In Darwin’s footsteps…and the Amazon jungle

Ecuador may be one of the smallest countries in South America (with the most volcanoes) – about the size of New Zealand – but it has amazing diversity.

It’s one of the 17 most bio-diverse countries in the world. Why?

Its long narrow territory is divided by the high Andes range; to the east is the Amazon basin and to the west the coastal plains and Pacific Ocean. Ecuador’s jungle has 1/6 of all the world’s birds and Ecuador itself has 10% of the world’s trees.

 And of course, 1 000km from the coast lie the famed Galapagos Islands where Darwin first started to think about the Origin of the Species. On our first walk on one of the islands – think black lava, white sand and weirdly shaped high cactus plants – we meet the Land iguana. Straight out of Jurassic Park, it blinks its hooded eyes and gazes dispassionately into the near distance.

Its sea-going cousins, the Marine iguana, huddle in large groups on some islands, before hurling themselves off the cliffs to dive underwater for marine algae.

 

 

Many birds and animals are unique to the islands – the Flightless cormorant, the Blue-footed booby, the Galapagos mocking birds, the famous finches, the Galapagos penguin, the Giant tortoise.

You’ll find yourself in a world where time began and has stayed much the same for 1 000s of years.

Come with me now for a walk in the Amazon jungle. It takes 5 hours by boat and paddle canoe to reach Napo Wildlife Center, a beautiful lodge run by the indigenous Anangu Quichua community.

From there we go by canoe deeper into the jungle, getting a fantastic sighting of the critically endangered Giant otters on the way.

Clad in rubber boots we trek through mud, water and layers of leaves. Thousands of trees and plants of so many species even our indigenous guide can’t name them all. Bright orange roots as thick as arms stretch across the path up to 200m from the parent tree. Our Quito guide Robbie, picks up a tiny frog the size of a fingernail with a bright blue stomach and red and black back. ‘One drop of this frog’s sweat’, he tells us, ‘could kill 40 people.’ We shuffle nervously. The leafcutter ants are everywhere, marching along with pieces of leaf to take back to their huge underground nests where they grow and harvest 80 species of mushroom.

Medicinal plants and trees abound – this one cures cancer, that one snakebite, the list is endless.

The birds around us call with strange cries and when we climb the 39m tower which rears up over the jungle canopy we see yet more – the Spangled cotinga, parrots and parakeets, toucans and trogons.

The complexity of the jungle is hard to describe. Mega, mini, nano symbiotic relationships between all living things. Remove a leaf or a whisker and the whole complicated eco-system could come crashing down.

Oil and the oilmen are destroying this jungle at the rate of knots. And Amazon rain forest can never be replaced.

So go quickly.

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