The PLAYA DE ORO RESERVA DE TIGRILLOS is 10,000 hectares of jungle --
all the land which the community of Playa de Oro owns. It is accessible
only by boat. One reaches the village first, and, another half hour
upriver, comes to the lodge.

History of Playa de Oro and the Jungle Cat Reserve

The lodge sits back about 100 yards from the river, and is totally surrounded by rainforest.
This is a rustic lodge (meaning, built of rough-hewen wood), but is as
comfortable as anything you will find anywhere in the Ecuadorian
rainforest. It is an L-shaped two-story building with verandas running
full length, upstairs and down, and a view to the river about 100 yards
away. One wing has four guest rooms, two up and two down, and bathrooms,
one up, one down. The other wing has three staff rooms and two dorm rooms.

In the downstairs corner of the L is the kitchen and dining room.
Upstairs the big corner rooms are the library and the hammock lounge.
Out back, adjacent to the lodge, are enclosures where we keep jungle
cats which have been confiscated from hunters and illegal exotic animal
traders, caring for them (the cats, not the wildlife traffickers) until
they are old enough or healthy enough to return to the wild. Right now
we have a young female ocelot there who was taken from an illegal
wildlife trafficker. She is probably healthy enough to be returned to
the wild, but she still hasn't twigged to the fact that live mice are
edible, and expects them to be hand-delivered, dead.  Obviously she
can't make it on her own until she learns to catch and kill.

Each private room one has a mosquito-netted double bed, a table, a
stool, and shelves for clothes and things. There has never been a case
of malaria in Playa de Oro, neither in the village nor at the reserve.
But because there is malaria on the coast (30km or so away), as a
precaution, rooms are screened and the beds are mosquito-netted.

The bathrooms have flush toilets and cold-water showers. However, the
river is so pleasant that almost everyone prefers to bathe there. Rio
Santiago has no crocodiles, electric eels, piranah, or disease-carrying
snails, and as there is no human habitation further upriver beyond the
lodge, there is no human waste in the river here either.

Water comes from a spring on a hill above the lodge and is boiled before
being used in the kitchen. Visitors always find a bottle of boiled water
in their room when they arrive, and afterwards can get their own in the
dining room, from a despenser which filters the already-boiled water.
Everyone drinks this except Mauro (the project director) who doesn't
like the taste of boiled water. He calls it "dead water."  I tell him
that as far as I'm concerned, the deader my water the better!

Food served at the lodge is almost all locally-grown or taken from the
river. The men go out fishing just about every day, and whatever they
catch is served at the next meal.  The women often catch freshwater
shrimp from the river, too. Sometime they travel to a town with a
market, two hours downriver, and buy a chicken. They make a trip to the
village of Playa de Oro every week, and there get fresh eggs.

The staff insists on plantains and rice every single meal, but I have
convinced the cook that foreigners appreciate more variety.  So,
although there WILL be plantains and rice on the table every meal
(because that's what the men who work there want), there will also be
eggs or pancakes for visitors at breakfast, and for lunch and dinner,
soup and salad to go with the main course of fish, shrimp, or chicken,
plus whatever tropical fruits are in season. I think pineapples ripen in
February, and there are others I'm not sure about, but they have
papayas, bananas, and coconuts all year around.  Breakfast is usually
served around 8 am. Depending on whether you are a coffee, tea, herb
tea, or cocoa drinker, there will be a hot thermos of that on the table
earlier.  The herb tea will be either mint or lemon grass, because
that's what's grown in the kitchen garden.  Lemonade, made from native
sour orange trees at the reserve, is usually served with lunch
and dinner, although sometimes they serve juice made from naranjilla,
maracuaba, or whatever other local fruit might be in season. If mixed
with water, the water of course will be boiled.

There is no electricity at the lodge. Kerosene lanterns are lighted at
dusk and lined up on the dining table. Whenever people are ready to go
up to their room, they just pick up a lantern and take it with them. If
you are a read-in-bed person, you definitely should bring a
battery-operated reading light - you know, the kind you clip on a book
so you can read in bed once you're tucked in under the mosquito net.

The temperature is fairly pleasant, only reaching the low 90s in the
heat of the afternoon (siesta or hang-out-down-by-the-river time), and
that only on days when there is full sun.  Most days there is cloud
cover or rain in the afternoon. Nights are very pleasant, mid-70s.
April is the rainiest month. May and June are the best months for
butterflies. December is the best month for birds.

There are no "planned" activities as such; the staff just takes its cues
from the visitors.  If you are into birdwatching, and want to be out at
first light, you'll let them know that and also let them know when you
want breakfast - whether before daybreak or later, after you've been out
a couple hours.  The guides will take you on jungle hikes whenever you
like, for as long as you like.  You'll most definitely want to take "la
sendera a la cascada", an hour-in, hour-out hike to a waterfall which
feeds a tropical-paradise pool, marvelous for swimming and for imagining
what it would be like to permanently "return to nature" in such a
pristine place.

Most hikes are in the morning, lasting from one to four hours, so that
you are back at the lodge in time for lunch.  That's because afternoons
tend to be either very hot or rainy, which makes that a better time to
hang out in the hammock lounge with a book, or mess around down at the
river.  The men go out net fishing almost every afternoon, and the
women, if you ask, will delightedly show you how to pan for gold in the
way they have done for centuries.  (Don't expect to get rich, but you'll
definitely end up with a bit of gold dust, and perhaps a flake or two.)
  Although their activities are gender-defined, they don't mind if
visitors cross over, female guests going out with the guys to fish and
male guests going with the women to pan for gold or catch shrimp.

The staff consists of the reserve's director, Mauro Caicedo, his wife
Enma, who is administrator of domestic services (ie, the lodge), the two
boatmen, Julio and Isaiah; Mercedes the cook (a 40ish widow whose
husband died of cancer two years ago), and a helper woman from the
village.  (The helper women rotate by the week, so all the women who
want to work at the lodge have an opportunity to do so. Laundry is done
at the river and dried in the sun on the stones.

The Playa de Oro experience is like living with a family, only better.
Because the lodge is big (an abandoned military barracks coverted into a
lodge by the locals), there is more privacy and more comfort (indoor
flush toilets, for example), than you'd have in a village home. It is an
authentic experience as opposed to a touristy one.
 
 

TRACY WILSON

Grace Lush