure I’ll find my way there soon, preferably before it truly vanishes.
Sadly, that’s likely less than thirty years at the time of this writing. So I’d best hurry.
Until then,
Best regards and excellent trails,
Old Sean
Written October 16th 2021
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Skog Å Kust Watertight Day Bag
Everyone should have a day bag. My favorite is the Skog Å Kust Watertight Bag. It’s easy to sling over my shoulders and lets me walk without fear of m devices getting damaged in the rain. Better yet, I can go swimming with electronics whenever I need to.
