Field Trip to the Amazon: Rukullakta and Coca (Monday, November 1 - Friday November 5, 2010)

The purpose of our second field trip of the quarter was to view the effects of the oil industry on the Amazon Rainforest. After about 5 hours of driving over the eastern Andes on Monday morning, we arrived at a community near the town on Archidona. We grabbed our bags and hiked through the mud and humid air to the farm of a Quichua family that is found in an area of about 17 Quichua communities called Rukullakta that have all united to keep oil companies off their land. The surrounding were gorgeous; much flatter than the Sierra, but untouched, tropical and filled with life.

After a very healthy lunch, we also moved into a little guest house hut without running water or electricity, but our beds did have bug nets! Then we got a tour of some of the crop areas, learned more about the history of the area, and took a dip in the stream that flowed by our cabana. After dinner we went on a night hike through the jungle, where we got “super lost”, according to our guide Nelson, and we occasionally had to stop to kill the biting ants that were getting into our boots.

Tuesday morning after breakfast we walked through the forest surrounding the farm once again with Nelson. He showed us lots of medicinal plants, some neat caves and the sacred sites for his ancestors. Lunch was followed by a trip in the van to a neighboring Quichua village. First we saw and participated in a traditional music and dance performance and then we played soccer and volleyball with some of the people living there. After dark we sat around a campfire in a little hut and listened to a healer in the community tell folktales. We returned to Nelson’s farm for dinner and another swim in the river near our cabin.

Wednesday morning we woke up and had to say goodbye to Rukullakta, which was very hard to do, even through it was a very muddy, buggy, and primitive place! In the morning we visited a tourism office nearby and saw some old petrogliphs near a neighboring town that is currently being threatened by a Canadian oil company. Back in Archidona we stopped for a traditional lunch of fish cooked in a banana leaf over a fire, which gave it a very rich flavor. Then we all pilled in the car to drive further to the north, where oil companies have been extracting since the 1970s.

At about 5 pm we arrived in the town of Coca, which is surrounded by three contaminated rivers, lots of shacks of poor oil worker families and the actual oil fields themselves. The hotel that the school found us was very comfortable, and the entire setting was quite a contrast to where we had been staying the past 2 days! Our hotel was located near the center of town, right on one of the rivers, and it had three swimming pools and turtles, peacocks, parrots, toucans, monkeys, and guinea pigs right outside the lobby! The weather was hotter and sunnier in Coca, so we immediately jumped in the pool that afternoon. After a nice dinner at the hotel, we walked around Coca at night to get our bearings.

Thursday morning was very hot even when we woke up and our first stop in the van was the small town of Sacha, which is where a great amount of oil in Ecuador comes from. We saw where they are burning the excess natural gas, visited a few wells and walked around one of Texaco’s old dumping ponds, which is filled with heavy oil and has been leaking into rivers and the soil for years. We talked a lot with a farmer who lives right next to the mess, and the effects on the health of the people, animals and crops in the area has been disastrous. Texaco (now owned by Chevon) is still battling against the people here to avoid cleaning up the spill in a court case that has been going on since 1993.

We drove back into Coca and in the afternoon we visited three different offices to talk with the county division of the ministry of the environment, the office of tourism and a community organization of leaders fighting against oil companies. On Friday we visited two more offices involved with the Ministry of the Environment, and both were trying to stop the deforestation, illegal hunting, and rampant contamination by oil companies. We also learned a lot about Yasuni National Park, which lies on the border of Peru and in apparently filled with amazing wildlife and Indigenous communities with very little outside influence. The only way into the park is by boat from Coca and it takes a few days to get there. There are also a few oil fields within park boundaries, so it’s unclear how much longer remain pristine.

On Friday after lunch we drove back to Quito in the van for about 6 hours and it was a good time to reflect on the sharp contrast between the two sides of the Amazon that we saw.