One of the guys knocked on the window at 3:42 a.m. It startled me so I must have been asleep. A few hours before we’d had a late-night seco de pollo from a cart serving patrons at a disco across the road. Through the cracked window the jungle night embraced me, windshield opaque with mist. My alarm sounded: 3:45 a.m. We’d parked in front of a police station along the Troncal Amazónica, the main highway snaking through the Ecuadorian Amazon, to sleep. I walked to the car in front of me where Alex, Jeremy, Julio and Calvo were stirring. I lit a cigarette and regretted it. “Ready?” I asked in Spanish. Incomprehensible mumbles came from inside the car. Tapio walked up from his own rig. “Did you get any sleep?” “Some.” “Should we get moving?” “What’s the plan?” “Don’t ask me.”

A friend and fellow expat named Tim had been offered 50 hectares (123 acres) of land in exchange for a drone and a laptop. I was intrigued and laughably skeptical. The property was located well off the road system in the turbulent Amazonian foothills of the Andes. A river ran through the western edge with little to no access in a part of the world with little infrastructure—the watermark for a spectacular dorado fishery. A group of colonos with claim to the land solicited Tim’s help through the coconut telegraph of jungle outfitters, offering him the parcel—part of their 600-plus hectare claim—in exchange for the tools needed for a topographical survey: drone and computer. Unable to make the trip himself, he asked if I could go in his place. He owns an adventure tourism business and is always looking for new rivers to explore. It was a 4- to 6-hour hike into the property and an additional jaunt to the river. Google showed what we both knew were mining scars, but they were not on the river in question, and easily dismissed when weighed against unexplored dorado fishing. Neither of us was convinced the trip was a great idea, but fortune favors the bold and this was one of those spots that had never been fished with a fly rod, maybe never with rod and reel. By the second beer I was committed…

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