A brief summary of what we found out in Ecuador - I will make a report later, as we are still here (but only Mindo is ahead, where no surprises are expected):
- Panacocha: a village straight in the rainforest with impenetrable jungle starting right when the tarmac ends. Accessible with a public boat, has a "hotel" and eateries, so you can stay there indefinitely if you wish so; camping doesn't make much sense here. There are wetlands and streams limiting access and the jungle is quite dense, but there is a broad trail (probably at some point passed by a small car?) a few kms north which reaches some rainforest and then plantations. At least a part of this is private, as we learned from the owner, but he was mostly okay with us. In general a great place "in the amazon" but not much room for jungle solitude.
- Limoncocha: From some reports online I got the idea that one can walk in the reserve, which is not true. Guided only, you need a boat to reach the trails anyway.
- Sumaco: We decided to try yo just walk out of Pacto towards the park, got stopped and told we must have a guide, no deal possible. The only way was to stay in Pacto and take day trips, which don't need a guide for some reason. We did so and it was great, the "community tourism center" offers a covered deck for open air sleep (just put up a net) with views of the volcano and lots of birds directly from the deck for $5 per person. It was so great I stopped being pissed about the failure to trek, until in the second night some drunk locals came and made it less optimal. The trail up towards the park is a bit hard in places, but we made a nice day trip on a part of it, more places are around the village. There are also nice trails down the road, but we learned now online that they belong to wildsumaco lodge (despite being far from it and on the other side of the road) and one should pay $30 per day for those. Well, I now feel actually bad for "stealing" a trail or two from them, but seriously, they need to post signs saying so, if they want to collect fees. We honestly thought that a sign "trail x" on a public road with no further information is an invitation to go there. If there was any sign this is private, se would have obliged for sure.
- Jatun Sacha near Tena: a typical "day trip reserve", so no adventure here either. But a pretty nice jungle, with a plenty if trails, even if a bit small. I enjoyed the nature a lot despite an almost fascinating lack of any birds. I am used to jungle birding being hard, but this was quite staggering, how despite a 7-hour effort, we saw one woodpecker, some oropendolas and caciques and a toucan flyover and that's it.
Overall this was a nice trip, even though it was mostly a failure in searching for a place to jungle trek. I am beginning to feel really stupid about this: I know for a fact that people do trek in jungles independently, but I just can't find any place to do so for years. I feel like I need to take a step back and start reading some books from travellers (which is usually extremely painful to me, as those people are notoriously self-involved) because googling doesn't bring much, as nowadays searches are just overwhelmed with commerical material, so everything leads to tour operators. Yes, I am now a bit wiser when it comes to day-triping in tropics and I have many ideas where to go next thanks to you lot, but I still feel there is more. In other biomes, I can just pack my backpack and go somewhere alone for days and it works, there must be a way to do it in the jungle. At least there is still a frontier to explore!