Tiputini, Ecuador (Rainforest) 2006 TR, Part 5

**backpack** · 04-11-2007, 11:39 PM

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

April 9: After 5 I couldn’t really fall back asleep and when the alarm went off at 5:30 I got up and sat around in the tent. Everyone else went up to the top platform, but I stayed in the tent killing mosquitoes on the outside of the mesh for a while since everything was fogged in. I went up eventually and took some photos of the forest in the fog until 7 when we took the tents down, then back up for a while before we headed down to the river at 7:20. I had lost track of time until we heard the boat coming, and we had to rush down to the water hoping we wouldn’t miss it. Of course, we did miss it by about a minute, and the group coming up was the same we saved yesterday so it was kind of annoying that they didn’t hold the boat for us even though we mentioned that we were coming back on the boat at 7:30 that morning.

We considered walking back but remembered that Kelly would be coming by on his way to the black water stream, so we waited around at the end of Anaconda and listened to Noah read The Lord of the Rings for about an hour. Kelly came by and saw us yelling and whistling and motioned that he would tell the boat to get us on its way back to the station. We waited around for another 15 minutes or so with Noah reading before the boat came back; the boatman was really good and didn’t even go down to turn around he just did a sweeping turn and softly bumped the prow into the bank. He didn’t seem to happy to be picking us up, though it only took about a minute from him turning into the spot to heading back down towards camp.

Back in camp I went immediately to the cabin to change pants and put on my sandals, then went to breakfast with the rest of the canopy tower campers. We had a big plate of scrambled eggs each and a bowl of cereal – they finally had coco puffs again so I had cereal too. [...] then went swimming with Nir, Heather and Beth for a few hours.

We got back at 4:30 and I took another quick shower, then came to the library and took photos of the beetle Nir caught yesterday. Class was at 6, but we were distracted talking about the building of Tiputini and how the USFQ lawyer was corrupt and contracted a crappy company to build everything. Apparently the flooded buildings down by the volleyball court used to cover the court itself and they flooded within a month of being built. Kelly and another scientist had told the lawyer and the construction crew that it would flood but they didn’t listen to “two gringos” and they also built all the buildings with the cheapest materials possible. Apparently within three years of construction they had to start patching the buildings, which is pretty insane.

The lecture, once we got to it, was about birds, specifically parrots and their relatives in Psittacidae.

April 10: I left the library at 10:15 to go pee in my room since both toilets in the lab are clogged with huge amounts of poo due to the lack of water this morning. I decided once I was there that I should go ahead and shave since I haven’t for a few weeks.

Lunch was pretty tasty pizza with ham, I had seconds and some people got thirds. It stopped raining a bit before lunch and the afternoon was really sunny. I went out for a walk just as Nir and Noah got back in from the walkways and decided to go swimming with everyone instead of hiking. The swim was fun; I went from the main dock and swam upstream to a log they were all sitting on. We would all climb onto the log and one person would stand on the submerged far end, count to three and we all jumped off together, launching them up into the air. Everyone took a turn, and it was pretty fun though I didn’t get as high as some people. After a while Alex swam up from the main dock and ten minutes later we all swam back downstream to sit around on the underwater platform. We took a group photo for Shelia and then everyone got pushed off the dock. I went under and didn’t really know what was happening until I wiped off my eyes and put my glasses on and realized I was drifting downstream along with most of the guys. I swam quickly back to the dock and within a few minutes everyone was back. We sat around until past 4:30 before walking back to camp. I had to wait for everyone else to take a shower, and was afraid that we’d run out of water before I got a chance. I did have enough water to wash my hair and rinse off at least, then came back to the library and watched the South Park “All About the Mormons” episode before class. It was kind of funny, actually, how Kelly came in and started writing stuff on the board and for a few minutes half the people didn’t realize it was time to stop working on papers and watching movies to listen. He talked mostly about birds this time, with only a few distractions, one of which was the jumping spider we had seen earlier but didn’t quite catch.

Dinner wasn’t particularly exciting tonight, just chickpeas with rice and a bit of overcooked beef. The chickpeas were really good, but the rice and meat were barely edible. For dessert we had a caramel pudding that was quite tasty, about as good as the chocolate pudding.

**backpack** · 04-11-2007, 11:40 PM

April 11: Woke up at 8:30 to a conversation about the safety of water at the camp. Apparently they weren’t sure it was safe to drink water from the tap, even though all the water here is the same no matter where you get it. I went to the library at 9 and agreed to go on a walk with Nir on Chorongo. We left at 9:20 and walked quickly around the loop, only stopping a few times for bug photos. About half way we saw Wooly monkeys, and after that we didn’t really see anything. Back in camp we went directly into the library to cool off.

Lunch wasn’t very good, just some beef with vegetables and rice, though it was my first meal in the new dining hall. I was going to go on a walk with Noah and some other people but they decided to go Chorongo and since I did that this morning I figured it would be better to head out to the canopy walkways and meet up with Alex who was already there according to the whiteboard. As I walked towards Murcielago in the stifling heat, a breeze began to blow through the treetops and the temperature rapidly dropped from sweltering to refreshing. The wind picked up steadily until there was a full on gale rushing through the canopy as I reached the walkways to find Alex taking off his harness below the tower. I took a few photos from below and we set off, hoping to get back to camp before the impending rain. A few hundred meters down Murcielago we ran into a freshly fallen set of trees which luckily weren’t difficult to climb over. I decided to walk down the trunk of the tree across the trail to look for any cool canopy animals that might have fallen to the forest floor. Alex came along behind me and slipped on a clump of epiphytes, falling gracefully with a slow twist to land on his back in the leaf litter. Luckily, he didn’t land on anything spiky or otherwise painful, and pretty much just got up and walked around looking for stuff on the ground. We didn’t find anything after five or ten minutes of searching and could hear rain coming in the distance, so we bailed on the tree fall and headed back to camp. About halfway there it started raining with increasing ferocity until we were both completely soaked despite our running the last 500 meters or so at full speed.

I went back to the room to take a shower and then a brief nap to wait out the rain. At 3:20 I heard people coming back to the rooms to get stuff before the float, so despite the rain it was going to happen at 3:30 as planned. The float was pretty nice, we saw Toucans on the way down, then Pygmy Marmosets at the tree we visited, and Macaws in a tree on the way back. I also saw a caiman walk into the water, but didn’t get my camera out fast enough to get a shot of it.

Class was good, we talked about rodents and other tidbits about mammals. Dinner (as Nir had told me earlier) was burritos, which was extremely exciting because I didn’t think I would be getting another burrito night before I left Tiputini. We ate in the main dining hall again, and I gorged myself on five burritos. Really it was enough filling for seven because I piled the beans, tomatoes, cheese, and guacamole so high on the first plate that I had to heat half of it before I could roll the rest in the tortillas. So good, my mouth is watering just thinking about it. We had the lemon cornbread cake for dessert, which while good was unnecessary after the burritos.

After dinner we headed back to the library and watched the South Park “Mormons” episode with some of the girls from David’s class who wanted to watch Lost as soon as we left. Oh, and Alex slept in Nicole’s room tonight.

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One more TR left... I should have just crammed it all into this post, but it's late and I have class in a few hours. Ack.