Costs, Food and Lodging
The cost of staying at the lodge is US $50 per night per person. This includes three meals a day and guides into the jungle or on the river. For researchers staying a month or longer the cost is $700/month. The boat between Selva Alegre and Playa de Oro is $50 each way (shared by the number of visitors aboard).
Reservations are absolutely required. Please contact
Rosa Jordan
The bill for the boat taxi and your stay in the reserve will be presented the day before your departure. Payment must be made in US cash, nothing larger than a $50 bill, and preferably tens and twenties. That's because there are no banks in the region, so changing large bills is difficult for the local people. Travellers' cheques and credit cards are impossible.
You will have no other expenditures at the reserve, unless you feel inclined to tip the staff. Tips should be given at dinner on your last evening. Whatever the amount, it will be divided evenly among the six employees.
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Set back 100 metres or so from the river, the lodge is totally surrounded by jungle, except for the river side, where one follows a path past through a "food forest" made up of tropical fruit trees (banana, anona, papaya), sugar cane, and pineapples. The lodge is rustic (meaning, built of rough-hewn wood), but is as comfortable as anything you will find anywhere in the Ecuadorian rainforest. |
Rooms are simply furnished, with a bed, a table, a stool, shelves for clothes and things, and a large lock-box for valuables. There has never been a case of malaria in Playa de Oro, not in the village nor at the reserve. But because there is malaria on the coast (30 km or so away), as a precaution, rooms are screened and beds are mosquito-netted.
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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. Readers should bring a battery-operated reading light–you know, the kind you clip on the book or wear on your head so you can read in bed once you're tucked in under the mosquito net. If you like music, bring an acoustic instrument or a battery-powered CD player with headphones.
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, piranha, or disease-carrying snails such as are found in most South American tropical waterways. Upriver, beyond Playa de Oro, there is no human habitation or industry of any type. Thus there is no human or industrial waste in that Part of Rio Santiago which flows through the reserve.
The dining room and kitchen are downstairs, where the two wings of the lodge meet. Upstairs the big corner rooms are the library and the hammock lounge.
Out back, adjacent to the lodge, are enclosures where they keep jungle cats which have been rescued from illegal animal traders, caring for them (the cats, not the wildlife traffickers) until they are healthy and old enough to return to the wild.
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 dispenser which filters the already-boiled water. Everyone drinks this except Project Director Mauro Caicedo, 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!
Most food served at the lodge is locally grown or taken from the river. The men go fishing almost every day. 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 downriver and buy a chicken and get fresh eggs from Playa de Oro. The staff insists on plantains and rice every single meal, but the cook, Mercedes, understands 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 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.
They have papayas, bananas, coconuts, and sugar cane all year around. Mercedes is also adept at vegetarian cooking.
Breakfast is usually served around 8 am., and there will be a thermos of coffee, tea, herb tea, or cocoa (depending on what you drink) on the table earlier. The herb tea will be either mint or lemon grass, because that's what is 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.
The staff consists of the reserve's director, Mauro Caicedo, his wife Enma, who is administrator of domestic services (ie, the lodge), the two motorists, Julio and Isaiah; Mercedes the cook, and a helper woman from the village. The helper women rotate by the week, so all the village women who want to work at the lodge have an opportunity to do so.
The Playa de Oro experience is like living with a family, only better. Because the lodge is big–an abandoned military barracks converted into a lodge by the locals–there is more privacy and more comfort (indoor flush toilets, for example) than you would have in any village home. Despite those concessions to comfort, it is an authentic experience, not a touristy one. Perhaps because the people here have not been compelled to play servant to First Worlders for unjustly low wages, they enjoy meeting and doing things with foreigners. They assume that anyone who travels from some far place just to visit them must be a friend.
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