There´s far, far too much that I´d like to write about - and there is no time. There is never any time. So i must restrict myself to highlights. Highlights and perhaps a few pictures.
But first: practicalities. How does one track bears? What does it mean to be a bear-tracker? Does an ability to track bears make one greater than the average human? (Probably.) Did I get the chance, at some point, to set my machete on fire and, thus, wield a flaming machete (Oh, yes.)
So. We tracked the bears - four of them ostensibly, but really just two females; the males being too far away at the time - using radio equipment. The bears are fitted with radio collars after being trapped using a cage and a tempting cow leg; the collars transmit a frequency that the bear-tracker tunes his radio to; the bear-tracker then notes the location of the bear using a sighting compass, after finding the direction that the beepbeepbeep of the bear´s collar is coming from; the bear-tracker repeats this process from at least two other stations (points in the cloudforest from which a GPS reading has been previously taken). Then, using the three points of data, the position of the bear is triangulated to a decent degree of accuracy. And then, this point of triangulation is plotted on a satellite map of the Intag cloudforest area. Finally, once lots of these points have been plotted, a polygon - the bear´s home range - is established. This information can then be presented to Ecuador´s Ministry of the Environment, who will, doubtlessly, then ensure that the cloudforest in this area is not deforested. The bears are saved! Hurrah!
That´s the general idea, anyway. Very roughly.
In order to track the bears, mostly we went on walks; beautiful walks along the roads, and down into the jungle, and up the hills, and along the rivers. On the walks we saw many wonderful things and smelled many wonderful plants and ate bear food and used our machetes to smash paths joyously through what Mother Nature had begat.
Smells: There were leaves that reeked of citrus. There was a lumpen fruit - I think it was a fruit - that when sliced open gave off a distinct odour of disinfectant. There was a wooly-surfaced, small, purple-green plant that filled the air with the sweet stench of bubble-bath. When the forest did not smell of these and other things it smelt of wetness, or decaying matter.
Sights: We trekked up to 20km a day through swollen air and sweating forests - luminous green and emerald green and oil-green and other greens - dipping into gloomy inlets where creamy waterfalls fell to glide tinkeringly over our boots. We rolled sometimes down the steeper banks, if they were covered in vegetation softish on the flesh. I lost a pot of jam on our camping trip in doing so; it was worth it. We became used to spectacular views all day, every day - would occasionally stop, panting from the effort of climbing a near vertical slope, and look around amazed, having forgotten in fatigue the majesty of our surroundings.
In the side of the mountain near Apuela, our nearest town, the features of a man looked out - eyes, nose, moustache. The locals told it was an Inca warrior watching over them, but we at the bear house felt it resembled more closely Friedrich Nietsche.
Tastes: The bear food, bromeliads, tasted of water and plant and mush. There was a fruit called grenadias which you cracked open the smooth yellow shell of to feast on the frogspawny insides. Very special. Tree tomatoes: not so much. Incredibly sour lemons, plucked from the trees, were fun to suck on. At the lodge we ate mainly rice and beans and lentils. For breakfast sometimes there were empanadas and they were wonderful. Cody and Mara, our fellow bear trackers, occasionally made cookies and the days in which they did were happy days.
Those were the tastes of bear tracking.
But there were hummingbirds. Ecuador has something ridiculous like 150 species of hummingbird. I must have seen at least five - species, that is. I also saw, very briefly, a toucan - and innumerable different types of parrot. The parrot is like a particularly boring sparrow to me. I see a parrot and I think, "Another parrot? In the wild? In a flock? Flying in a pretty symmetrical pattern? Rubbish. I´m going to go and watch The Thin Red Line on the laptop".
(Never watch The Thin Red Line. It is terrible, beyond awful. Put up even with multi-coloured parrots to avoid it.)
The best bird I saw - better even than the black and yellow chap who hung out at the thermal baths, or the menacing turkey vultures, or the swift-like swoopy things - was the cock-of-the-rock. Apparently, it is one of the rarest birds in the world. Go and search google images for the cock-of-the-rock. Go on. Do it.
Look at it! It´s all red and pretty and it has a fantastic eighties hairstyle in a swoop back from its brow. Look! Cor ... it´s great.
Anyway, we had to get up at four in the morning and head down to the river in order to see the cock-of-the-rock. The air was a muggy obsidian and we utilised Andy´s wind-up torch for the first hour. Then the sun came up, though it was hidden behind wispy, carpeting clouds, and engulfed the world in a bluish pallor. It was a very different kind of beautiful, and lasted only a handful of minutes before the bilious brown of the river and green of everything else emerged.
We saw the cock-of-the-rock at around ten am, having searched fruitlessly up the river for the preceding few hours. It was a vague red blob in a tree. But Christine - the wife of John, the ex-president of the International Bear Association and catcher of over 1600 bears, by the way - had binoculars. And I saw the red swoop hairstlye in profile, and watched it sit there for around twenty minutes observing stoically the raucous rounds of a flock of parrots. And then we went home smiling all the way like people in a crap novel which has a happy ending.
So, that was a highlight. There were many more.
But that is all I have time or energy for - for now. Hopefully I will find some seconds and some minutes soon in which to talk of other things we did when volunteering as bear-trackers, as well as record our latest exploits as we move down the Ecuadorian sierra towards the sun and sand of the Peruvian coast.
Here is me with a flaming machete. We achievied it through the enforced contiguity of blade, paint-thinner and cigarette lighter. A lifelong dream fulfilled. Marvellous.
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