Tena Ecuador, The Gateway to the Amazon

After two months in Quito, we headed south east over the Andes down to the Amazon rainforest town of Tena. I thought that going from ~10,000 feet elevation to ~1500 would make breathing easier but the air became so soggy and humid that I was huffin' and puffin' there too.

Tena is known for the rainforest and the many rivers, which are tributaries to the Amazon, that surround the town. As such, Tena has become a popular launching point for jungle, kayaking and rafting adventures.

As Lilly browsed the various adventure companies, I watched a few YouTube clips of young people rafting down the rapids around Tena and honestly it was not something that would have been my first choice. Maybe a nature walk looking at medicinal plants, hon?

We chose Caveman Adventures The owner sat down with us the day before to personalize the itinerary. Since this was my first (and quite frankly probably my last) whitewater adventure, my main concern was that I didn't want anyone counting on my non-existent rafting skills to somehow save their ass from drowning in case the raft flipped, which I quickly realized was a real possibility. He ended up suggesting the Cat 3/Cat3+ rapids of the Jatunyacu River.

So he sent just the two of us that day as passengers with Tovi as our guide in the raft. Rafi, a very young, but very accomplished Cat 6 kayaker, followed us in his kayak as a lifeguard; he seemed bored on the Jatunyacu, which the owner called "the gentle giant" and could be seen checking his Tik-Tok feed while he waited downstream for disaster.

Tovi was very thorough concerning  our pregame safety instructions. For 45 minutes he went over the possible fraught scenarios, how to avoid them and what to do if they transpired. They included, but not limited to: hitting another occupant of the boat with your paddle, getting knocked out of the raft by a wave, having the whole raft flip over and tossing everyone into the water and so on. Then there was what could happen once you were out of the boat and floundering about in a Cat 3 rapid in Ecuador: foot or other extremity wedged in rocks as the waves crashed over you, trapped in an underwater washing machine cycle, what they call an hydraulic...... 

We then practiced how to hold on to the rope that Rafi was going to throw to us to pull us out of the hydraulic and on to his kayak....

I thought to myself that in spite of all these safety procedures, if this boat goes over, I am finished.

Alright, let's do this thing.

As you can see here, if I fell off into these waves, it wasn't gonna end well.

Whew! 5 hours later. Because I am 15 years older than Lilly, and was beginning to be accused of "never wanting to do anything fun anymore" I was game for this but.... relieved when we got to the end safe and sound. 

All's well that ends well. Chilly, but well.

We rented this cabin in the outskirts of Tena, where the Tena and Puno rivers conjoin in the middle of town. Although seemingly jungle-isolated, there was the TerraLuna Lodge right across the gravel street and throbbing house music echoing about on weekends at some motley rustic riverbank bars that occupied a space on a bend of the Puno river.

This cabin would have been considered management housing in the A-frame jungle village that Lilly and I lived in for years. As such, we were potentially more acclimated to community jungle life than your average 10 day eco-tourist. There was a path running along the side of the house that led deeper into the rainforest where quite a few extended families lived; consequently there were dogs, children, men with bush tools, grandpas and teenagers on motor bikes that sometimes traversed the trail from early morning to mid-late evening.

I say potentially acclimated to community jungle life because Yoga Style Hawaii in now long in the past and during the past few years, living in Mexico, Guatemala and Columbia, we were usually ensconced behind tall walls topped with razor wire, broken glass shards and sometimes electrical fencing. There were usually bars on all the windows and at least two sets of heavy steel doors protecting our compound from the baddies that were perchance lurking in the shadows.

This cabin was debonairly fortified, so the nonspecific sounds from the wilds coupled with the traffic on the path caused some concern the first couple of nights. In Quito, for example, if we had woken up to the sound of some random people apparently outside our bedroom.....("what is that noise...?") it would have been cause for more than just some concern.

Walking from the cabin to town, you cross the Tena River with Sumaco Volcano, at 13,090 feet and whose last eruption was ~1895, in the distance.

Weren't Paleolithic Ecuadorans pioneers in the use of the poison dart blowgun and the art of head hunting to make shrunken heads?

We heard the thump of Ecuadorian EDM on the weekends. It is a pretty jungley area so we were curious and went nosing around. Across this swinging bridge was a bend in the river with Cat 1 rapids and a few rustic, family run restaurants/bars.

This is a rustic cabin, with the entrance a 100 yard slog up the side of a mountain, in Baños de Agua Santa, about 4 hours from Tena, that we almost rented. Wanna know why we changed our minds on another stay in a *rustic* cabin?

I conveniently forgot to mention a couple of minor mishaps major transgressions that we inadvertently caused at the cabin in Tena. Although unintentional as well as embarrassing, they are so humorous that the editor of the blog has deemed them worthy of exposure on the Internet. 

We have now lived in Airbnbs for ~four years in many countries. As we move at least every month, we are very careful at the diverse properties to insure a good recommendation from the host (actually we only deal with Superhosts, a title frequent Airbnbers will be well aware of). The cabin was properly/truthfully presented online as rustic and we knew what we were getting into. 

On our first night we got back from the grocery store and found that the refrigerator was not working. We texted the host who as it turned out lived in Quito, about 4 hours of hard driving away. He said that "it was working last week". That very well may have been the case, but it was not working now. We found that the freezer was cold enough to work as the fridge and as we had adventures planned most days, we let it slide.

The toilet in the very small bathroom was tiny, set very low and required a deep squat for someone of my height and girth.  After taking a number two, I found that I needed to put my hand on the sink in front of me as support in order to hoist myself up from the abyss. Well, as it later turned out, the sink was attached to the wall with two little aluminum thingamajigs, and I pulled it off the wall. The sink shattered on the ceramic floor into many sharp dangerous shards and sheared off the intake water valve, spraying water like a fire hose against the opposite wall. Lilly heard all the commotion and thought that I had had a heart attack. When I got the door opened, she saw me with my pants to my ankles, unwiped and shit stained ass and all, broken ceramics and a developing biblical flood. She looked bewildered. As the vast damage didn't seem commensurate with my explanation of only putting my hand on the sink, she later inquired "what were you really doing in there?'

 Although I have had a lot of experience with broken sinks, having owned the Shimmy Club, a, ahem, lively college event space, we could not figure out how to turn the water off to the sink. So a second call went out to the owner. With some doing, he guided me out into the yard, near the front gate and jungle path to a little blue knob. He then said he would  make the ~4 hour mountainous drive from Quito (man that must be one sucky part of being an Airbnb Superhost).

The Superhost eventually got there, well into the evening. He brought some tools to clean up the mess and seal off the broken water valve. We chatted for an hour or so as he was extremely knowledgeable about indigenous tribes in the area and the plants that they use; I think he may have been some kind of professor. He spent the night in one of the downstairs bedroom and was gone in the morning. We offered to pay for the sink, but he wouldn't have it. In my defense, the sink didn't have one of those support pedestals and was barely connected to the homespun wall, but still it was horrifying and embarrassing.

A few days later we were sitting on the front porch after adventure. There was one of those sturdy tables that had an indentation/niche in the middle where you can put decorative shells and such (in this case there were what looked like indigenous beads) and then the whole table is covered with a thick piece of glass. Popcorn is served with many meals in Ecuador, so Lilly was cooking up a batch. When the joy was ready, she then put the hot metal pot on the table.

A SICKENING CRACKKKK. The whole area around the pot shattered into shards of glass. "Is this, like, really happening?" In a short week, it seemed like we had all but destroyed this man's cabin. We were so horrified that we waited until the day we were leaving to send him a picture of the damage. From his reply I learned a new phrase in Spanish "What a bummer". We left him a $160 in a secret place, which was the cost of the rent for the whole week, apologized profusely and then did the ye ole Leake skedaddle down to the bus station and fled to Baños de Agua Santa.

Hence, there would no rustic cabin in Baños or really anyplace else for a while.

Instead, opted for a condo in Baños. It is in a quiet neighborhood overlooking this mandarin orange and avocado orchard across the street. I guess the cloud forest elevation and the proximity of the equator make this area a real citrus garden spot. This foto is taken from a large plate glass window in one of the bedrooms. Day and night it offers a movie of the clouds coming and going, rain storms coming and going and tiny hummingbirds....well you get the idea.

Baños is the adventure capital of Ecuador. It offers all manner of out door activities and adventures, but at the center of it all are the hot springs heated by the nearby very active Tungurahua volcano. The Termas de la Virgin de Santa Agua is located right in the middle of "downtown" Baños. It is local, inexpensive and can be quite crowded when school is out and on weekends. There are others scattered about the area.

Of course the Indigenous Quechua people have visited the hot and cold springs for millennia and had their own legends concerning the pretty, promiscuous and volatile Mama Tungurahua. As usual, the Spanish Dominican Catholic priests took the folkloric and pagan beliefs of the local people and began the process of melding a pagan goddess with a Catholic saint. Soon, stories of the Virgin Mary appearing at the base of the waterfall circulated and voilà, like that you had a new syncretic religion.

In the 1940's they built these laundry tubs, where the locals could wash their clothes with holy water.

      I guess everyone has washer machines now.

They have many different types of pools; hot, hotter, warm, tepid, cold, freezing. The Tungurahua volcano heated mineral water is brown, the cold springs are clear.

They have many different sizes of pools: some olympic size ones jammed with young'uns and others that fit only one or two people. These are the public springs that cost $4.00 and are geared towards local families with kiddos, groups of senior citizens that appear to soak and gossip daily and a few foreign tourists.The hot water comes up from cracks in the floor of the pool or from pipes drilled right into the side of the mountain.

There are also a few high end lodges and spas sprinkled around town. We got a night spa pass to one hotel that promoted a "nocturnal pool open until midnight" and from the pictures of the rooms, a naughty weekend. There were a few ahem, exploring couples and newlyweds sipping fruit drinks in the various pools and fountains. It was much cleaner than the public pools because there was no brown water to leave stains and mineral build up on the tiles.

WAIT A FRICKIN' MINUTE! No brown volcanic, cure for everything mineral water? I smell FRAUD! Speaking Spanish has its advantages in a case like this, because I was able to secretly interrogate the maintenance man, under the guise of an amateur geologist. Just as I suspected, they piped in cold municipal water and HEATED IT UP IN BOILERS!

As I said, the town of Baños offers up many other adventures aside from the baños. This particular business offered a sort of facedown Zip Line that left from this vantage point, crossed the Río Pastaza before landing somewhere in that narrow canyon across the way. In that canyon you can see a swinging trapeze like ladder that you climb up to exit after the ride. We gave it a pass for a number of conspicuous reasons other than that the infrastructure seemed a little rickety.

To get to  Pailón del Diablo you have to cross at least two swinging bridges.

But as I noticed Lilly exiting off one of them, I decided......

.......to wait it out with the grandparents and moms with babies.

Pretty cool waterfall though.

Went to the Casa del Arbol where they had a nice hydrangea, flora and fauna garden. That's Tungurahua volcano in the background with some snow on its sides.

and the End of the World Swing

Statue of two boys pondering the Andes; reminded me of my two sons contemplating the Appalachian Mountains many moons ago.

Cuy, er, guinea pig, is/was a thing here. Looked like a lot of skin and not much meat; besides Lilly had had them as pets back in the day. We got the PapiPollo instead.

We then caught the bus to the Indigenous people-centric town of Riobamba. About an hour outside of Baños, during what turned out to be one hell of surreal and hairy ride. I noticed a bit of huffin' and a puffin' on my part while sitting quietly in the bus seat, so Lilly checked the elevation and sure enough, at that point we were at 12,630 feet, the driver professionally barreling across mud slides on sheer drop offs.

Love the jaunty hats the locals wear. We wanted to buy the hats for that special gringo occasion that demands a jaunty Andean look. Alas, as they are exceptionally well made (llama felt?) and inflexible, they would have been ruined in our hobo packs. The specific patterns of the skirts, ponchos and scarfs identify what tribe/village the wearer hails from.

These weren't even the biggest cabbages we saw. Maybe it's the black volcanic soil?

The humble potato was domesticated in the Andes over 8000 years ago and was only introduced in Europe in the mid 1500's. It then spread everywhere.

There are ~4000 varieties of native potatoes, found mostly in the Andes. This market said it offered about 30 different types.

Chimborazo Volcano, elevation 20,549 feet, last known eruption ~ 550 AD, from our kitchen window. Until the beginning of the 19th century Chimborazo was considered the tallest mountain in the world.

 

Are you ready dear reader, to get some shit straight about exactly which mountain is the tallest one in the world? 

I have now hiked on one, pussyfooted around another and now looked at one from my kitchen window all three of the three contested contestants (and even these three contested contestants are contested by mountains like Kilimanjaro, but here goes) for our first place winner of being the Earths tallest peak.

The top three contestants.......drum roll ....................are:

1) Mount Everest, Nepal 29,032 (I climbed to Kali Patar 18,519 which offers a spectacular view of Mount Everest and is as far as a poor boy can climb on Everest without a permit/support staff, circa 1982)

2) Chimborazo, Ecuador 20,549 (looked at Chimborazo out of my Airbnb kitchen window in Riobamba while making coffee 2022)

3) Mauna Kea, Hawaii 13,802 (pussyfooted around Mauna Kea on various adventures, but never did the big trek to the summit 2013-2018)

So, you may ask, who wins? Obviously Mount Everest?

NOT SO FAST!

Here's the deal:

Most of the world measures elevation from sea level, ergo by that standard, Everest wins hands down

Mauna Kea has 13,802 feet of volcano rising up from sea level in the Pacific Ocean. However, Mauna Kea is so heavy that it sinks ~4 miles into the earths mantle. So if you begin your measurements by swimming down into the Hawaiian Trough or if all of the world's water suddenly disappears, you would get a mountain of a whopping 56,447 feet.

Chimboroza is 20, 549 above sea level...BUT......due to the equatorial bulge and if the distance is measured from the center of the Earth, Chimborazo's summit is the most distant point on Earth closest to the Sun, besting Everest by~two kilometers.

Sweet reader, I wouldn't lose any sleep over all this; you might just want to get on an airplane and fly over Nepal, Hawaii and Ecuador and ponder all of them from your comfortable seat in Business Class.

Thanks for Stopping By