Probably one of the biggest highlights that drew me to this study abroad program, along with the Galapagos, was the chance to visit the Tiputini Biodiversity Station , argueably the most biodiverse place on earth. It is located in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon and across the Tiputini River from the controversial Yasuní National Park. Yasuní is the largest park in the country, and also contains vast expanses of known oil reserves, which as you might imagine, causes issues in a country in need of easy money, such as Ecuador. On top of that, the park is home to a handful of indiginous groups, perhaps most notably the Houarani and the Quichua. Hence, there is a very unique and volitile political climatein the area as well.
I will try not to dwell on it too much, but some of the basics of this climate are worth mentioning. Technically, before Yasuní was a park, it was owned and had been used by the government as oil concessions. Hence, although it is a national park, oil was already being extracted when it was created, and the government can actually lease parts of it to oil companies whenever it wishes (despite the fact the Ecuador has the only constitution in the world that explicitly gives rights to nature). To add to this, most Ecuadorian oil companies do not have the resources to do the extraction or purification, so the companies that recieve the concessions are often from already wealthy nations, and much of the money leaves the country. In this way, Ecuador effectively sells their resource for too little, has the resource extracted, and then uses the money just to keep its head above water rather than actually building an industry that creates jobs and promotes higher independence and standard of living.
Anyway, what president Rafael Correa, who incidentally attended USFQ, has proposed in the last ten years is a program called the ITT Initiative, which basically asks other, richer countries to pay half the value of the oil reserves in Yasuní in order to keep it in the ground and also allow Ecuador at least some of the money in order to develope. The richer countries gain because it makes them look like they care about biodiversity and carbon footprints and such, and also might be of advantage later if the world decides to use a carbon credit system or something similar. Basically, thats the jist of it; there are many more complicated issues with it that I will not go into, and as of now, not enough countries have bought into it, and other very recent actions concerning mining that Correa has done will probably discourage people from buying in.
So yeah, really cheery. But all that turmoil aside, we were headed to the Amazon! We got to the airport early and flew to an oil town called Coca. From there, we took a two hour boat ride down the Napo River, the largest river in Ecaudor. We then arrived at the checkpoint for the oil concession, and going through there was essentially like entering a new country. We had to have passports, documents, the works, and all of our bags were thoroughly checked. Once we were through the checkpoint, we took an open air bus, called a ranchero, for two hours through forest that was filled with small banana and cacao farms. After this long, bumpy ride, we arrived at a Houarani settlement, where we got into a motorized canoe on the Tiputini River, a tributary of the Napo. This turned out to be another 2 hour boat ride, but we were really in the middle of nowhere now (as you might imagine), and got to see some cool wildlife such as the Capybara, which is the world's largest rodent, as well as a multitude of cool birds such as Maccaws, Currasows, Toucans, and Tanagers.
After this long day that included three different mediums of transportation, we finally arrived Tiputini Biodiversity Station, hereafter referred to as TBS. It had an amazing outlook over a bend of the Tiputini River, therefore providing us an excellent venue for birding along the river. The station itself consisted of an open-air dining hall, a building with offices, labs, and classrooms, and about 12 sleeping cabins. They also had a series of trails that covered over 30 kilometers of the surrounding area.
