Day 1: "Did You Bring Boots?"
"Did you bring boots?" asks Gordon Molitor, CARE director in Ecuador, when we arrive in the capital city of Quito. "It's the rainy season. You'll definitely need boots." He isn't talking about leather hiking boots, but about high-riding rubber boots, which he says are one of three essential items for a journey into the Ecuadorian rainforest. High-octane mosquito repellant and long pants are the other two.

Created in 1979, Ecuador's Cotacachi-Cayapas Ecological Reserve is located between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. All photos by Kimberly Conger © CARE 2001.

My colleague Kim Conger and I are on a mission for CARE. Our assignment is to document the organization's work in Ecuador's Cotacachi-Cayapas Ecological Reserve -- work that seeks to find a sustainable balance between the often competing needs of nature and man. Work that seeks to protect precious, but now-threatened natural resources and promote improvements in the lives of families now living among or around these resources.

Tropical forests are great storehouses of natural life. They are home to more than half the world's species and they can provide sustainable supplies of water, food, timber and numerous other resources if both managed and protected properly. But the over-exploitation of forests has wiped out more than half of the world's original tropical forest cover.

Communities living in and around the reserve depend on the use of surrounding resources to survive.

In Ecuador, the legacy of logging has been equally damaging and continues to pose a threat to the future of the country's natural resources. To combat this, the Ecuadorian government has created a number of conservation areas. The Cotacachi-Cayapas Ecological Reserve makes up approximately 5 percent of the 18 percent of Ecuador's land that has been set aside for conservation purposes. The reserve is located in a bioregion classified as one of the world's 10 hotspots in terms of conservation priorities because of the unique plant and animal life that resides there and the threat that these now live under. As a result, both international and national interests meet here. CARE has worked in the area since 1992 promoting long-term biological conservation and sustainable community development.

Jody Stallings, director of the Sustainable Uses for Biological Resources (SUBIR) Project, explains the importance of this effort: "Without an adequately planned system of protected areas, more forests will be depleted and the cost will not only be to nature, but also to the many vulnerable people who depend on these resources."

Stallings adds that "Anyone seriously committed to poverty alleviation should recognize that the long-term health and wealth of developing nations is linked to the conservation of natural ecosystems."

Ecuador, about equal in size to the U.S. state of Colorado, is in the northwest part of South America.

Off to Borbón
After buying boots at a nearby store, we board another plane. Our final destination today is Borbón, a fishing village of 5,000 people where the Cayapas and Santiago Rivers meet. There we will begin our journey into Ecuador's last remaining coastal rainforest.

As the plane descends from Quito's 9,000-plus-foot altitude and the Andes Mountains give way to wetlands, the air becomes muggier and hotter. We land in the town of Esmeraldas and from there begin a three-and-a-half-hour truck ride to Borbón over dirt roads along the Pacific Ocean.

The last El Niño wreaked havoc on roads in the area, and our progress is slowed as a result. There also are numerous stops for trucks and buses to squeeze by one another, a normally routine action suddenly embued with danger as we eyeball the steep drop on one side of the road and the wall of rock threatening to punch out windows on the other. Dust sticks to the truck like glue.

Roll Up Your Windows, It's Carnival
We quickly learn an important lesson about an annual tradition in Ecuador during this time of year: Roll up your windows. It's Carnival!

Rocky roads: the intensity of El Niño-induced weather wreaked havoc on many of Ecuador's coastal roads.

Carnival is a pre-Lent festival (like Mardi Gras in New Orleans) in much of South America that takes place before Easter and is characterized by celebrations and parades and, in Ecuador, by children of all ages trying to douse each other with water.

Kids perch along the road to Borbón with buckets of water. Using hollowed-out coconuts, they flick water into passing cars, including ours. Before learning our lesson at the first water ambush, we are completely soaked. I look back in the mirror to see two kids jumping up and down, high-fiving each other.

The town of Borbón is an Afro-Ecuadorian community located at the juncture of the Santiago and Cayapas Rivers.

Borbón is a dense maze of buildings made of weathered wood and rusted tin, with dirt streets winding in between. Hundreds of television and radio antennas crowd the skyline, creating a surreal jagged vista from a distance.

In the hot early evening sunshine, we go to a tiny riverfront restaurant. Several local CARE staff join us. The shrimp is fresh and sweet and we eat plenty of them, heads and all.

After dinner, we walk to the CARE office, the base for SUBIR. USAID and private donors have funded the 10-year project. The office also serves as a place to stay the night, not only for us, but also for staff from Ecuadorian conservation partner organizations Ecociencia and Jatun Sacha.

Four of us pack tightly into a tiny room, pull mosquito nets down around our single beds, and turn in for the night in the pure, unrelenting heat at the edge of the equator.