A full day at Napo

Sunday February 15

We had a “lazy start” this morning: breakfast at 6:30 and the first activity (birdwatching from a tower) at 7:00. But about 6:45 the local family of giant river otters came out to fish along the shore, so that took priority over everything else!  Once we got to the tower we saw two kinds of monkeys and a number of bird species, including three kinds of macaws. Later in the morning we took a canoe ride up a different creek than yesterday’s, stopping to watch the otters again on the way.  We were treated with a sighting of five Red Howler monkeys, including a baby. 

In the afternoon we went out by canoe again. This time we took a short walk in the woods, to see Noisy (or Spix’s) Night Monkeys. While similarly cute, these are a different species to the Panamanian Night Monkeys we saw in the Darien. A Fer-de-lance (a highly venomous snake) was curled up along the trail to add to the excitement. We walked single file along the far edge of the trail, as this is not a snake you want to make nervous! 

We returned to the canoe and retraced our “steps” from yesterday afternoon along the main creek, spotting a two-toed sloth and some new birds. We were grateful for the strength of our canoe paddlers to get us home ahead of a thunderstorm. 

Pictured: Red Howler monkey family, juvenile Zigzag Heron, fer-de-lance, white-fronted capuchin monkey 

Made it to the Amazon

 February 14

For the first time ever (which means we are really lucky) our trip was a bit delayed by travel issues.

We flew to Quito on Friday February 13 without incident. On Saturday the 14th we were to fly 40 minutes to Coca, then board a motorized skiff for a two hour transit followed by another two  hours by canoe to get to our lodge. It was a lovely morning in Quito and our 9:00 am flight departed on time. However as we flew east across the Andes the clouds closed in.  

About halfway through our flight, we got a view of a very odd dark cloud towering well above the cloud cover. Based on its location, we believe it came from the current eruption of the Reventador volcano.  A later google search verified that the volcano did erupt Friday night.

As we neared Coca we had to abort the landing, as the  fog was too dense. We circled the Coca airport for about an hour and were unable to land. We flew back to Quito. We changed to a new plane about two hours later and took off again in the early afternoon.  This time we landed without incident. We were greeted at the Coca airport by a double file of police— it turns out that a famous Puerto Rican reggaeton band was on our plane, coming to help the celebration of Mardi Gras. 

We traveled two hours at high speed in motorized skiffs; this gave us a good appreciation of how wide and long the Napo River is, but didn’t allow for much wildlife viewing. Then we moved to canoes— these had space for 5-6 passengers and 3 paddlers. We were conveyed up a narrow twisting creek for about 4 miles to the lagoon in front of our lodge. This is the only way to get to the lodge, which means all the construction materials, appliances, everything to build the lodge had to be transported in the same way. We saw some wonderful birds and quite a few caimans in this last leg. 

Pictured: Hoatzin, our lodge from the lagoon, Black Caiman, Green-banded Urania (a diurnal moth)