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The Classroom Package: How to Find Limoncocha

          To find Limoncocha, you must first locate the continent it is in, South America, and the country it is part of, Ecuador. South America is easy to find because it is directly south of North America. Ecuador is easy to find, too, if you know what ecuador means in Spanish. If you don't, you can figure it out: just change the 'c' in 'Ecuador' to a 'q' and the 'd' to a 't.'

          With that information, you're ready to travel!. Take a taxi to the bus station and a bus to the nearest airport and from there, fly to New York City. From the harbor of New York City, you can take a boat that will float South in the Atlantic Ocean past Cuba and into the Caribbean Sea. From there, you will pass through the Panama Canal into the Pacific Ocean. Where the equator meets land on the western shore of South America, you will have reached Ecuador: bienvenido (welcome). (Flying all the way is quicker of course, but we wanted you to take note of the route.)

          So now that you are in Ecuador, all you have to do is find Limoncocha. No problem: dock your boat and follow the equator east, up the western side of the Andes Mountains. You could take a llama if you weren't in a big hurry. When you get to the top of the mountain, you'll come to Quito. Quito is the capital city of Ecuador and has well over a million people. Keep following the equator past Quito. Now you'll be descending the eastern side of the Andes Mountains, so you could coast pretty quickly on a bike. As you zoom down you'll notice a river forming from the melting mountain snowcaps and the rainfall. This river will be falling in waterfalls and rapids until you reach the bottom of the mountain. There, you can hop in a canoe and follow the river as it winds more slowly through the westernmost part of the Amazon rain forest.

         The river you are in will soon meet up with another river, the Napo. The Napo is very wide and the water is muddy .  It eventually flows into the great Amazon River, but you don't have to go that far to reach Limoncocha. Floating down the Napo (about one third of the way to the border of Colombia from the place where the Napo met the river you followed down the mountain), you'll come to a river port called Pompeya. Take to your feet and head north. After walking four or five kilometers, you will reach Limoncocha.

        Limoncocha is part of the Amazon basin, a huge plain which stretches across the whole South American continent. It's a plain filled with trees and crisscrossed by many, many rivers. Like the Napo, most of these rivers are fed by the snow and rain of the Andes Mountains on the western side of the continent. They eventually wind their way into the Amazon River, collecting additional runoff rainfall as they go. The Amazon River, in turn, takes the water from all of these rivers and carries it to the Atlantic Ocean on the eastern side of the continent, thousands of miles from where the water's journey began in the Andes (and the same ocean in which you first boarded your boat for the journey). The Amazon rain forest is one of the oldest ecosystems on our planet and has one of the most diverse and amazing array of living species ever known.