I usually write about crime and courtrooms, but if John Steinbeck can write a travel book about his dog, I thought I could tell you about my recent adventure to Ecuador, Peru, and Machu Picchu.  One of the things I wanted to do more than anything else was go into the Amazon basin. The Amazon River actually starts east of the Ecuador border, so you can’t get on that particular river.  But, the Amazon basin contains some big and powerful rivers that feed into the main river.  And the scenery looks all the same, anyway!

To get into the Amazon basin, you take a new paved road that cuts the time to get there from Quito, Ecuador by about six hours.  The old road was rutted, single lane, and usually washed-out.  We were lucky.  As we crossed the Andes to get down into the Amazon basin, it was raining slightly.  Still, a huge mud and boulder slide crashed across the road and blocked both lanes.  Luckily, the Ecuadorian people are industrious and they had a big back hoe there to clear-off the road in two hours.  We found ourselves waiting eight cars back from the slide—meaning we missed it by only eight cars.

Once we crossed the Andes the road cork-screws around and, of course, goes down to the jungle.  I could fee it getting hot and humid.  It rained on and off as we made our way toward the Rio Napo, a tributary of the Amazon.  We came to a small town on the river with a gravel landing for boats.  All of us transferred our luggage into long canoes with outboard motors on the back.  The only way to the lodge was to motor downstream.  The pilot cast-off and we churned our way through the cocoa-colored water that had a powerful current.

In about twenty minutes, we rounded a bend in the river and saw the lodge—large and built up in several layers at a point in the river.  We landed and had to walk up a switch-back trail to the lodge.  Once, there I knew we were still in civilization.  There was an open-air dining area next to the bar, both of which surrounded the lovely pool.  If this was what it was like going into the Amazon, it was pretty good!

The sky boasted piles of cumulus clouds and sunset cast a variety of colors over the surrounding jungle: blue, orange, yellow, and salmon.

That night, the weather changed and the rain came—hard.  In Minnesota we have heavy rains that last for about fifteen minutes before they taper off.  In the Amazon, the heavy rain thundered on our roof for hours.  When I looked out to see across the Rio Napo, it was gray and black, but it sure smelled good.

The next morning, it was dry and all the plants and trees had absorbed the water.  I went for a swim before breakfast, as the temperature was climbing quickly.  On a chair next to the pool, I saw an abandoned towel, and a woman’s bikini left on the chair—both the top and bottom.  Where did she go and how??

This was the kind of trip into the Amazon I liked—Amazon Lite!