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Travel and World Culture   
 Image: Ecuador
 Photo: Carlo Ricchiard
 Image: Ecuador
 Photo: Chartchai Meesangnin

Tiputini River, Ecuador: A Bitter Pill
By Meggan Dwyer

There has been a hatching; it is near the sleeping huts by the big Strangler Fig. I’ve been told there are at least fifty newborn Equis vipers aimlessly slinking the damp earth around the root system. They are furious at the moldering novelty of their world and nervously lashing out at shadows with untried venom. The Equis slid from their mother, fully formed and legless, left to find their own direction in the night rainforest. They are loose cannons. Unlike their elders, they cannot differentiate between enemy and innocent, so they react to everything as adversary – wind, ants, the toe of a rubber boot. They have no control over their venom, cannot weigh the costs of using their precious reserves and therefore, are at their most dangerous.

I have just arrived here too. I am standing in the midst of the reptilian swarm, directionless in the oppressive half-light. I have no idea where the line is between enemy and innocent or if there is one at all. The air is dark, crude - viscous and smothering.

This much I know. It is three AM. I am standing near the banks of the Tiputini River, a tributary of the Napo River, which is a tributary of the Amazon. I am in the heart of the Ecuadorian Oriente in YPF Oil Block 16. -Huaorani territory, malaria country, jaguar terrain. I am standing deep in the rainforest in my underwear and rubber boots in a sea of baby pit vipers and I’m lashing out at shadows.

In my house in Quito, nine thousand feet above sea level, I placed a chalk-white pill the size of a lentil on my last molar. It melted onto my tongue as quickly as the burnt milk flavored ice cream they sell on the corner near my house there. The pill is Larium, a man-made quinine. I read the side effects and taste the cruel bite of tonic - nausea, vertigo, ringing in the ears, headache, abnormal dreams, insomnia, panic attacks, hallucinations, anxiety, paranoid reactions, transient dizziness, paranoid delusions, hair loss, circulatory disturbances, palpitation, irregular pulse, muscle weakness, malaise, convulsions, numbness, and itching.

Yesterday I flew out of Quito, cacophony of sound, ascended into the silent space above the Andes, and landed in Coca, an oil town roughed out of the forest by the rugged hands of temporary villagers who work for the oil companies. It is a frontier town of quick, cement blocks that house the basic needs – a grocery, a bar, a whorehouse, a clinic. Coca is patrolled by Ecuadorian policemen carrying automatic weaponry. Coca sweats thin beer and sickness and stagnant water. Its inhabitants, citizens of an unofficial internment camp, squint from the glare off whitewashed cement. Coca sweats fear and aguardiente and the looseness that alcoholism and poverty foster. Wing clipped toucans, taken from the outlying rainforest, sit immobilized on perches. Leering murals of naked women riding bongo drums are painted on the cement walls. Dusty children pick at sores and suck sugar water from bags like captive hummingbirds. I step into a motorized canoe and travel up river past small plantations of banana and yucca lining the banks, later changing to a couple of cultivated trees interspersed with clay trails leading to huts further inland. Two hundred feet above sea level, on the deck of a motorized canoe, I swallow another bitter pill, the size of a mosquito, a conga ant, the eye of a baby pit viper.

Further up river in Pompeya, we reach a checkpoint and the entrance to the YPF oil operation in Block 16. Men with yellow jumpsuits and machine guns demand passports, proof of negative HIV testing and inoculation against yellow fever. I sign papers saying that if I am kidnapped by Columbian revolutionaries or various indigenous groups, the oil company is not responsible for me. I leave my passport and documents in the hands of these men and continue across land that is simultaneously inhabited by an oil operation that sucks crude from the deep jungle and the Huaorani people who have lived here always.

Before coming here, I met a man while hiking in the paramo outside Quito at 12,000 feet. He was a geologist who worked as an environmental consultant for an oil company. As we labored over the pillow-planted landscape, he told me how he and his coworker had been kidnapped five years before by an indigenous group who hoped to buy back some of their rights. He was held in captivity for sixty days in a remote village in the foothills. He said they treated him fine, fed him well. As the fog rolled across the paramo obscuring the trail, he fell silent in his story and concentrated on peeking around corners and watching his back. He shivered even though we were struggling uphill. Later, when I returned to Quito, I looked up his story and read that his coworker had been shot in the head.


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