It started with a distant rustle deep in the jungle. Chuka, eyes focussed intently on the canopy, heard it first. A child of Ecuador's mighty Rio Napo, Chuka is tuned to the nuances of the dark varzea and igapo (jungle floodplain). Every sound is a telltale; a clue to bigger things.

"What? Where?" I looked imploringly at him, completely lost amid the myriad shrieks, chirps and warbles of the dense foliage.

A demanding and expectant tourist, my impatience and frustration was already showing, but Chuka knew his careful efforts were about to yield results.

"Monkey come!" he said in such a loud whisper, he must have felt as if he were yelling at me.

"There!" he motioned frantically toward a distant kapok frond bobbing suspiciously against the rain-laden sky. I can barely make out the tiny silhouette of a squirrel monkey, pathfinding for his following troupe. Then, in what sounded like a monsoonal downpour, a deluge of monkeys arrived. Squealing, cussing and rampaging through the canopy, the little rabble-rousers tore past us like anarchic left-wing militants on a mission.

My Amazon journey began, curiously, after an airborne island-hop across the Pacific from Sydney, through New Zealand, Tahiti and Easter Island. Then, from Santiago, the smog-enshrouded Chilean capital, I flew north to Quito, the historic, high-altitude centerpiece of Ecuador with its Spanish baroque churches, expansive plazas and colourful markets.

Many tourists heading for the Amazon will fly out of either Quito or Lima, bound for the upper reaches of the world's largest river basin to towns with such evocative names as Iquitos, Kapawi or Coca. Here I must make a confession. I never actually saw the Amazon River. So convoluted and intertwined are the network of voluminous waterways just to the east of the Andes that the whole region is broadly referred to simply as "Amazonia". So that's were I went, okay?

Located at the end of a shallow mountain valley, Aeropuerto Mariscal Sucre is Quito's busy air hub. With just one long runway, aircraft of all shapes and sizes make use of its eminently practical design. Jets, props and choppers, both civil and military, bearing the curious latin livery of Icaro, Saereo, Aerogal, Líneas Aéreas Suramericanas and Avianca line up on the taxiway for clearance.

I'm flying with little Saereo, and I fall in with three score other expectant travellers through a little door in a big shed adjacent the main terminal. Amongst the murmuring, I hear traces of German, Spanish and some mysterious Slavic tongue. Eduardo, my driver, curses loudly. "So many people!" his hands inflecting upward in deference to a higher authority, "We should be early." I pat him reassuringly on the shoulder, "You go. I'll be fine". And with that he was off.

Inside and duly ticketed, weighed and stamped I observe the couple of aircraft parked out front. The twin will take twelve at a pinch, the other, a stretched, high-wing Cessna maybe ten. I do the math and it doesn't work out. It turns out to be a busy little shed. Inadequate looking planes come, fill with fat European tourists and struggle off. My turn comes, and instead of an aircraft, it's bus. To my relief, I'm ferried to a sparkling twin-engine turboprop (a Beech 1900D if you're finicky) and we're soon pulling confidently up out of the valley's thin air and heading for the Andes.

It's not long before the excited contingent are craning for a view of Cotopaxi, the 5900m volcano that often vents its molten fury on the city below. The pilot confirms our sighting with well-contrived enthusiasm for someone who must fly past the thing on a daily basis.

Our descent down the eastern perimeter of the imposing Andes reveals a vastly different landscape below. Tufts of dense black little clouds cluster together over a sodden landscape interspersed with creeks, streams, ponds, dams and villages. The occasional road splices adjacent fields of contrasting hue together in a verdant, if somewhat dull, tapestry.

We finally put down on a fresh tarmac strip in the little town of Coca, not much more than 200 kilometres, as the Beechcraft flies, from Quito. The modest terminal building reminds me of a tiny rural bowling club somewhere in the Victorian mallee, slapped together with Bessa blocks, rough plastering and misaligned window slats. My pared-down kit is soon presented to me and we're piled on a lumbering bus to meet our river transport.

Coca is true "wild west", at least as far as Ecuador is concerned. The air is thick and damp and wide dusty streets are plied, not by busy lorries and vans, but by handcarts, motorcycles and the odd mule. Produce and goods festoon every corner with vivid plastic buckets, kitchenware and wicker as adornment. After a civilized coffee and banana break, we're at the wharf milling amongst piles of cases, tarps and beer cartons.

Werner, a twilight-aged, chain-smoking German introduces himself as the manager of Sacha Lodge, our ultimate destination, and ushers us toward three long cigar-shaped canoes. These slender, rough-hewn vessels blend seamlessly with the dark, muddy waters of the Rio Napo that runs through this outpost. As we file on, sporting bright orange life-vests, cushioned planks are placed behind us until our full complement of about twenty is seated under a thoughtfully installed awning.

A substantial outboard motor springs to life and we're off! The Rio Napo is one of the major tributaries of the Amazon and is so named because it is really just molten silt derived from the fragile plains this side of the mountains. Islands of dirty sand, some sprouting shrubbery, create a slalom for our shallow draft canoe and the prop often groans loudly against unseen banks below us. The hot, saturated air, mesmeric grind of the motor and swaying of the boat conspire to induce me to slumber. I wake occasionally to see modular little villages perched on the crumbling bank. I wonder how long the washing, hanging jerry-rigged between spindly posts, must take to dry. Perhaps a month?

The Rio Napo is growing wider and shallower all the time. The banks are clearly in a state of constant collapse with roots and runners poking out at all angles and the edges of the river lined with the corpses of long-toppled trees. The hue of the soil matches perfectly that of the torrent flowing interminably past, consuming and disintegrating it with every passing minute. The tall, imperious kapok trees, some hundreds of years old, must look upon their encroaching doom with sad resignation.

Before our arrival at the almost imperceptible landing that is the gateway to Sacha, we were constantly taunted with squalls and rain showers to the point where I didn't know whether I was soaked from sweat or rain. Ick! I'd drawn a boatload of Israelis so, with my limited (read: non-existent) Hebrew, conversation was limited. Once clumsily ashore, they seemed to take forever to sort their luggage into the frail handcarts. Amid loud discussion, there was a lot of pointing this way and that and I could see that if we weren't under way soon, the impending downpour would finish us off. I grabbed my light pack and hoofed it up the long plankway that lead into the jungle, leaving the squabbling mass behind.

"Stop!" I ran frantically toward the last canoe pulling away from the bank. I held up my finger indicating "Just one more please!". I could see a tiny space for me on the end of this dugout setting out across the black water lake. With some resignation, the chief paddler brought it back and I clambered on. "Phew! Thanks".

"You just made it," observed the cheery American lass ahead of me. And as we disembarked in the shelter of the lodge a few minutes later, the heavens opened with such force that the once mirror-still pond was soon frothing like an angry cauldron under the near-biblical downpour.

"Yes, I did."