Lago Agrio (officially Nueva Loja) is seven hours east of Quito by bus or 30 minutes by plane. The town got its unofficial name from Sour Lake, Texas, the original headquarters of Texaco Corporation, which began using it as an outpost for oil exploration in the 1960s. After more than four decades, Lago is a far cry from the lethargic jungle community that Texaco commandeered. Now it's a grimy frontier city that has flattened all greenery for kilometers in every direction to accommodate the oil pipelines that crisscross the once virgin landscape.