Jungle Pics

I never quite got around to adding photos to the post on my brief excursion into the Amazon jungle. So here's a follow up post with a few snaps.

Junglecraft 101: the branches of the liana tree act as natural filters, so if you know how to identify the tree, you can always find a source of pure, fresh water in the jungle.

Most palm-type trees have edible larvae or suri in their branches. They have a slight flavour of coconut, though I'm ready to believe that they're tastier when fried.

At night, tarantulas can easily be found on tree trunks in the jungle. Their diet includes small birds. To humans, their venom is not fatal, but will apparently leave you in considerable pain for about eight hours. This was about as close as I wanted to get.

The river was high, and we canoed through the flooded forest looking for birds. Occasionally, we spotted a sloth high in the tree branches.

Under the shade of some mangroves, we managed to catch a few snapping piranhas, while the others stole half a chicken's worth of bait.

Despite it's resemblance to a large goldfish, there's reason for the piranha's fearsome reputation. It's teeth are razor sharp, and are said to be able to take off a finger with a single bite.

On the river, thunderclouds gathered in the afternoon heat.

But it was great to catch a breeze cruising along in the motor canoe.

Back in Iquitos, some Indian girls do a fantastic drum-accompanied tribal dance on the waterfront most evenings. Their party trick to finish off is dancing with a couple of boas that have been slithering around their feets. The snakes seem pretty tame, but I'm not sure I'd want to get as, ah, intimate as they do.

Categories: Peru, Amazon, Iquitos

In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle

Photos to come

In the broad clearing there were three spacious wooden bungalows raised on stilts, with high roofs of palm thatch. Each bungalow featured a shady porch with room to hang at least two hammocks. Inside were cots hung with clean mosquito nets. The bathroom had a concrete floor, cold running water and a flush toilet. Only a few large ants mooched around the base of the cistern.

Back down towards the river was the dining hut, with a long table of rough wood, a water filter, a thermos with tea and coffee, and a canopy which kept out the sun and the insects.

The jungle refuge offered just my preferred blend of bourgeois adventurism. Wilderness with catering.

It was a different world from the tacky jungle lodges around Iquitos with swimming pools, hot showers and observation towers. But it didn't quite require you to be Tarzan, when you'd been a deskbound bureaucrat only a few weeks previously and were still recovering from your confounded sunburn.

The refuge was a respectable 215 km from the city. We had driven an hour and a half along Iquitos' only highway, to the little port of Nauta, then travelled another two hours by motor canoe. We cruised along the Marañón to its juncture with the Amazon, crossed the great river, then headed an hour up the Yarapa – a tranquil, muddy-coloured tributary – to find the half-hidden entrance to a quiet lagoon.

The refuge belonged to Andres, a local guy who after 20 years guiding tourists had acquired his own business with a little office a block from the waterfront in Iquitos. His younger brother Juan was the chief guide on our trip.

There was a fair menagerie of pets: a tapir, a peccary (wild pig), a coti (racoon-like creature) and a toucan. They were fully tame yet idiosyncratic. The tapir apparently liked to head into the jungle at night time to look for food, returning to the refuge in the day, where it was also fed. Only a year and a half old, it was still on its way to its full-grown size of 300 kilos. The toucan was slightly loopy: the staff at the refuge sometimes had to pick it up and put it on a ledge or a tree at night, because it had the tendency to fall asleep on the ground – a risk to its health and safety.

It would have been a great story if they had all wound up at the camp as orphans, collected by a kindly hunter or villager. But I found out that from the assistant guide Mike that they had been bought. There's a small trade for those who can snatch a young animal and sell it to the lodges as a tourist gimmick.

Our first forest walk was a pleasant enough exercise in Junglecraft 101. We found a termites' nest and crunched on a couple of the supposedly edible insects. Juan pointed out a rubber tree and cut it with his machete to show how the sap flowed out and coagulated. We saw the slash marks on the trunk where the rubber collectors had tapped it last century.

From a palm tree we sampled the larva which nested in the hollow branches. A slight taste of coconut. I managed to quaff a couple, but was ready to believe that they were tastier when fried.

We refreshed ourselves with fresh water from the liana tree, whose branches form a natural filter. We observed the giant ceiba – the Amazon's largest tree – and a fallen mahogany, though we didn't se any that were standing. While I was prepared to believe Juan's statement that this was "primary jungle" - in the sense that it had never been cleared for cultivation - it still wasn't quite what you imagine as pristine rainforest.

A monkey was glimpsed here; a couple of parrots there. But any other wildlife was well and truly scared off by the tapir, which ccompanied us on the walk, frolicking boisterously.

After two hours we were drenched with sweat, bolstered by a tropical shower which had filtered its way through the canopy. Moisture ran off my forehead and into my eyes. Mud squelched and sucked around our shoes. Though my long sleeves and head-to-toe covering of insect repellent were doing the trick (I had stripped naked and smeared myself well with the lotion before leaving the bungalow), the clouds of mosquitos were intense and persistent

I figured I wasn't quite ready to take a day-long trek, let alone form a guerilla army to fade silently into the forest and strike like lightning at the invader. Given a bit more acclimatisation, I thought I might manage a one-night camp.

After sundown we went back into the forest to look for tarantulas. They weren't hard to find: every second tree seemed to have a fat, hairy resident, its eight thick legs grasping the trunk. We crept a little closer, positioning our cameras.

Every metre we moved further away from the clearing, the thicker the mosquitos became. I'm not a spider fan, and had expected to be freaked out by the hairy arachnids that like to feast on small birds. But while I didn't want to get too close, and nervously hovered just long enough by the spider that Juan scooped onto his machete to get a good photo, the tarantulas seemed positively benign and tranquil in comparison to the ever-present mosquitoes, swarming and whining like an angry plague.

Later, we headed out in the canoe to look for caimans. The moon was high and bright, and Juan was sceptical about whether we would see any. “When the moon is high, they can see us coming”, he said.

We silently sailed through the still waters of the lagoon, down the quiet river, and through flooded groves of trees. No caimans, but for the first time I was struck by a thrill, a feeling of the wildness and immensity of the dark jungle.

The night was loud with the chirp of insects and the the bellow of tree toads. Disconcertingly close by came the rumble of a motor - a ferry making its way up the Amazon. I thought I heard people's voices. I asked Juan, who said there was village with a Presbyterian church about five kilometres away; the singing was drifting on the night breeze. It still wasn't quite Heart of Darkness.

In the torch beam we saw the glowing eyes of a scampering monkey; and later a big owl flapped silently from its perch. But the caimans were nowhere to be found.

In the morning the mist was rising slowly, Avalon-like, from the surface of the lagoon, and we went out in the canoes to look for birds. Across the lagoon, along the river, through the reeds and the mangroves, we patiently identified the species: parrots, parakeets, kingfishers, vultures, herons, dotted this and crested that. I only saw the splashes, but two pink river dolphins broke the water twenty metres behind our canoe.

Every now and again Juan or Mike spotted a sloth. We stopped the canoe, while the guides passed around the binoculars and tried to point out to us where it was. “There! Don't you see! Just to the left of that forked branch!” When we finally picked out the stationary sloth, it was by managing to reconceptualise what had appeared a bird's nest or pile of leaves.

After an hour I'd lost all concentration. My ass was sore from sitting in the canoe and I was desperately craving coffee. On our return from breakfast came disappointment: the coffee tin was empty, and I had to make do with cinammon and clove tea.

We took the canoe across the other side of the lagoon, anchored under some shady mangroves, and began to fish for piranha. We had simple wooden rods – whittled tree branches with a line of thin wire and a rough iron hook.

Juan passed around chunks of chiken and beef. It was good bait for carnivourous fish. The problem wasn't attracting them – it was outsmarting them. Time and again I found that my hook was stripped bare, although I had hardly felt any pull on my line. After a while, Juan snagged a small catfish, then a couple of snapping piranha. Then at the third attempt, Tomas – a Swiss tourist - managed to get one as well.

Just when I'd given up hope of ever catching anything, I responded with a jerk to another almost imperceptible tug. I lifted my line out of the water, and this time there was a flash of orange; a wildly thrashing piranha was snared at the end of my line.

I hung the flailing fish above the canoe and let Mike subdue it. As a fishing incompetent, I didn't want to get too close to its powerful jaws which can apparently take off a finger with a single bite.

My success wasn't repeated. Over the next half hour we steadily worked our way through the rest of the bait. Rossmary – a girl from Iquitos – gave up in a sulk and announced she didn't want to catch one anyway. We headed back across the lagoon for lunch.

As we drank tea and compared photos, Mike brought me my piranha, lightly fried in margarine. It was tasty, though the flesh was scarce. For a brief moment I felt like a real hunter-gatherer.

But thank goodness they'd remembered to cook us some chicken.

Categories: Iquitos, Amazon, Peru

Sweat and Tears

I've had some difficulties with the climate in the jungle. It's been hot, to the extent that even the locals are complaining. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem: I'm an evangelical hot climate convert. But a couple of weeks ago, I made the mistake of getting quite badly burnt at the beach in Mollendo (Arequipa), when I didn't spread the sunblock around well enough when we went to play volleyball and football.

By the time I got to Iquitos, I was peeling on my back and chest, and had dried-up blisters. A couple of days and nights of the intense humidity and constant sweating, and I had come out in a rash all over my chest and the lower part of my back. I would wake up from a disturbed sleep scractching furiously. I tried smearing myself with aloe gel, moisturizer, and, following the advice of my local self-appointed nurses, alcohol (not recommended!).

Something had to be done, as I was about to head into the jungle itself for a couple of days, and I didn't want to even contemplate mixing with the mosquitos with my skin in such a state.

So I went down to the pharmacy, described my problem, and the woman there gave me a cream containing ani-inflammatory steroids and antibiotics. By then they were getting sick of the sight of me; in the first couple of days I had started to develop an irritating sore throat, and requested something to relieve that. Later, I returned and demanded their best insect repellent, as I have a history of being sweet meat for mosquitos.

I'm happy to report that the medicines were all cheap and effective. The pills and lozenges they gave me for the sore throat cleared up the irritation nicely, though they couldn't prevent the snuffly cold that developed a couple of days later. After using the entire tube of cream over a couple of days, my skin rash had settled down well too. This was also helped by a decision to sleep under a single sheet with the fan on its lowest setting (still rather strong) blowing directly over me. Part of my problem had been sleeping the first few nights with no sheet and the fan switched off, causing me to wake up with the sensation that somebody had empited a bucket of warm water over me.

And the excellent combined mosquito repellent / suncream prescribed by the woman in the pharmacy really worked! Together with the couple of long-sleeved t-shirts that I bought before heading into the jungle, it helped me to return to the city without a single bite, despite the clouds of voracious insects that accompanied us on the jungle walks (story to come).

I have a tendency to avoid all medication this side of Panadol, and generally go along with the post-Silent Spring distrust of too many chemicals and medicated lifestyles. In the jungle of Peru it's a different story. With the outdoor lifestyle abundance of fresh fruit and fish, chronic Western ailments are not really the problem. What is going to hurt you will hurt you swiftly and without apologies. You need to fight back fast with good drugs. My philosophy for living here has become: when in doubt, medicate, medicate, medicate.

I'm fortunate enough to be able to afford to do that, but that's the flip side of the inherent gringo vulnerabilities that we bring with us and cause us to fray at the seams in a beautiful natural setting where people wander cheerfully round explosing their healthy, bronzed and glowing skin - not something I can ever aspire to.

Categories: Iquitos, Amazon, Peru

Explosión!

Take one January afternoon in Iquitos, 34 degrees celcius with 62% humidity. Location: an old aircraft hangar on the way out of the city. Add approximately 5,000 people packed into the structure, spilling out of the only open side towards a concrete terrace with a few tables and a makeshift bar. To season, let local Iquitos band Explosión! belt out a high-energy mixture of cumbia, merengue and tropical pop, with the odd salsa piece for variety. Simmer at a high temperature for several hours until everything is liquid.

It was a typical Sunday afternoon in Coa, one of the popular (semi) open-air discotheques where weekend concerts start in the late afternoon and continue into the night. The usual protagonists are local acts like Explosión, Kaliente, Sensación, Adrenalina, and so forth. They boast a battery of synthesizers, an extensive percussion section, and at least three or four bikini-and-tassles clad dancers, who sinuously spin and gyrate to the music.

Refreshments are provided by two or three harried people rushing about behind a tiny makeshift bar outside, frenetically opening crates of beer and fishing water and coke out of a bucket which once contained ice, while everyone pushes and shoves, shouts, and waves money.

This particular Sunday was bolstered by the presence of Lima act Los Caribeños, who were supposed to be the highlight. But by the time Explosión had finished their frenetic two-and-a half hour set, with stops only for a couple of crowd competitions (breaks are for wusses), Los Caribeños' brand of tropical ska-funk seemed rather tame and repetitive.

Besides, by then I at least had transferred almost all my body's water content from the inside to the outside. My friend Clayra insisted that she, I, and her friend Blancaflor (they have such pretty names here) work our way as far as possible into the middle and the front of the crowd as possible.

Have I ever sweated more? Has anyone? I made several trips to push and shoulder my way to the front of the bar and bring back beer. Within a couple of minutes, it was like warm tea.

The habit here is when people finish their beer, they simply place it on the concrete floor beside them - with preditable consequences. Clayra did this, and I picked the bottle up, saying: "hey, I'll take them all outside and leave them on a table". "No, it's all right", she said. "Someone comes round and collects them".

This is true - there was a guy with a bag scavenging the bottles. But he didn't always arrive in time, and as the crowd got denser bottle collecting was no longer practical. The previous time I came to Coa, we arrived when the band was already half way through, and the floor of the hall was scattered with broken glass. This time, I was able to see the process in action. It's always going to happen, and with typical Peruvian insousiance, nobody does anything about it.

Carnival is about to start, and groups of the local teenagers were getting in early, covering each other with flour, and randomly spraying around beer. We managed to escape most of the flour, but the beer was unavoidable, and by the time we stumbled out of the hall, three songs into Los Caribeños, I smelt like the University of Canterbury Student Union the morning after Orientation opening night.

Somehow the girls managed to remain relatively dry, and given that we were all in the same place when the beer started spraying, this led me to conclude that the sticky moisture covering from my hair to the knees of my jeans was 90% pure gringo sweat.

Categories: Iquitos, Amazon, Peru

What I'd Left Out

There just hasn't been time to update the blog over the last week and a half. I have to do a bullet point list of where I've been and what I 've done.

As I mentioned, we got to Iquitos in three days and three nights on the boat from Pucallpa. I'll put together a whole story on that some other time.

I was over a week in Iquitos. As well as the motorbike classes, I also participated in an ayahuasca ceremony, which I suppose did "cleanse" my body through repeated vomiting, but disappointingly didn't produce any psychdelic experiences.

We went to visit the Boras and Yahuas tribes, about half an hour from Iquitos by boat, and bought more miscellaneous arts and crafts, while they jumped into native costume, performed a brief traditional dance, and charged us for the experience.

We also visited the "serpentario", an animal santuary perched above the river which included a tame anaconda amenable to being photographed draped around the neck of tourists.

Not to mention the social life and numerous invitations to people's houses to be stuffed full of local cuisine.

Tuesday morning at 6:00 am I took the fast, but extremely cramped, boat to Leticia, wher the frontiers of Peru, Colombia and Brazil meet. I spent four days in Leticia, undertaking some investigations about which I hope to be able to write in more detail some time in the future.

There was another trip to a native community, and some more handling of another anaconda, this time wild, which had eaten seven of the local chickens, and had recently been captured.

On Friday the "dry law" started in Colombia; presidential elections were on Sunday, and no alcohol was allowed to be served throughout the country during the weeknd, presumably so all voters would make a sober choice. To address this inconvenience, we left the country - several blocks down the street into the Brazilian town of Tabatinga.

This didn't turn out to be such a good idea, as the next morning I very nearly missed my flight to Bogota, luckily being saved by my new Letician friends who came to my hotel and woke me up.

I spent the evening in Bogota at the comfortable house of a friend of a friend, and the next day took a taxi through the very quiet city to the airport to catch my flight to Santiago. Seven hours of pleasant flight in the company of a very gregarious girl from Bogota who was going to study in Australia, and I was at my second to last stop.

My uncle and aunt, who live in Viña del Mar, very kindly picked me up, and that's where I am now. My body has had soemthing of a "what the hell have you ben doing to me these last five weeks" attack over the last couple of days, but now I'm on the mend.

Tomorow I'm heading back to Santiago to catch up with a couple of people, and then it's back to NZ and to work. Another time, another place, another life.

Born to Be Not So Wild

AS I mentioned in a previous post, traffic in the jungle cities of Peru is completely dominated by various kinds of motorcycles. I already knew this, as my friend Blanca in Arequipa had painted a romantic picture of her "tierra", of people riding around on motorbikes, hair blowing in the wind. So one of my goals before coming here was always to try and learn to ride some form of motorcycle.

Having expressed this wish to various people on my arrival in Iquitos, I had several offers to give me classes. I took up the invitation of a girl called Glahiss, whom Hugo and I had met with her sister at an open air disco on Sunday evening.

We rented a small motorcycle and headed out of the city to the Quistococha reserve, where there is a stretch of asphalt with no traffic.

Everything was going fine. The motorcycle was stable and easy to handle; I was getting the hang of working through the gears. After making another lap of the short stretch of ashpalt, I slowed up and went to stop. I squeezed the brake; unfortunately in my efforts to concentate on the gear downshifts, I neglected to take my hand off the accelerator, and in fact ended up squeezing it harder.

The result was predictable; the bike careered and skidded about 10 metres, I was thrown off, and the bike rolled onto its side. There pretty much ended the lesson. I escaped with a light graze on my right elbow. The motorcycle, however, received some noticeable scratches around the front wheel and mud guard. Worse, the steering wheel appeared to be twisted, and the bike would no longer go into neutral.

We headed back to Iquitos, going slowly in second, me with some trepidation about what I would have to pay for the damages. About five minutes down the road we were stopped at a police checkpoint. The rented bike had no plates, and they also wanted to see Glahiss' non-existent licence.

Glahiss was called across the road to talk to the more senior policeman. "Where's your licence, señorita?", he asked. "I don't have one, Ramón", she replied. "What? How do you know my name?", asked the policeman. It turned out that she had known the cop when he was much younger and used to come to her mother's store. She had just that moment recognised him.

Meanwhile, I was left with the other policeman. Having explained the gravity of driving an unlicensed vehicle and the need for police vigilance, he took an interest in my piranha necklace. "What else have you done here, bought any other artesanias?", he asked. I told him about our trip to the communities of the Boras and Yahuas tribes. We were let go with a warning.

We struggled on. Just as we were coming into the central part of Iquitos, we had a puncture which completely deflated the front tyre. We stopped a moto taxi, whose driver agreed to "tow" us to a tyre repair shop (meaning the front wheel lifted onto the taxi's baggage space, us holding on). He also managed to straighten the steering column and get the bike going through the gears again.

The puncture took less than ten minutes to fix, and the shop manager was sympathetic about my accident. "Ah, it's the only way to learn", laughed. "When I was twelve, I rode my bicycle directly into a power pole".

We headed off again. Two blocks later, we ran completely out of petrol. The bike stalled and completely refused to start. This time, we got another moto taxi driver to "push" us the few blocks to the nearest petrol station. I rode in the moto taxi; Glahiss sat on the bike, which the traxi driver pushed along with a free foot. This is very Peru - informal, creative improvisation making up for failures in other areas.

We got to the gas station, bought some petrol and headed back to the motorbike rental plae. As soon as we had parked the bike, Glahiss went into flirtatious negotation mode with the young attendant. We had been away two and a half hours, but she was trying to convince him to charge us for only two hours. "Oh come on, make it two hours", she simpered, batting her eyelids.

In this way, the attendant was distracted from checking the condition of the bike and noticing the scratches, which I had convinced myself weren't that bad anyway. He eventually caved in and charged us for two hours, and we walked away, me wanting to hurry to the next block somewhat quicker than Glahiss.

If slices of bad luck do seem to come in threes, at the end of the day we had been favoured by fortune.

Iquitos - Marchitada y Bonita

The trip by boat from Pucallpa to Iquitos took three days and three nights, with an extra day's delay thrown in when the Henry I, despite all assurances, didn't leave port.

It was an experience and an adventure, most of everything I had hoped it would be. I'll try and find time in the next few days to describe the journey in all its detail and texture.

For now, in a few snatched moments in the internet, I content myself with reporting that Iquitos is an absolutely intoxicating place, a faded and soporifically lazy tropical dream. At the same time as understanding why many people who live here have the goal of moving somewhere else, you can easily comprend why visitors never want to leave.

Within an hour or so of arriving, both Hugo and I independently concluded that it reminded us of our received image of Cuba. Attractive colonial buildings in the centre, eroded and peeling in the heat. Palm trees hanging lazily in the windless air. Fleets of motorbikes and ancient buses buzzing through the streets. People sitting outside corner stores and motorbike repair workshops playing cards in the evening. Fiestas every night with people of all ages joyously shaking their hips to salsa and cumbia. Beautiful women strolling casually through the plazas. Endless variety of exotic dishes, strange fish and fruits.

I don't have time right now to describe the things we've done so far, but must mention the overwhelming warmth, friendliness and hospitality of the people. These are cliches; nevertheless I defy anyone to find a place where the local population is at once as nice and as interesting as here.

I should mention that is also very safe; this is the first place in Peru where people talk down the dangers rather than exaggerate them. Lima seems like a planet away. Social conditions are not much different from the rest of Peru; it's more that the possibility of crime doesn't seem to occur to many people. It would generally involve moving slightly too fast to be feasible.

Will try and write more when I can.

Rolling on the River

HUgo and I arrived in Pucallpa Tuesday afternoon after a tiring but tolerable two-leg trip from Arequipa via Lima. We have reserved tickets for Iquitos on a boat called the "Henry", which has claims to being the fastest on the river, and leaves this evening at 5:30.

After looking at the options, we decided to pay a little extra for one of the tiny, hot cabins, as this means we can leave our bags in a secure place and will at least have the option of sleeping in a bed. But we have also bought hammocks and will be able to relax on the (covered deck). The guys selling the tickets made all sorts of extravagant claims about special food for those in the cabins, and armed on-board security, which we didn't believe.

Later this afternoon we will stock up on provisions, including insect repellent, fruit, water and beer, before boarding the boat for what we hope will be an interesting and tolerably comfortable trip.

On the way here, we climbed out of Lima in the evening, crossing the Andes by night. Morning saw us already in Tingo Maria, in the lush lower part of the "ceja de selva". From there we endured two stretches of rough unsealed road, and had to wait for an hour for roadworks, before finally arriving in Pucallpa at around 3:00 in the afternoon. The countryside was green and attractive, ranging from jungly lowlands, to hills with ferns and waterfalls.

Pucallpa is a friendly, surprisingly attractive town, decorated by plams and othe trees and buzzing with swarms of moto taxis, three wheeled vehicles with the front part of a motorbike attached to a passenger platform seating two people. There's evidence of some wealth; Pucallpa is the centre of commerce for a large area, and the wood and petroleum industries are being supplemented by increasing agriculture in the lowlands to the west of the town, plus the beginnings of tourism.

Last night we took a moto taxi out of town to a lagoon which had been recommended to us by another taxi driver. We feasted on the local cuisine, and were surrounded by indigenous women selling crafts. I opted for a píranha tooth necklace, which I hope will protec me against all fierce beast, fish and serpents during my journey.

We then took a launch across the other side of the lagoon to visit an animal reserve run by a kindly ex-policeman who was originally from Camaná in Arequipa. There were several kinds of monkeys, sloths, a range of South American rodents, a boa, an anaconda, and a beautiful ocelot. Most of the animals were in cages, but the monkeys were free to climb in and out.

The animals were also mostly babies or quite young; the owner said he always ended up getting animals dumped on him to take care of, so had decided to start up a nature reserve. It had been going for 8 months; they had just completed a restaurant and were starting on building tourist bungalows. We left a donation for the animals, and talked with the owner's son about creating eco-tourism links with Incaventura and Sudamerica Tours.

From this evening, we will be on the river until we get to Iquitos, so this blog will not be updated for at least three days.