Part of every South American travelers experience includes riding on buses for extended amounts of time. Some people can't stand the lengthy, often times cramped and smelly, rides. I love them, so much so that I often take the seven hour ride from
San Jose to
Santa Barbara when visiting my family back in the
United States. These rides offer a few things that one is hard pressed to get in a car of your own or even on a plane; uninterrupted time to get lost in your thoughts along with new landscapes to ponder over, not to mention time to read that book you've been putting off for a month or so (
Mountains Beyond Mountains turned out to be perfect for the occasion). Two eleven hour bus rides through waterfall laden rainforests and a week in the Amazon provided me the opportunity to write quite a bit of those thoughts down. Typically I write to inform, sometimes to even entertain, this time the words that made it here are designed to convince. You see, I was lucky enough to see and experience the circle of life that takes place on the edges of the Amazon and the experience helped me to see how far away humans have stepped from that circle and in turn remind me that our natural resources can not continue to be taken advantage of. It is my goal to convince you to experience the Amazon for yourself or to, at the very least, help to conserve it from the encroaching modern world.
The Amazon, originally created in my head by my schooling and the Discovery channel was made up of dangerous animals and indigenous tribes that would attempt to shrink your head upon first sight, more like a plot in a Roald Dahl book than anything else. I knew it was an important place but never thought I would ever have the opportunity to go there so did not put much thought into its actual importance in this world. As I traveled along the highway and into the lush green landscape circumvented by small farming pueblos and waterfalls that put those in
Yosemite to shame I realized how much of my world I was truly leaving behind. My experiences were not all good, it broke my heart to see a map of the Ecuadorian part of the Amazon with less than a 5th of the land preserved from human contact, about a third used for tourism and the rest owned by Texaco and Chevron. This was most evidenced by the oil line that followed the highway to the edge of the Cuyabeno river and the oil towns that would randomly pop up between the small farming ones secured by atypical chain link fences, keeping them safe from I don't know what. What was even more disheartening were the small towns that chose not to accept oil money but instead, cut or burnt down the surrounding forest for farming or raising cattle, in an attempt, I can only imagine, to survive.
Fundraising for nonprofits and selling history to teenagers has taught me that making people feel guilty will not convince them to do anything for you. Instead I will embark here on a quest to engage you in my brief story of the Amazon, to paint a picture well beyond what you can watch on any HDTV. I will intersperse my words with pictures but you must remember that my award winning sister is the photographer in my family and I, I am just a girl with a pen that only recently started to take writing even remotely seriously. I hope I will do the Amazon the justice it deserves.
Chapter One titled,
Dear St. Anthony Nicole is Lost and Must Be Found, It's Been About a Month Since I Last Saw Her will be out in a few days, maybe.
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