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)
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