The Colonel and his monkey

Whilst on the Eastern slope of the Andes in Ecuador we ventured down into the lowlands for a couple of days, basing ourselves in the town of Archidona. Up to that point, most of our time had been spent at altitude, so conditions had been relatively cool and comfortable. As we descended, the temperature and humidity gradually increased and everything started to look and feel much more ‘tropical’. We arrived at our hotel just as it was starting to get dark and were greeted by the owner, a gentleman known to all as simply ‘The Colonel’. Whilst he was supervising us being booked in, I was more than slightly distracted by the young spider-monkey that was lovingly clinging to his arm. The monkey was wearing a nappy (or diaper for my American readership) and answered to the name ‘Pepito’. It soon became clear that Pepito regarded The Colonel as his surrogate parent and that they were inseparable, although the Colonel seemed to have a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards his young charge’s affections.

The hotel rooms were some distance from the main building, consisting of wooden cabins with metal roofs, reached by following a winding path through the trees. As it was dark, a light had been left on outside my door and, as I arrived with my luggage, I was greeted by a whole host of moths and other insects who had been holding some kind of impromptu party on my porch. Braving the assault of this insect horde I settled in to my quirky room. Along one wall at one end of the room were two wash basins. For some reason you had to take a step up to reach the basins, which would have been fine apart from the fact that this step was coated with The Mat From Hell. It looked like an innocuous ‘anti-slip’ bathroom mat but, as I discovered to my agony, if you stood on it in bare feet then razor sharp plastic ‘dimples’ would dig into your soles and toes, making it an almost unbearably painful experience!

My room at The Colonel's hotel

During the night I awoke in some confusion, as the world appeared to be ending-the most torrential downpour I had ever heard was pelting down outside. Of course, the sound of falling rain is always made to seem much worse than it actually is when you are sleeping in a building that has a metal roof. Even so, this sounded bad. Tremendous peals of thunder soon joined the cacophony and I lay there, imagining the lake that was no doubt forming outside my door and wondering if we were going to be stuck in this little town as a result of the many landslides that would no doubt have blocked the only road out due to this biblical amount of rain……eventually I became more immune to this deafening racket and started to doze fitfully. It turned out to be a good thing that I was only dozing, as when I checked my iPhone to see what time it was I was amazed to see that my wake-up alarm was going off and that I couldn’t hear it due to the racket outside! Bemused, I turned the volume up to full and STILL couldn’t hear the alarm going off, even when holding the phone close to my ear!

In the morning light, the hotel seemed even odder than it had done on our arrival the evening before. In one corner of the dining/breakfast room there was a glass case with a dozing boa constrictor in it. As I was inspecting this case and wondering whether the boa was real or not, one of the staff offered to get the snake out of it’s case for me and drape it around my neck. I graciously declined this offer, concerned that the Boa would wake up to find itself wrapped around my throat and think that it had just been provided with it’s breakfast.

That morning we were intending to visit a reserve which was also owned by the hotel. We had to ask the Colonel’s permission to visit this location and he insisted that he take us there himself. We got into our vehicle, having been instructed to follow the Colonel and Pepito in his. The Colonel then promptly sped off into the distance, having first carried out an interesting manoeuvre which involved reversing at high speed out onto the main road without any consideration for any oncoming traffic. We followed him as best we could as he wove his way through the chaotic streets of Archidona. It became apparent that the locals were well aware of The Colonel’s driving style and wisely got well out of his way as they saw his car approaching. Clearing a route in this manner, we followed him for miles, up an increasingly badly maintained road that eventually became more like a boulder strewn steep river bed, rather than a road as such. We eventually reached an imposing set of giant gates which marked the entrance to The Colonel’s reserve, which appeared to have been modelled on the entrance gates to Jurassic Park! Satisfied that we would be OK left to our own devices, The Colonel said his farewells and sped off back down the rocky route home, Pepito gazing at us mournfully through the front passenger seat window.

A Wire-tailed Manakin, one of the birds I photographed in The Colonel's reserve

DrB