Tena
"The rivers here are not scenery. They are the organizing principle of everything."
The bus from Quito takes four hours — the last two of which are the descent from the páramo into the oriente, the Ecuadorian Amazon foothills, a transition that is among the most dramatic I’ve made by road anywhere. The landscape drops from cold grassland and volcanic rock through cloud forest to something increasingly lush and warm, the road switching back through walls of vegetation, the temperature rising with each curve. By the time the bus pulls into Tena’s terminal and the doors open, the air is humid and warm and smells of soil and flowering things and something faintly sweet that I later identified as cacao from a plantation near the road. I stepped off the bus into it and stood there for a moment with my eyes closed.
Tena sits at the confluence of the Tena and Pano rivers, which merge here before joining the Napo a few kilometres east. The rivers are not metaphorical — they literally bisect the town, and the main bridge connects the two halves of a city that grew up on both banks without fully settling the question of which side is the center. The market is on one side, the buses on the other, and the river runs underneath everything, visible from almost any street. It is wide and fast and brown after any rain, and the children swim in it below the bridge with a comfort that made me envious. I stood watching from the railing one afternoon while the water level rose visibly from a storm upstream.
The Kichwa communities outside Tena offer a range of experiences that range from genuinely illuminating to slightly theatrical, and the difference is mostly in who guides you. The community I visited with a guide named Freddy — who had grown up there and now ran tours primarily to fund his nephew’s university education, which he mentioned without sentimentality — took us on a two-hour walk in the forest that I am still thinking about. He identified a plant every ten metres: this one for fever, this one for snake bite, this one for stomach pain, this one — a small red fruit — just because it tastes good. He ate it as he said this and offered one to each of us. It tasted like a lychee crossed with black pepper. We drank chicha, the fermented manioc drink, from clay cups. It tasted earthy and slightly sour and had a very low alcohol content. Freddy drank three cups and was unchanged; I drank one and felt pleasantly calm for the rest of the afternoon.
The cacao grown in the Tena region is among the finest in Ecuador, which is to say among the finest in the world — fine aroma varieties that the large chocolate companies buy at premiums and that small producers here are increasingly processing themselves. I visited a family operation ten minutes outside town: cacao pods the size of footballs hanging from the trunk of the tree (not the branches, which looks wrong and then stops looking wrong), the fermenting boxes smelling intensely of vinegar and fruit, the roasting shed where the smell shifts to something darker and more recognizable. The chocolates they made on-site were very good. I bought too many and ate them on the bus back to Quito.
The waterfalls above town are the thing that brings the backpacker circuit here, and they earn the reputation. The Cascadas de Latas are about an hour’s walk on a trail that starts dry and gets progressively muddier, ending at a series of falls where the cold water — genuinely cold, coming off the higher elevations — pools in carved rock basins. I swam in it fully clothed because I hadn’t brought a swimsuit and couldn’t regret it. The cold after three days of jungle heat was the most purely physical pleasure I remember from the whole trip.
When to go: June through September is the drier season — rivers are lower, trails drier, and the cacao harvest peaks in September. The rest of the year sees frequent rain; February through April is the wettest period. Tena is accessible year-round but gets crowded with Ecuadorian domestic tourists during school holidays (July–August). The rafting on the Napo and Jondachi rivers is best at moderate water levels — local operators will advise on conditions.