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Travels to the last frontier
 Kapawi Lodge©DR
The Amazon. Why not a weekend trip to that last remaining haven of undeveloped land-in perpetual sun (and rain)? This writer decided to take that leap. She left the steely hollows of Charles de Gaulle airport one wintry morning, and set off for a weekend in Ecuador.
The question remained though: where in Ecuador? Jungle lodges have become quite the thing in South America in these last twenty years, keeping up pace with (or despite) the oil companies which have also discovered the riches of untouched forests. All I knew was that I wanted an "eco-lodge", a venue loosely defined as a hotel that does not adversely affect the environment, and in fact-in the best possible scenario-actually contributes to its well-being.
Some eco-lodges recycle the money made by the hotel back into the community. Others use their property for animal preservation. I became a miniature expert on eco-lodges once debarked in Quito. There is one called La Selva, run for 20 years by Canadians, which specializes in butterfly conservation. I did not go to this one after a passing tourist in a bar, sipping her sopa de papas, complained that it sounded like a prison camp for the delicate butterflies. A more home-grown sort of ecolodge is by Coca, the oil town. There, native Indians take you into their homes, where you sleep on the floor. Wanting both absolute "wildness" andluxury, I chose none of these deals, and took the private plane to Kapawi, the most recommended and expensive of all the eco-lodges in Ecuador, over 1000 kilometers from the nearest town "Shell" (named after the oil company) and 20 kilometers from the Peruvian border.
One flies past volcano tops spewing black smoke and then descends into a canopy of vines and palms, knowing one is as far as one can be from a motor vehicle. The pristine territory-over 6000 kilometers-belongs to the Achuar Indians, who collectively bonded twenty years ago to fight the oil companies. No oil companies means no roads other than the tributaries of the Amazon river.
The sense of inaccessibility is made clear when one asks the housekeepers at Kapawi where they come from, and they respond: "Four days walking east."
 Karin at Kapawi Lodge © DR
I was admittedly a bit cynical about this idealism, given the harried atmosphere of the central office in Quito and the fact that this lodge caters to the well-heeled. At $1000 dollars a weekend, including the private plane, it is the priciest of the lodges in the Amazon.
Yet, it turns out that the lodge is truly struggling to keep up the original mission. Most of the staff are Achuar, just now learning how to maintain eye contact with European guests. Rather than a shrewd money-making venture for the northern office (whose main venue is in the Galapagos), the lodge is running just above cost.
The advantage of this lodge is also its disadvantage: the lodge faces stiff competition by the more accessible lodges up north: here the plane often fails to fly because of a wet airstrip. More animals are to be seen in the north as well: oil drilling has pushed the animals to live on the reserves, as readily observable as in a zoo, our guide told us.
Kapawi's uniqueness more than makes up for its few monkeys. The cabanas are built like Achuar jeahouses, with thatched roofs and elliptical shapes, running east to west. Two large screened windows open vistas over a laguna. One has spacious elegance--pretty white beds and dark wooden floors--right among the vines, while listening to frogs and howler monkeys.
Following a strict ecological principle, no nails were used in its construction (although I almost stepped on a screw, loosened from the bed-frame), and the lighting is powered by solar panels. You cannot use your own shampoo, but just the biodegradable lotion provided in containers. The water will drain right into the swamp. And rather than oppressive heat, the climate is mildly cool, perfect to take walks along the self-guided trail in the green gloom of vines and palms, where I came across a guastine (a black squishy mammal) crawling in the path.
We-the ll guests and I-spent most of our time on bird-watching tours down the river, where we spotted a three toed sloth hugging the middle of a tree, a couple of pink dolphins skipping in the water, and the rare harpie eagle surveying his prey, high on a top branch, and other birds etched in the trees: king vultures, dusky billed parakeets, chestnut macaws, and a whole flock of blue parrots. We were the only canoe along the river under the vines, occasionally passing Achuar women washing clothes at the muddy banks.
The last day, the lodge organizes a visit to an Achuar village. This was an experience I dreaded, having already visited the zoo-like Karen tribes in Thailand, with guest shops next door. Here, however, we were told to stay behind an invisible line in a thatched home, the line dividing the Shaman's quarters from the female quarters and from us. The Shaman, with reddened cheeks and a jolly smile, sat in his tortoise shaped chair, carving darts, and spitting from his bowl of manioc beer, a drink made of chewed roots that have fermented because of the saliva. The Shaman's wife-the last of five-shuffled towards us in a dirty yellow dress and scraped bare feet-to offer each of us a bowl of the "chichi", which we had to hold (but not drink) out of respect. An exchange of formal greetings occurred between our Achuar guide and the Shaman, both speaking simultaneously as is Achuar custom. The Shaman then said "wayanik"-welcome-and asked our life story.
Our stories were short: a Dutch banker, a Filipino nurse, a former VietnamPOW fighter pilot. The Shaman's was long. He had once killed many people in inter-village attacks, accumulating in the meantime his five wives (more than one was murdered), until a missionary showed him the light to a peaceful life and he set up this village of 15 children. He now conducts healing ceremonies for the ill, a ceremony that invariably includes ayahuasca, the hallucinatory drink that even his eight year old son-sitting in a Bell Atlantic t-shirt-had taken for a cold.
Of course, "cultural exchange" may be a fraudulent term for our experience, as the young anthropologist, scribbling notes next to me, remarked. When the Shaman asks us how doctors heal their sick, he wants to compare notes. We use knives for surgery, he learns, whereas the he recently used a straw to suck up the bad spirits from the sexual organs, with small puffs. When we ask how his shamanism works, we are being polite, not excited to incorporate this knowledge in our own.
Leaving Kapawi, it was hard not to feel the project is a last-ditch effort to keep up a part of the planet that is bound to extinction in the next fifty years. The founders of Kapawi are turning over this lodge 100% to the Achuar in 2011, to be the only lodge in Ecuadorrun by the indigenous, rather than mestizos or foreigners.
But it is hard not to be pessimistic. Will the Achuar be able to resist the Ecuadorian government who by law has rights to anything underneath the soil? Will the Achuar in five years-despite the active training program and English lessons-be able to meet the standards of a posh Western clientele? (I admit, I myself found the visiting housekeepers in training, in a teenage bevy next door to me, a bit too giggly and noisily chatty for the price-tag).
I would hope to be optimistic given the enthusiasm of the people in the lodge and the exceptional peace of this place. Yet en route to my wintry home of Paris, I met an upstanding fellow from the US, eager to share with me his brochure for his own new lodge, just a few hundred miles west of Kapawi, replete with Jacuzzi and massage services. How did he get the idea and the funding for this new lodge? "Oh, my mining company," he said. "We are surveying the area. Of course it is difficult with all the red tape to excavate, but we are forging ahead."
I would suggest booking your ticket as soon as possible, perhaps before the next sunset! Contact: http://www.kapawi.com
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