Adventures in Bameno, part I

I am back from my latest trip adentro and true to form, it was an adventure. Because you are now reading this means that I got back in one piece. Not to say that I am not totally exhausted and dealing with a particularly virulent sore throat and cold…but I am back…and I am happy to be back.

‘So, how did it go,’ you ask? Well, that is a somewhat difficult question to answer. Traveling and organizing anything with the Waorani is always challenging. See any post from my trips with them for exhibits a-q.

As with any of my stories of traveling adentro, more than half of the story is just getting there. True to form, this was the case this time, too. On the flip side, I lucked out and got to go with the taxi that was taking the gas for the canoes. So instead of leaving at 8:30 a.m. and spending almost 20 hours on the rented bus (which was making several stops, plus a 6 hour detour to pick up other women), I got to leave at 7:30 p.m. and go directly to the community, which was only about 9 hours (notice I say only 9. My perspective on time will be forever changed after this whole experience. Suddenly a 4 hour drive to our cabin in MD sounds sooooo amazing). Anyway, this was huge both for my body and my mental well being.
So, Edison our taxi driver friend picks me up at my house, we drive into town to look for Manuela (who was temporarily missing) and pick up the drill bits needed for the cordless drills for the workshop. We get out of town basically on time (30 minutes late constitutes on time here). As we were leaving Puyo, we get stopped at a police checkpoint whereby the taxi driver is asked for his documents. Just a routine check. A few hours into our trip, however, we are stopped again by what looked like military police. They wanted to know what we had in the back of the truck and where we are going. Edison answered that we had gas (true) and that we were going to Gareno (false). It was an innocent enough of a lie, as it was the closest Waorani community where canoes are used frequently…it just didn’t happen to be the community where we were headed. It wasn’t a big deal, it just made for a little less hassle from the police. Okay, I should back up a moment and fill you in with important background information that would make this little lie more relevant: there is a new micro-enterprise/problem where people are smuggling gas from Ecuador (where gas is subsidized and the price fixed at $1.48 a gallon) to Colombia (not subsidized = more expensive) where it is resold at a big profit. The government is trying to crack down on the gas smuggling in the northern part of the country by basically prohibiting sales of gas into gas cans unless you have a mountain of paperwork signed by the provincial governor himself. This evidently wasn’t an option for us. So, for our merry band of travelers, this meant buying gas in Puyo, hiring a taxi to drive our gas for the canoe motors 9 hours to the town of Tiwino. Sound crazy? Well, it is. (No, we couldn’t buy it in Tena and shave 2.5 hours of the drive. Why not? Because we don’t have credit there. Why couldn’t we pay with cash? Because, we don’t have it. Funding agencies do not send a check at the initiation of a project to spend as expenses arise. The Waorani run credit at certain stores and businesses, then have to turn in the bill to get it paid for by the funder. No credit, no dice, or in this case, no gas. It is a maddeningly inefficient, and in this case, expensive system.)

Okay, back to the road trip. I manage to curl up in the backseat of the cab and catch some zzzzzzzz. Then I wake up and we are at yet another military checkpoint. This time the cab is surrounded by three military police and they tell us to get out of the car and show our identification. This is about the time that Manuela remembers she doesn’t have hers. I am slow moving trying to dig out my ID, put my shoes back on, find my glasses. I finally hand the very unfriendly guy gripping the large automatic weapon my ID and he starts grilling me with questions, “what’s in the back of the truck? Where are you going?” Reflecting on our situation> we looked so sketchy. A taxi from Puyo with two huge barrels of gas covered by a tarp headed north in the middle of the night. Hummm… I started to panic, because a different military dude was simultaneously grilling Edison and I wasn’t sure what Edison was saying…if he was going to tell them the name of the actual community where we were going or some other random name or story. I was really fearful of contradicting whatever he said and risk getting us into some type of trouble, so I played the dumb gringa card and pretended to not understand what we was asking. No speak espanol. Thankfully I didn’t have to play this game very long because Edison had quickly completed his interrogation got back in the drivers seat and said “vamos.” No problem. I understood that. We all got back in the car and took off. Turns out Edison happens to be retired military. And, it turns out that they were searching for weapons not smuggled gas. Deep breaths.

At around 4:30 a.m. we stop at the newly installed military/Environment Ministry checkpoint. The station is new and is charged with trying to stop the flow of valuable tropical hardwood illegally logged from the Waorani territory (the flow of wood, incidentally, is headed to Colombia where it is processed and then too often it makes it to the U.S. as various final products). We asked if the busload of Waorani women had already passed on their way to Tiwino (our plan was to meet up with the bus at the bridge around 5 a.m.). The guys at the station didn’t seem to know what we were talking about. What? This was very worrisome, because that meant the bus had problems or something happened. We decided to push ahead. When we drove to the Tiwino bridge, we saw the big red bus parked along the side of the road. So if a huge red bus full of Waorani and a few random gringos passed through the checkpoint without notice without them noticing, how easy was it for the cunning illegal loggers? I don’t know what this says about the checkpoint system…but in their defense, there was a “shift change” at 4 a.m. and the previous guys might have dealt with them…but still……..sketchy.
At dawn, we unload the two tons of food and baggage from the bus and carry it down to the area where we would be loading the canoes. Except the canoes weren’t there. We took over the cute thatched tourist cabin adjacent to the river and hung out while we waited…and waited …and waited. About 5 hours later, the big wide steel canoe steered by Penti pulled up. No explanation was offered as to why he wasn’t there at dawn, as we had agreed. These are just one of the things that you just have to deal with in this line of work. Because a lot fewer Waorani women came than expected, we were able to cram into one canoe…which was great because there wasn’t another canoe. As gringos, we were offered the prime seats (with backs!) while the Waorani willingly piled in on top of bags and one another. We’re all set to go and then we are forced into yet another holding pattern. Evidently there was a part to the motor missing. Deja vous hits me again from my last trip where we were missing a critical part. Very luckily, this part was able to be found somewhere close…and we were finally off…at the crack of 11:30 a.m.
The plan was we were going to leave at dawn and go straight to Bameno, our final destination. The estimated travel time was 12 hours, which, if we left on time would put us there right at sunset. The late start put a bit of a kink in this plan. We didn’t want to be on the river after dark, and we didn’t want to have to camp on one of the beaches…which happened to be in what is called the Intangible Zone of the Waorani territory (mom & dad don’t freak out) which has been set aside for the Tagaeri and Taromenane, two “uncontacted” indigenous groups who live in voluntary isolation. Not unlike how the Waorani were before contact with missionaries, these groups are fiercely defensive of their territory. So, basically, camping on the beach was not a good option.
So, without really discussing any of this yet, we just pushed off and motored downriver. The weather was actually quite perfect. Yay! I’m not completely cursed with bad luck! It was partly cloudy, so the sun was not beating down on us. And there was no rain. The wildlife viewing was awesome. We saw a Harpy Eagle (very rare) several pairs of Scarlet Macaws, lots of parrots and tucans, Currasows (also very rare), lots of monkeys (mostly squirrel monkeys), turtles, Amazon Kingfishers, trogons, and lots of other birds we couldn’t identify. I am sure we would have seen a lot more animals had the loud canoe motor not scared so many away. Had it been raining, the trip would have been quite miserable. The hardest part was just getting comfortable. Despite the cushioning offered by my sleeping pad, my ass was aching after just a couple hours. There was just no way to get comfortable.
We kept motoring away, only getting hung up once when the engine cut out and we drifted into some branches and then got hung up on a log...

Can the canoe be unlodged from the tree?
Will the group be attacked by vicious caimans and boas?
Will our hapless heroine make it to Bameno and avert nightime attacks by the uncontacted tribes?

Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion of Adventures in Bameno!!!