Day 14 - TBS

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Today I woke up at 5:15am in order to see the sun rise. Since there is no electricity at that time I had to get ready in the dark. Emily, Shawna M, Stephanie O, Zim, and I walked to the lookout. We didn’t really get to see the sun rise per say, but saw the sky lighten. There isn’t really a good horizon to see it come up over…just lots of trees. It was very peaceful though, and we saw bats flying around and playing with each other. Back near the comidor Shawna found a really neat bird – David told us it was a Wood Crawler, similar to a wood pecker (?). Breakfast was delicious and consisted of pancakes with fruit and fruit juice topping. Since it is Rachel’s 21st birthday we all sang to her too.

After breakfast the whole group went to get boots to walk around the station in. We were split into 3 groups: 1 politics group that did a different hike (Louis couldn’t go because she was sick), and 2 ecology groups that went on a really long hike. My group consisted of Lindsey, Steph O, Lianne, Forrest, Jon, and myself; Maller was our guide. He was a really sweet guide and since he is older he knows a lot about the forest. It took us about 4.5 hours to go around 4km, but it was trekking through rough jungle terrain. They aren’t normal paths that you’d see through the woods – this consisted of ups and downs and mud patches and slippery bridges and climbing up rocks and muddy slopes and lots of ducking under branches and vines. We saw so much stuff including wooly monkeys, spider monkeys, conga ants (they are HUGE), leaf cutter ants, lemon ants (we got to eat them and they really taste like lemon!), tapir tracks, armadillo tracks, deer tracks, sequeda (sp) burrows, palms, fungi, butterflies, bees, macaws, and spiders. Not to mention the plethora of lianas, bejuos, and other crazy vegetation, and termite and wasp nests.

I think my favorite part was learning about the lemon ants to be honest. The acid they produce makes it so only one kind of tree can grow in a specific area and no other plants are present. This allows the ants to get all the nutrients from the tree (?). They are very small ants, and very tasty as well! Then Maller made Steph a bracelet from palm, and he was supposed to make the rest of our group some but never got around to it…He really is a true forest expert though and was a fabulous guide.

Although the temperature in the actual forest isn’t that hot because of the canopy cover, the humidity made it feel like 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone was constantly sweating, dehydrated, and simply exhausted from all the hiking. Of course my group didn’t bring enough to drink because we didn’t know we were going to be gone for more than 4 hours, and Maller cept us moving at a grueling pace. Lindsey kept saying she was going to die and we should just leave her body behind, but we all made it back intact and alive. I think we were all pleased when we arrived back at the station at noon for lunch. I changed into my bathing suit and laid my clothes in the sun to dry a bit, and went to lunch. Lunch was fine, but because I was so hot I didn’t really have an appetite; the juice however hit the spot.

After lunch a bunch of people went down to the river to swim – I sat on the steps watching for a while, covered in butterflies and bees. Finally I inched my way down the steps so I was sitting in the water a little bit because the sun was really hot at this point. Eventually, and after much persuasion, Sam, Katie D, and I got in the river. We swam out to the current that brings us back around to the dock – there is a really neat eddy you can just float in and go in circles forever. The only down side of swimming was me kicking a submerged log…but it was totally worth it. I got out so I could shower before the rest of the day, and went to work on my group project. Unfortunately our teacher gave us little guidance on what we were actually supposed to be doing so it was kind of a guessing game at first.

I ended up in a group with Sam, Lianne, and Steph. We decided to explore fungi growth as compared to canopy density for our mini experiment. We went out on a 1 hour hike with Timoteo to look for fungi – slight language barrier but it worked out ok even though I ended up doing most of the translating. By the end of the hike we had our project all figured out and just need to go out and collect our data the next day, and then put it into an oral presentation by Thursday at 10 am! Steph ran through her oral presentation for us, and I tried to get some reading done before dinner, but was falling asleep so I had to go get some coffee. Before dinner the class listened to Steph’s and Forrest’s oral presentations for class. Dinner consisted of an awesomely huge plate of pasta with vegetables and a light sauce. The lights went out and I thought we lost power, but out came a cake with candles on it for Rachel’s birthday. The cake was chocolate and delicious, but poor Rachel got her face shoved in a piece of it! (Ecuadorian tradition).

As soon as dinner was finished, everyone headed back to the classroom for David to give us a talk about Oil in the rain forests. Here is some stuff I learned from him:
~ 25% of Ecuadorian territory is “protected”
~ Yasuni is the largest protected park in Ecuador
~ Cuyabeno Reserve: protect fauna
~ PetroEcuador – Nationally run
~ 1980s Conoco got Block 16 in Yasuni National Park from Huaroni
~ Oil makes up 50-60% of National Income – could be extremely detrimental to cease all oil operations
~ Next amount comes from family members that have gone to another country (illegally) and sent money back to Ecuador
~ Next largest income includes bananas, roses, and shrimp
~ Now, majority of Block 16 is inside Huaroni territory à the oil company only has to make a deal with Huaroni to use land
~ Huaroni use slash and burn agriculture to primarily farm manioc and plantain; they are a very aggressive tribe, get women by killing men of another family and taking the women àvery controlled population
~ “Untouchable” zone with Huaroni tribes has never really been contacted – they do not want to be contacted. No way of knowing who/what is being protected. Essentially they don’t exist, not registered, no idea how many people are living there
~ Conoco sold small area to sub-company: Maxus; Maxus sold to YPF (previously the national Argentinean company), which merged with Repsol à Repsol YPF is now one of the largest companies in the world
~ UN declared Yasuni as Biosphere Reserve
~ Used to look for oil using echolocation and seismic survey; use strips of paper similar to pH strips to see if oil traces were in the ground
~ Texaco used to clear cut huge paths and blow craters in the ground; now-a-days use silicon plug to contain explosion
~ Extracting oil: 1:10 ratio or oil:water; water has salt, heavy metals, and radioactivity; Texaco put most of this water back into the streams in the Amazon
~ Now they have to re-inject water into ground: most expensive part of drilling for oil, this takes a HUGE amount of energy
~ 3X amount of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez has been dumped in Ecuador since 1970s
~ Enter Huaroni territory, they want money, oil hires indigenous peoples to cut down forest
~ Flare (fire torch) kills 2 full sacks of insects and birds each day à don’t know what impact this will have on pollination
~ Garbage = problem; Huaroni dump garbage à their garbage used to only consist of organic/biodegradable matter, now contains plastics, etc
~ Basically, Huaroni culture is being eliminated slowly
~ Pompeya à causes much pollution; hunting done beyond needs for subsistence; “false needs”
~ In Huaroni culture there is no private property – things belong to the ones who need it

Tomorrow we will hear from Kichwa and Huaroni people, and we are supposed to think of some questions to ask them. Oil is basically a really depressing topic, and the talk went on so long we no longer have electricity for getting ready for bed back in the cabins…