Day One (Part One)

Wake up in a ramshackle house to the sound of a group of jabbering Huaoranis. At this very moment in my tent it is apparent to me that things are about to get very weird for the next month and a half. We eat another simple breakfast in the house while sitting next to a woman we have nicknamed Typhoid Mary as she has been constantly hacking and spitting up nasty stuff (we would later discover that this woman is Otobos mother, which made me feel slightly guilty at the crude nickname, kind of).
After breakfast Caiga, Bartolo (Otobo´s bros), Conan (the cook), Typhoid Mary, Joe and I head out in the canoe down river heading farther away from the safety of the sensical world. Coincidently the week prior to our departure I had came across a free copie of the Apocalypse Now screenplay and the Heart of Darkness, both stories freshly in head as we head downstream.
After several hours of nothing but dense forest we pull up to the Shiripuno Lodge, which to many is considered far "inside" although we will be pushing on much farther. The place is mostly empty although we come across a peculiar character speaking almost perfect english but looking Ecuadorian and wearing a small music amplifier on his belt, which is connected to a microphone protruding from a fanny pack. It appeared that this man had departed the "sane train" long ago. Immediately he struck me as the spitting image of Dennis Hoppers character in Apocalypse. A brief discussion with him revealed that he was a biologist who had spent many years visiting the area to record bird sounds. He asked how long we were going in and our answer of 6 weeks produced a surprisingly amazed response from him, further adding to my suspicions about how we were going to last that long if this nut job was having trouble fathoming it. After a cup of coffee we reboard and set out. 6 more hours of riding with the ocassional sighting of spectacular wildlife---parrots, monkeys, and a "baby" anaconda that was around 10 ft. long. Once we were long past the lodge and way far from anything else, it was pretty obvious that we were now operating under the total trust of our Huao companions as our being left alone would result in one serious predicament. Later we spent about 3 hours travelling through the Tagaeri and Tanomanone (the two uncontacted tribes) territories, at which point Caiga repeatedly retold us the stories of the history of killings that the tribes inacted in recent years to loggers and the ocassional missionary (sometimes doubling as an oil rep). As Caiga is a future employee of Otobo´s eco-lodge, we are going to have to explain to him that his stories and re-enacted stabing motions are best left out of his guiding of future tourists as it is spooking us a bit, especially when we arrive at a classic ambush-style downed log blocking the river.