BGTW AWARDS & TRAVEL MEDIA AWARDS

Adrian Phillips’s piece on the Ecuadorian rainforest earned him both Travel Writer and Consumer Writer of the Year

It’s 5.45am, no longer night but not quite morning either. The air is washed with a sunless light, and mist rests like a sagging net on the crown of the forest. Julio and Fredy paddle stealthily, loose-limbed, each taking a few gentle strokes on one side before flicking the oar up in an elegant arc to take a few strokes on the other. The river oozes, flat and dense and silent. Alongside us, the rainforest is immense and stock-still, not a leaf trembling, the trees silhouetted flat against the grey. I’m struck by a sense of the theatrical, of a stage set ready for the play of life.

And as we wait, the orchestra builds the atmosphere. Cicadas lay down the bassline with their enduring electric hum. Next, a woodpecker taps out a tempo, supported by a dove that repeats its single note, as regular as a metronome. On top of this comes the melody — piping whistles and echoing chimes, a huffy burst like someone working a bicycle pump, the ratcheting noise of a clock being wound, the bubbling of a cuckoo, its call like boiling water, and the sound of an oropendola bird, like a pebble dropped in a pool of liquid gold.

With a sort of guttural drum roll, the first members of the cast enter stage left. “Howler monkeys!” Fredy says, pointing to four redfurred figures emerging from the dry-ice haze at the top of a fig tree. “The males growl like that to mark their territory.” We drift on, and birds start coming thick and fast. A pair of blue-headed parrots make a dash overhead, protesting loudly about some outrage or other. We look in on an animated debate between cobalt-winged parakeets, who squawk among the acacia branches. An aloof, Guinnessbeaked toucan stares into the distance, pretending not to hear.

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