We left Otavalo a week ago for the Alto Choco Forest Reserve in northern Ecuador. Ramiro and Carolina, Ecuadorian mountain man, and a Swedish woman, our two contacts there, met us in town to get us started. We ended up in our own small van following a rocky road through the mountains driving through thick clouds to get to the town of Santa Rosa. We got out at the start of the town, just a couple of houses, a store, and hiked into the forest to the house we would be staying in for the week.
Staying with us were Ramiro, Carolina, and three Belgian boys that had been there for 5 weeks already.
http://www.zoobreviven.org/images/albergue1.jpg
We brought all the food for the week up with us, excluding the avocados we picked off a tree, and got our water directly from a river in the jungle that we had to hike to when it got clogged, and of course it did.
We did a variety of things in our stay in Alto Choco. We used machettes to plant baby trees and branches of trees that would grow quickly. We cleaned out the tree nursey and helpéd order what was in there. We spent a lot of time unearthing plastic bags with soil in them that were to be used for seedlings but I guess were forgotten and completely covered with soil and the new arbolitos. We went into town for a crochette lesson, making bracelets from all natural materials, and for our last day we hiked up the house the Belgian boys were working on and hiked further into the reserve to the corn fields meant to feed the rare spotted bears that are protected by the reserve. We planted more corn and then had our lunch of rice sandwiches in a spot cleared by a hungry bear.
We did important work reforesting some of the last 40 acres of the reserve that had not been reached, and we all loved the peace and tranquillity of the reserve, relaxing by a fire at night in a hamock.
Today we are hopping on a bus for the coast and a week working at Rio Muchacho organic farm, making chocolate and milking cows!
Paz
Paul
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