Whether transportation is by a multi-colored public bus or a luxury coach, the route from Riobamba down to the jungle—or the Oriente as it is commonly known—is the same perilously thin highway. Riobamba, a city of 140,000 with few major tourist sites of its own other than a religious art museum, soon disappears behind steep and verdant slopes.
Despite the gradients, almost every tillable hectare is quilted with fields. Crops range from the familiar—potatoes, tomatoes, onions, beans and garlic—to the once prevalent and now uncommon grain called quinoa.
"Quinoa was more important to the Incas than corn or potatoes," veteran tour guide Antonio Torres explains. "Practically all of the protein the Incas ate came from quinoa."
"It is easy to grow, practically resistant to disease, so it is an ideal plant for third world countries. It has been thought of as a possible solution to the hunger of the third world. Now it is being planted extensively in Africa and Asia.
"Unfortunately we came very close to losing quinoa," he adds. "The Spanish didn't like the taste of it—most probably because they didn't know how to cook it... Nowadays we're going back to growing quinoa—probably not as much as we used to, but let's hope some day it will be a very important part of our diet."
The botanical wealth of the rainforest is general knowledge. Not so well publicized are the unique riches of the mountains. As an example, Torres points out a plant that is being studied as the source of a possible antidote for snake venom.
The bus stops so that passengers can saunter over to a rough wooden sales counter and sample a local alcoholic brew known as 'chicken soup.'
"What they do is get sugar cane liquid and they marinate chicken and fruit in there," Torres says. "Very potent stuff. But they say when you drink that you are getting the poison and the antidote at once, so you don't get a hangover."
From a tourist's perspective, there is only one significant settlement on this descent. Thermal springs at the town of Baqos are a renowned attraction, as they have been since the time when the Incas held sway. The Agoyan Waterfalls may once have been a spectacular rival for roadside attention, but a hydroelectric plant has stemmed the view along with the flow.
Gradually the air becomes muggier and hotter, and as the bus draws near to the town of Shell—named, of course, for the oil company—the mountains give way to undulating jungle. Our destination, Misahualli, is a port on the Napo River, a tributary of the Amazon and a conduit into an eco theme park in the making.
With development and pressure of population threatening much of the Amazon, Ecuador has created a number of conservation areas. East of Misahualli are the Cuyabeno and Cayambe-Coca wildlife reserves, which harbor not only monkeys, peccaries, jaguars and macaws but also protect the home territory of various indigenous peoples.
Orellana, incidentally, had a lasting influence on the region in a way he probably didn't anticipate. Guides and bearers from the highlands abandoned the Spanish expedition and settled in the jungle around here, Torres says. As a result, the Quichuan language of the Incas became lingua franca in the vicinity of the Napo even though the Incas never annexed the area for their Andean empire.
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