Making a canoe in the Ecuadorean Oriente

Ahuano is a little town in the upper Amazon region of Ecuador, 20 km downstream from Misahuallí. We found a nice little house directly on the river bank – perfect for our plan to make a canoe.

It was not so easy to find the wood. For a really good Amazon canoe, you need three hard wood* planks of at least 7 metres length, 40 cm width, and 3 cm thickness. In practise, you look for someone with a chain saw and a piece of forest. You choose your tree, pay him 30 USD, and he will bring you the planks. But somehow, the thought of walking into pristine forest and cutting out the largest tree, hurt me.

We ended up buying some ordinary timber wood planks of 3 m length and joining them together with sheet metal and tar, as we had seen it from other canoes. This turned out to be more work: four days in total.

Our expenses:

8 planks: 20 USD
1,5 kg of nails: 9 USD
2 kg of tar: 8 USD
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Total: 37 USD
*Preferably a tree they call "cedro". It is a leaved tree and has nothing to do with cedar. The scientific name is Cedrela odorata.

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