The Oriente is full of creepy crawlies of all kinds… but so many are easier to see at night.

This is a collection of photos we took while staying deep in the jungles of the Pastaza Province in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador. They were taken using a combination of head lamps and hand-held flashlights.

It might be interesting to know that the locals had a very hard time with us hitting the trails at night. Most of these photos were taken very close to the lodge. On one evening we went on a night hike with our local guide in hopes of finding a boa constrictor (no such luck). He explained to us that there are a lot of dangerous creatures in the jungle and most of them are nocturnal. Therefore, it is always considered safer to stay home at night. Why take chances?

If you have the chance, please read Jared Diamond’s book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? He hits on the cultural difference of risk taking and how to some cultures something that we see as not very risky, like camping near a dead tree, might seem very riskly to people who have lost family to a tree that fell in the night. Of course hiking these jungles at night comes with some risk… but so does using all the modes of transportation we took to arrive to this destination deep in an Amazonian Jungle.