The Orient

Upon returning from the (west) coast I took another overnight bus to the far east of the country to the Cuyabeno National Reserve, a preserved jungle habitat in the northeast of the country close to the borders of both Colombia and Peru. I went for a short 4-day trip with 3 other guys from the hostel/school I had been attending in Quito, almost a requisite trip to the Ecuadorian jungle before I left the country. Some quick highlights:

- Eating ¨lemon ants¨ that live inside certrain tree branches and secrete a liquid that does taste just like lemons.
- Lots and lots of bugs, spiders, exotic birds
- Lots of monkeys too. and some freshwater ¨pink¨ dolphins and sloths and night snakes
- Visiting an indigenous community (the Siona) and contemplating how they do their business (agriculture, trade, and suspect intra-family procreation)
- Catching a monster cicada in a whiskey glass and letting it loose in a sleeping cabana-mate´s mosquito net (not really...we were too nice).
- Motorboatin´
- Sunset in a ¨flooded forest¨lake




Great trip. And every great trip deserves a great segway...

The entry point to this portion of the Ecuadorian jungle is a 34,000 person city known as Lago Agrio, which is generally regarded as one of the more dismal and dodgy cities in the country. It´s proper name is Nueva Loja, but on most maps it´s labeled as Lago Agrio. Translated to English it´s Sour Lake, the name of the small town in Texas where Texaco is said to have been founded. This town in Ecuador was essentially founded and developed as an oil town in the 1970´s, when Texaco explored for and extracted oil from the Ecuadorian rainforest until 1992 when its contract with the state expired.

This bit of trivia first piqued my interest a few weeks ago. On top of that, the front page of the best'regarded Ecuarodian newspaper (El Comercio) was graced with a picture of protests in Lago Agrio about 10 days ago. A few thousand people organized themselves around the very first oil drill that was erected by Texaco in Ecuador and made some human-chain political protest messages that were photographed aerially and broadcast during the recent Live Earth concert in New York. Upon hearing this, I was seriously interested in what was going on in this town. So, after my jungle trip, I made a stopover in this gem of a town. What would transpire has to-date been my most memorable exprience of this trip.

From what I had gathered beforehand, Texaco pumped a LOT of oil from the Ecuadorian jungle, set up an entire infrastructure of pipelines to ship it to the coast, and acted a little less than responsibly while (contestably) adhering to weak Ecuadorian laws until their contract expried, and made a bunch of people mad for various reasons. The Texaco story also interested another traveller from the jungle trip, a German named Soeren (where is the o with the dots over it key??) who joined me on the adventure to find out more. More to come, but here´s a glimpse of how I spent my weekend: