A Walk in the Woods

These woods look a lot different than the ones I visited in NH in October, but for me, a walk in the woods, no matter what woods, is an unexplainable pleasure. This 7 hour walk took me all along the boundary of the Lalo Loor Reserve, into an Ecuadorian uncle’s banana farm and back down around to the northern most point of Tabuga. The reserve is on the southern most boarder of Tabuga. While I was relaxing and eating lunch at one of the two local restaurants, scraping the freckle sized ticks off every part of my body, I had the biggest exhausted grin on my face.

Bigote, Maximo and I started the walk carrying a bunch of barbed wire, hammer, machetes etc. Bigote is the cook at the reserve and Maximo is in charge of trails, volunteers and other activities. The reserve has had problems with hunters and people cutting down wood (woodsmen?) and we were on a mission to close a door they had recently opened in the boundary fence. I strongly believe that the people coming into the reserve aren’t doing it o be malicious but literally for lack of other options. The people are coming in from Camarones and if you look at Camarones from some of the high points along the walk, it’s clear that the people have already destroyed all of the forest in the community. The community sits in a bowl surrounding by stripped hills once lush with dry tropical forest. Now the only forest sits along the rim of the bowl because it’s owned by big landowners who haven’t needed to exploit it yet.
To get to this fence we walked along a stream, it’s dry now because we’re in the dry season but remains the greenest part of the forest. Monkeys howled above our heads, playfully checking out who was in their territory. These howler monkeys yell like gorillas but really are the size of a two year old, an American two year old, not an Ecuadorian two year old, they’re smaller here. They are black and have awesome tails that allow them to eat fruits high up in trees that would otherwise be unreachable. They are also known for peeing on people and throwing their own feces in self-defense. This was the case with a fun Israeli volunteer who was really into photography. In attempt to capture the playful howlers on camera he would climb the trees and quietly follow the monkeys. I am not sure if he got any good pictures because he uses film and processes his own prints, but he definitely got some good stories.

I collected a few different plants along the walk to plant in our botanical garden that we are working on at the environmental interpretation center. One of these being a baby strangler fig. They are incredible trees, have a huge impressive presence and are my favorite in the forest. People say the roots can grow up to 100m from the main trunk of the tree. I don’t know if this is true but there are definitely roots in places where it’s hard to find the main tree. One of my favorite parts of the walk is this steep rock face that in the rainy season is a really beautiful waterfall. When we got to the boundary it was really disappointing to see that our neighbors had opened up a new door to get into our woods. We collected motor oil bottles, bullet shells and other trash. Then we got to work. It felt so good to be with Bigot e and Maximo, just the three of us, working hard, making jokes and being together. Besides my host family, they are my family here. Working side by side with them has been incredible. They have completely accepted my desire to learn everything even if it’s considered ‘man’s work’ and even expect me to carry heavy loads, machete the tough hard spots and align the barbed wire.

After the fence was put up and photos were taken as evidence of the trash and the new fence we headed uphill. This incline is ridiculously hard and I gasped at the new fence that my host dad and uncles had put up the week prior. My host dad is 50 but moves like a teenager in the woods. He grew up in the forest collecting tagua and palm seeds. Maximo, Bigote and I had to take two breaks just to get up this hill, my dad and uncles did it while carrying barbed wire and the fence has three layers… craziness.














The top of this hill marks the highest point in reserve and the farthest boundary from the road. From it you can see the ocean, which when you’re hot and sweaty is like a huge tease and makes you think, I wish I was a bird. Well, what kind of bird because during one of the breaks a yellow bellied toucan flew over us. Toucans have a very distinct call and all of our heads flew to the sky to catch a quick glimpse of this awesome bird.

Also at the top of the hill, you can find a lot of tagua trees and chonta trees. Tagua is the vegetable ivory that is used for jewelry and other art. It starts out as a liquid that is in a pod that is in a bunch of pods. With time the liquid transforms into a solid like coconut meat and later becomes really really hard. So hard that it is called vegetable ivory, you can carve it, dye it and makes amazing things with it. Still to this day people drink the tagua liquid where they’re out in the forest and, after that steep climb Max, Bigote and I really chugged it down. I also helped Bigote collect chonta which is a small peanut M&M size fruit from a spiny palm tree that is used to make a drink mixed with sweet plantains (Yummy!). In order to get the chonta down we had to use a long piece of bamboo, make a hook at the top and attempt to catch the thick stems in the bamboo to tear it off. This involved me stepping back and trying to direct Bigote. Every time he’s catch a stem of the huge heavy bunch of chonta he’d have to jump back quickly. Then we collected the bright orange seeds, drank a little more tagua juice and started to walk along the ridge of the hill.

This brought us to my uncle Gio’s land where I had never been. He has a ton of banana and plantain trees and a mama pig with 7 piglets came running to us through the trees thinking that we had brought them food. From here we started to descend into the northern part of Tabuga. As we passed different bunch of fruit trees Bigote told me who owned what. It was awesome to finally see where all the men go when they head off in rubber boats, on their mules with a machete.

During the dry season ticks are a problem in the forest and especially near cows. The ticks don’t carry diseases but are a pain in the butt and hard to get off. I have never ever seen anything so bizarre as the thousands of ticks that were falling on Bigote and Maximo. The ticks accumulate at the end of little twigs in the paths and when you hit them all those thousands of ticks stick to your pants and try to find the warm spots. Read between the lines here, almost all the men have found ticks in their ‘warm spots’. Not to mention armpits or just everywhere!

The walk ends on a smooth decent through ovo trees. I don’t know if there is word for ovos in English but they are a little bigger than grapes, have a hard seed in the middle and can either be sweet, sour or incredibly sour. People often eat them with salt and when I first tried them I hated them. Not, as time has taught, I love them. We stopped and climbed the trees and ate ovos all the way back down to Tabuga.

My walk in the woods was probably one of my favorite days in Tabuga. I felt so at peace, happy and sad all at once. I can’t believe I am leaving here so soon and that time has passed so fast. Yet, I felt like I was having closure with the forest. I saw monkeys, a toucan, tons of other birds, drank tagua, collected chonta and was with my forest family, Bigote and Max. Walking down the main road with a machete and a baby strangler fig, in my rubber boats, dirty and exhausted I couldn’t have been happier.