Amazonas
The idea to set out on this adventure grew on me as I wanted to use my skills to create awareness for our natural wonders in this world which I hold very dearly and care a lot about.
I started the journey by traveling in a very small airplane from Quito in Ecuador to Coca (Francisco de Orellana) which is a small oil town and has only been reachable by road for the past 30 years. It borders the 1 Million soccer fields sized Yasuni National Reserve almost directly which is an incredible biodiverse place and holds many indigenous communities. With all my gear in my backpack, there was no clear route from A to B I was traveling by the word of locals waiting at ports for the next boat, going further into the jungle.
I met a Huaorani man called Conan who agreed to take me to his family into the jungle. It was incredible meeting people who didn’t even know how old they were as his uncle encountered the rest of civilization when he was a teenager 50 years ago.
I spent a few days with his family in Yasuni getting an incredible insight into their traditions and environment until I continued the 2000km journey onto Nuevo Rocafuerte the border in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This is where I found a boat that could take me to Pantoja in Peru just over the border. I spent my nights sleeping in a local woman’s wooden shed while recording jungle sounds and footage for the project.
The local slow boat had presumably broken down and was almost a week late. Luckily, I was able to join a postal service boat that was going all the way down the Napo river until Iquitos (a huge jungle city in the Peruvian Amazon) while stopping on the way at small jungle towns.
Before heading to Colombia I hired a local guide and first headed up another river to visit a national protected reserve called ‘Pacaya Samiria‘ To record more sounds and footage deep in the rainforest.
Back in Iquitos, I found a boat that took me to the triangle border of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil in the middle of the jungle. To cross the river, I had to charter someone privately to take me into Colombia.
Now in Leticia you could walk into Brazil’s town ‘Tabatinga’ as the area was so small it didn’t make sense to have a border between the two towns.
I first traveled deeper into Colombia’s Amazon north from Leticia where I stayed in a hut before catching a slow-boat from Tabatinga which would make stops until it reached its final destination ‘Manaus’. From here I hired a guide and chartered another boat which could take me to the indigenous communities ‘Tuyuka’ and ‘Dessana’ where I recorded their instruments before exiting the Amazon rainforest.