We arrived in Apaika, a tiny village in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon and home to the indigenous Huaorani people, in May 2015.

Bay, the head of this small community, had been expecting us. Maybe not that day, or that month, or even that year, but he seemed unperturbed by our arrival, and he and his family quickly welcomed us.

Bay was a machine, he just worked so tirelessly. Whereas my soft cameraman hands were raw and blistered and my face covered in perspiration, his callused hands could carry on throughout the day and he never seemed to break a sweat. But he was much more than a worker, he was an incredible mentor for the project, not only showing us how to do each step of the canoe-making, but also showing us how he lived in the jungle.

After a morning working on the canoe we would generally head out into the forest to help Bay collect what he needed from the jungle. Anything from vines to make baskets, palm fronds to repair the roof, specific hard woods to make spears or replace a broken axe handle, to the more exotic edible delicacies such as grubs and piranhas. His knowledge of the jungle was astounding.

Our stay with Bay became more and more about the time we spent with the family and Bay than it did about the canoe. Whether it was making woven baskets from vines, going fishing with poison made from the root of a vine or making biscuits for the family.

It is only when you remove some of the time pressure from a trip and spend weeks in one location that you start to slip into a different pace of life. We had no watch, no phone – we would wake when it got light and go to bed when it was dark. Work in the jungle became our job, our gym, our daily life.

Sitting round a smouldering and smoky fire sheltering from the rain, and avoiding working on the canoe (the blisters!) Bay told us the story of how his father first met a white person.

Missionaries had arrived on a beach in the river by small plane. They built a treehouse, and broke bread with the Huaorani that met them on the beach.

“They are the devil. We should kill them. They want to eat our children”

One of these warriors was Bay’s father. The contact with white people apparently sparked a fierce debate within the community: the white men (there to tame these savages) were described as devils, and aliens. I should imagine white explorers and colonists from the time had very similar descriptions of the Huaorani.

“They are friends,” Bay’s father said.

“No! They are the devil. We should kill them. They want to eat our children.”

A group of Huaorani warriors went and speared the missionaries, so defending their land, their traditions, and their beliefs from the outside world for a few more years.

Tagaeri and Taromenane sound like tribes from Game of Thrones, not real life. It wasn’t until over a month into our stay with Bay that we started hearing stories about the Tagaeri, and how close to us they were moving – a day’s walk away. It was also then that we started to hear the recent histories of conflict with the Taromenane, stories of kidnapped children, revenge killings and murder. This is what we were heading towards if we continued down the Shiripuno/ Cononaco rivers into the Intangible zone.

We changed rivers.

The change of rivers, although costly was rather straightforward. Something that you would need to have special permission for in the UK was no problem – just put the tonne of canoe on the back of a taxi and drive it to a new river.

We did have to have several arguments about where to drive and where was best to get dropped, but once your canoe (that takes eight people to lift) is on the roof of someone’s car, you have very little say when they ask you for more money to go to the river you actually want to go to.

Even so we didn’t really end up in exactly the right place. But we were promised that it would lead to the right river.

What the change of rivers did highlight was how close to Bay’s patch of forest oil extraction was happening, and how roads transect the jungle, opening it up to the outside world. They are the beginning of the end, the oil platforms themselves are transient and (unless there is a spill) do not have a huge impact on the area.

Roads however open up the area, first hunters come, using the road to penetrate deeper in to the jungle, then a few settlers, spreading out from the road, planting a few crops, cutting down a bit more jungle, eking out a living from the nutrient poor soil, and before you know it the jungle has gone and you have a physical barrier to wildlife travelling through the rainforest.

As we travelled down our new river, the Tiputini, we felt isolated in the middle of untouched jungle. Getting out of the canoe and onto the bank to make our camp for the night was a daily struggle, through an impenetrable wall of spiky leaves and biting insects.

The current was fast enough that we couldn’t paddle against it, so by the time we had spotted a possible campsite we wouldn’t be able to get back to it in time. The spell of being in untouched jungle was only broken on a couple of occasions when we would pass under a bridge. Bridges that were only put there through the quest for oil in the heart of the Yasuni National Park.

Making the film was by far the hardest part of the trip. Weeks of runny poo and a multitude of biting insects and giant spiders were relatively easy to cope with. They just became part of the everyday.

What you have to remember when watching the film is that there is no one there with us. Just two guys and a bunch of my camera kit. No film crew waiting around the corner to capture us at our best and worst. But for me, that is what these trips are about – journeying through a beautiful and diverse landscape and capturing that space at a specific moment in time.

Read the rest of the Mpora April Remote issue here.

Head to Reelhouse or Vimeo on Demand to watch ‘Dugout’ –  Benjamin Sadd and James Trundle’s full film from their Ecuadorian adventure.

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