I forget who said that, but whoever they were they knew their stuff. I recently returned from a trip to the Peruvian Jungle than can be summarized in that quote. I think it´s best if I start from the beginning, so here we go:
Thursday in the morning I left Nanchoc and headed to Chiclayo to meet up with the rest of my group (Robyn, Ryan, Sarah, Sam, and Tania). We all ate at KFC in Real Plaza—aka the place where you buy gringa food—and prepared for our 12 hour bus ride over the Andes Mountains to the jungle town of Tarapoto. After the usual routine of checking baggage and showing of passports we all were aboard our 2-story bus with semi-lean-back chairs. The bus continued to run as usual, the bus attendant passed out a sub-par meal of chicken with potatoes and some unidentifiable dessert (either flan or creama volteada…we´re not sure) and then the extremely scary movie of fashion (right now, I Am Legend) started to play. However, five minutes into the scary movie we diverted from the normal bus routine…the bus attendant began passing around plastic baggies. When we asked what they were for she simply replied, “in case you have to vomit and can´t make it to the bathroom.” It was in this moment that I knew we were in for an interesting trip.
Gladly I can state that none of us needed to use the barf-baggie. I can however with equal confidence state that none of us were able to sleep on said bus either. A combination of freezing air coming out of the air vents mixed with a healthy portion of fear for zombie-like-I-Am-Legend-jungle-dogs that may or may not be rampant in the area combined with the horrible roads we were traveling left most of us with less than 2 hours of shut eye. I, being in the very front of the bus with two huge windows to see out of the whole night (I traveled with the mentality that if I was going to die I wanted to see it coming), can testify to the conditions of the roads. Apparently the night before there were a number of landslides that left most of the roads covered in dirt when we were lucky and rock and mud when we were less fortunate. It was slow going, and we arrived in Tarapoto a little worse for wear a few hours later than planned.
Upon arrival the kind owner of our hostel was there waiting for us--a very grandmotherly looking woman with short curly hair and the coolest accent we have ever heard. She helped us into moto-taxis and took us back to her hostel where we dropped our bags and slathered on some sunscreen and ran out the door to go jump off some waterfalls. We rented two moto-taxis and headed up the mountain to a national park with a waterfall where the locals (and tourists) so to swim and enjoy a nice day. And as per usual when traveling in Peru, you cannot pass more than 24 hours without a transportation issue…ours arrived in the form of a flat tire on my moto-taxi. We tried, and tried to get the attention of the other moto-taxi with the other half of our group and failed. Rather than pulling over and waiting for help (as any American would do) we just kept going, very quickly, down the mountain on one good wheel and the other rim. We all made it to the waterfall alive and excited to jump off the cliff into the water; it’s a small cliff, maybe 10 feet up, probably more like 8. I think we all jumped off…I can{t actually remember that far back in the trip…but I know I jumped ,with Ryan and Tania a few times. Before we jumped the first time we were asking the Peruvians how deep the water is, to which they all replied, “It´s REALLY deep, you´ll never touch the bottom.” We figured a few things out: that deep for a Peruvian is not deep for a gringo—we all hit the bottom, thankfully softly, and that water in the jungle is COLD! We spent a few hours jumping, swimming, taking pictures, and eating the no-bake cookies I brought and then returned to Tarapoto…6 to a moto. So if you are wondering how you fit 6 gringos in a moto-taxi here is how: you put 3 in the bench behind the driver and you have the other 3 sitting/standing on the back cargo ledge. Note to self for future riding experiences, do not sit down, the bumps are NOT good on the bum when sitting on pure metal bars.
The next day we went to the Blue Lagoon, which is in actuality green…but that´s just a small detail. We rented a car to take all 6 of us to the lagoon and wait for us, then take us back. To get to this lagoon you have to cross a river on a barge. Now stop right there. I know you have a mental picture and I wish to interrupt you before you get it good and drawn in your head and explain what this barge looked like. It was 3 canoes tied together with a wooden platform that laid across them that you load cars and people onto to cross the river. Now we weren´t that worried looking at the barge, I mean the guys sure did look like they knew what they were doing and as with most things in Peru I´ve learned that the people here do better with the things that they create for themselves. We watched the first barge go across, it was a synchronized dance of sorts with the 3 motors to get the boat to move upstream then at the halfway point, drift with the current to the other side and dock to unload the cars and people.
Now, I consider myself an observant person…that being said, I wish I hadn´t noticed the following. To the right of this docking area there was a big orange column that was connected on the other side by a large thick metal cable to another big orange column. To me it looked like there used to be a trolley or something that would pass from one side to the other. So I decided to open my big mouth and ask our driver (who is from the other side of the river…so has obviously been crossing this river for 40 some odd years) what were the columns for. His exact reply, because you just can´t make these things up, was: “There used to be a boat connected to the wire, it would go straight across the river and then come back, but recently the current was so bad and it was so overloaded that one side went under and caught the current and the whole boat sunk.” I looked a little harder, and sure enough, right in the middle of the river there was a faint V, the connecting cables from the boat causing a ripple in the current…the boat was still at the bottom of the river connected to the cables and towers. Being a glutton for punishment, we asked when this was assuming (a horrible thing to do) that it was years ago…nope, last week. Yes, these men have been using the 3 boat-redneck-yacht-club version of this barge for all of 5 days…now this is when pre-Peace-Corps-Jenny whould have said “heck no, I´m going home.” Yeah, I actually looked at this thing and said, “hum, this could be fun.” It´s amazing the things 2 years can do to ya.
At the Blue Lagoon we ate Tilapia caught from the lagoon, swam, and were introduced to my new favorite food: A banana (a special one for frying that´s harder than a normal banana) that is grilled, then cut in half (hot-dog bun style) and filled with crushed peanuts. Gosh it was good. I ate 2 in less than 5 minutes. It´s like a peanut butter and banana sandwich 2.0. After a few hours of eating and swimming we met up with our driver and headed back to the hostel to hear our second transportation blip. The boat that “always” leaves from Tarapoto to Lagunas doesn´t seem to be leaving on Easter Sunday. Yeah, okay, it was bad planning on our part to travel on Easter Sunday, but people said it´d be leaving. We were slightly panicked (when I say slightly I mean slightly, we were eating snacks lounging on the floor singing songs waiting to see if it worked out) the hotel lady came back with good news: there is 1 boat that is leaving.
Yay! There was a boat, we went to sleep and woke up at the butt crack of dawn (3am) and took a TWISTY TURNY road to the dock at Yurimangas. I, can proudly say, have never been carsick before, felt a little queasy. I wanted to teach this guy how to drive in the mountains. Or at least to stop accelerating INTO the turns and breaking coming out of them…it was just a nauseating experience for most, and an actual vomit-inducing experience for others. We made it all relatively in one piece and met up with our guide´s daughter. She took our hammocks and got them set up on the boat and we enjoyed a nice breakfast while we waited on the boat to load.
Now, I knew that we would be on a boat, and that this boat would be hanging room only (hammocks). But all of our friends who had taken this boat had been on the tourist boat…we went on the Peruvian boat (as it was the only one leaving that day). The main difference: the amount of space between you and your neighbor. Without joking, there were our 6 hammocks hung in a 4 foot wide space of this boat. We all sat head to toe as to all fit relatively comfortable and set off on the adventure. Looking around the cabin it was just ridiculous how many people we had in this boat. There were at least 40 people hanging in hammocks, 40 more squished in along the sides of the boat on benches, maybe 10 babies that were hanging in hammocks above their mothers, and at least 15 kids sleeping on the floor underneath all the hammocks. AND this was just on the second floor…I didn’t get to take a look at the bottom floor. We were all doing fine, catching up one some sleep or some reading…for the first 2 hours. Then I (and a few others) had to use the bathroom. We were hanging a good 30 feet from the back of the boat, where the bathroom was, and between us lay a sea of bodies, baggage, and babies. It probably took Tania and I a good 20 minutes to make it to the back of the boat, sliding underneath hammocks, crawling over some that hung real low, crawling on our hands and knees under others, side stepping over babies, bumping people sitting on the benches. It was a sight to see. The bathroom was an even better sight: a 2 square foot wooden cubical with a toilet (yes a real toilet) that dumped all contents into the river (so sad). After doing our thing, and making our way back to our hammocks we told the event to the rest of the group, who we had accidently awoken in our efforts to escape, we all decided to drink the bare minimum of water to avoid that trip again.
We got in some good shut eye. Around 1 in the afternoon a guy began passing out little slips of cardboard with a stamp on them. We all accepted them, not knowing what they were for. We asked around and found out that it was for food. Yes! This boat just got better. Not only were we having fun (we actually were…the bathrooms we just interesting) we got food! It was´{t anything to write home about, yucca, rice, meat of some kind, but it didn´t make us sick…this was the important part. After lunch Ryan and I began a riveting game of hide and go seek with two girls that were sitting near us. Yes, you read that right. We were playing hide and go seek while SITTING (that being in a stationary place) in a hammock. These girls were having a blast, and so were we for the first 10 minutes. Soon thereafter Ryan faked sleep and I began reading, the girls got the hint and left us alone for a while.
Around 10 hours into our ride we decide to climb up to the roof of the boat—we were in search of some good pictures, more air, and space. We found it up there. Traveling by river in the jungle is by far one of the coolest things (if not the coolest) I´ve had the opportunity to do in my life. We passed so many small villages, and waved to probably a hundred children in the process, and told some great stories. At some point we decided to grab the snack bag from down below and had some PB&J sandwiches and potato chips with a LITTLE water. When it because too dark to see we decided to climb back down and sleep (yeah we waited until it was too dark to see to climb…we are special). When we work up it was night time and we were in Lagunas.
We took down our hammocks and met up with Klever, our very…interesting…river guide. His name just fits him perfectly. He´s almost impossible to describe if you´ve never met him, but I´m going to try: he´s a shorter man, built for working hard, with a receding hairline and equally prominent laugh-lines on his face. He´s a man built to be a river guide; he has just the right ratio of smarts to craziness with an added amount of ability to bull-shit and tell one heck of a story. We dropped off our stuff at the hotel, ate, went over the trip and went to bed. The next day we woke up at 8 (Klever understood that we would want to sleep in and a grumpy traveler is no fun) and got ready to head out on the river. We left most things at Klever´s house, only bringing rain jackets, hats, a dry shirt, sunscreen, and the like with us, then took another moto-taxi to the launch point for the 2 day paddling trip into the national reserve.
I have never been so happy for the following: my rain jacket, my dry bag, and a paddle. It poured on us the whole first day, so I was obviously happy to have my rain jacket (and pissed I had put on so much sunscreen just to have it wash off with the rain) and my dry bag to keep myself and my stuff dry. Then I was even happier to have a paddle in my hands. I hadn´t paddled since the outdoor leadership classes at NCSU and I had forgotten how much I loved it. God it felt amazing to paddle again. I surprised all the guides by actually knowing what I was doing, and the guide for my boat appeared to be extremely pleased to have a helping hand for the journey.
We made our way down the river, stopping along the way to dump water out of the boat (it was raining REALLY hard), to see monkeys, parrots, birdies, a sloth, and a jungle cuy. Yeah, there is apparently a Jungle Guinea Pig that lives about 20 feet up in the air in the trunk of a tree…it blew our mind as well, and yes I have a picture of it. But the favorite of the trip was Slid. Sid is a sloth. We were paddling and Sarah and I´s guide said, “Look, a sloth.” When we asked if we could get a closer look, he took out his machete and chopped the poor guy out of his tree. Sid, being a self-preservation type of sloth, made a “run” for it and fell into the river. Instinctively Sarah and I plunged our hands into the water and pulled the poor guy out of the water and into the boat…forgetting that we would then have a wild sloth (is that a paradox?) in the boat with us.
I remember reading about sloths when I was in school…I can´t remember when, but I know I was still young enough to have been missing a tooth and was still able to drink a juice box without actually opening my mouth (remember when you could just stick the straw in the gap?). I remember a few things about sloths: they are the world´s slowest moving animals, they walk/crawl butt first, and they were related to a 12 foot tall giant dinosaur-sloth back in the day. I couldn´t think of any reason that a sloth would be dangerous, but I kept my distance for a few seconds just in case…I mean they have relatives that were 12 feet tall…there has to be some reason they stayed around for so long without getting eaten. Finally the guide told us we could pick him up, that he wasn´t going to hurt us, and to take some pictures.
We found out a few things about Sid along the next few miles of river: he smells, really bad, he is covered in little bugs that eat the mold that grows in his hair that enjoy crawling onto the body of whatever he is holding on to, Sid is around a year old, and that sloths eat once a week and use the bathroom once a week. One thing that we never did actually find out was if he was actually a he…we just kept going with it. When asked if people keep sloths as a pet our guide answered, “Why the heck would you want one as a pet?” Okay, so he has a small point, but we could see how if you bathe him once or twice a month and only let him play in clean water how the guy may not stink so bad. You´d never have to worry about the little guy running away from home seeing as how you´d catch him before he made it out the driveway, and if he only eats AND uses the bathroom once a week he´s very low maintenance, the perfect started pet for any child.
After stopping at a house to eat lunch with Sid (“for being the world´s slowest animal you sure are moving fast enough to interrupt lunch”) we got back in the boats and went looking for a place to leave him. We all felt pretty bad that we had carried this poor sloth miles and miles away from his home (a distance that he will never be able to make in his life) and then ditched him in a new and unknown area. The guide assured us he´d be fine and that we´d come back this way the next day to check on him (yeah, he was actually there a day later…all of 4 feet from where we left him).
The rest of the day we paddled further down the river to a campsite on stilts. There we docked the boats and began preparing dinner. Ryan and I de-scaled the fish on the paddles (very sanitary…we are bad health volunteers) and washed them in river water before handing them over to the cooks to fry. While we were waiting for dinner I taught some of the group how to paddle and then they had a race. Now, I would have thought that any group of 4 or more gringos, given the chance to paddle a boat in a river in the jungle of Peru would have jumped on the idea…apparently not. According to Klever, we were the first group he had ever seen take to the boats by ourselves without a guide and play. Basically we rock…but we already knew this. At this point in the trip we had reached a number of our goals: to see a sloth, to see a monkey, and to see a parrot. We were still missing a few so we told Klever what they were: to see an anaconda, to eat a piranha, to swing from a vine, to see river dolphins, and to see a toucan. He told us he´d do his best to help us reach our goals.
That night we went out for a night paddle, and Sarah was praying the whole time we didn´t see a BIG anaconda. She had heard a story of how they can “stand” 6 feet in the air out of the water and then fall ka-blam style onto passing boats causing them to sink and become anaconda snacks. Not the best story to hear before traveling in the pitch dark at night on a river full of them. We didn´t see much that night. A few sleeping birds, saw a few alligator eyes, but no bodies. We returned back to the camp to sleep; Sarah was happy we didn{t see any legless beings.
Early in the morning we went for a walk in the woods and heard (sadly didn´t see) toucans. They have a beautiful song, a sort of a tut-ti type thing. It´s amazing. We walked further back into the woods and took pictures by these cool trees that´s roots grow FROM the branches to the ground. And then, Sam´s life was changed forever. She was able to reach her main goal, quite possibly in life: she swung from a vine. The rest of us tried, I failed, most succeeded. We even got to drink some of the water from the inside for the vine…and I´m happy to report that none of us got sick from it! With the mission accomplished we headed back to the boats and ran into the river dolphins. We spent a good half hour watching them do their morning hunting, then headed back to the camp. Along the way we spotted an alligator, luckily from a distance because he looked bigger than I wanted to see up close.
For breakfast we ate…PIRANHA! Fried piranha tastes very similar to catfish, just with a few more bones in there. Their jaw are just ridiculous. They can open wide enough (WHEN cooked) to fit at least 3 of my fingers inside the tall way. After a hefty breakfast we headed back to Lagunas…paddling up stream. It took us a while, but we got back and managed to beat most of the storm that was heading our way. The wind is a very scary thing in the jungle. We were told that since all of the plants have such shallow roots (there is only 15cm of good topsoil in the rainforest, the rest is clay) that a slightly higher than normal wind can send whole trees to the ground. Seeing as how some of these trees had thorns on them I wanted them falling nowhere near me.
Back in Lagunas we got the first bit of bad news: There is no boat leaving for Iquitos today, but no fear there will most defiantly be one leaving tomorrow! WRONG. Tomorrow showed up and we got the same story: there will be a boat tomorrow. Considering we only had about 2 tomorrows tomorrows to spare before our plane left—without us—from Iquitos, we didn´t have much wiggle room when talking about a 30 hour boat ride. So we went for Plan B. Plan B wasn´t official, it was thrown together. Plan B consisted of our guide, Klever, running/biking all around Lagunas asking every single person he knew with a boat how many gringos they could fit on it and how much it would cost. Now if it had just been our little group of 6, we could have been out of there in a hot second on the mayor´s boat…but it wasn´t just us 6, there were two more groups of 4 from the Peace Corps all in the same…situation. So after being told that 14 was just too much gringo for the mayors boat we had pretty much given up hope.
It was about halfway through Klever´s fishing story (a tourist lost his finger to a Piranha trying to get his fly fishing lure back…stupid) that a small man showed up at the house, sat down, and just didn´t appear to be in that big of a hurry seeing as how he was intently listening to 9-fingured Dan´s story as well. Upon the story´s completion he says: I can take the gringos to Nalta (big city before Iquitos) if we leave NOW. Well I´ll be darned…he was in a hurry after all. We (people from my group) go into panic mode, all 14 gringos are spread out throughout this relatively small, but still rather large town with no cell phone service. Now, one might think it´s easy to track us down…it´s harder than it looks. Frantically an hour later we all show up at the dock, and of course, the guys are still not ready to leave.
We took a look at our boat, it looked nice. Just like a one-story version of the one we took from Yurimangas, it even had a little hole in the back to call a bathroom. Excited to get heading to Iquitos we all went to go find some lunch for the ride and stock up on some snacks. When we returned we were in for a rude surprise. The big nice boat we had seen before was motor-less and the men were moving her motor to something that resembled a 15 foot long canoe. A short while later we noticed 2 huge barrels of gas being loaded onboard and reality sunk in…we were somehow going to fit 14 gringos, with 14 bags, 3 Peruvians, 2 gas barrels, and a car battery aboard this boat…somehow without sinking.
I do not know how we did it, I really don´t. And the first 2 hours were even…somewhat…pleasant. I got a little sunburned, but so did the rest of the boat. But at around hour 3 the rain started. Hard. Now I didn´t forget to mention the handy-dandy foof on this 15 foot canoe because it didn´t have one. The guys killed the motor and started passing out a tarp (aka my only back rest available in the seat I was in) to hold over our heads and bags. At this point I should mention where I was seated in the boat. At the nose of a boat, when loaded down with 14 people and their stuff, the water comes in over the sides splash-mountain style. I was okay with that when there was sun, but when the sun went away, I started to get cold (Zach started getting cold too, he almost died in the front with me). Then when holding, yes holding, down a tarp while moving in a semi-speed boat you tend to get cranky and tired. So tired+cold+wet= 2 very unhappy campers.
Now when we got on board this boat we asked a few very important questions to Klever: How far to Nalta, how much are we paying? The usual. But the one question we forgot to ask the people ACTUALLY driving the boat. The oh so important question. Do ya´ll actually know where we´re going? Eluded our minds. Probably because it seemed obvious. I mean, who would agree to take a boatload of 14 people to a place they´d never been before…these guys. Yes my friends, yes. These men didn´t actually have any clue as to where we were, or where we were going. We were told this trip should last 8 hours, buy hour 10 we show up at a town. Upon stretching our legs and using the bathroom we are told by the locals that we are not, in fact, in the town of Nalta (as we had all thought) and were not even halfway there…S*@#%.
So after almost crying (I’m not going to lie, I was dying in the front of that boat) I got back in the boat and hoped we´d get there soon. At 3am, about 15 hours into this mess I hear the following conversation:
Our boat: hey you guys
The other boat: yeah?
Our Boat: do you know the way to Iquitos?
The other boat: no, we were hoping you did.
Oh goodie. 28 collisions with logs later (the river is apparently used to carry logs to Iquitos) we arrive, by some miracle, in Nalta. After a very uncomfortable exchange of way too much money in front of way too many locals we grabbed all of our stuff and got on the bus to Iquitos. 2 hours later we were in our hotel and bathed. Thank goodness.
While in Iquitos we enjoyed 1 thing probably the most: The Yellow Rose of Texas Bar and Grill. Good American food with some good COUNTRY music. I was in heaven. We actually ate there every meal (I would say I hate to admit that…but I don´t, it was that good). We also did the usual tourist things, went to the market, bought some artisanal goods, saw floating houses (yeah there is a place where all the houses are build on a raft), and ate grubs. Yep, those little gross white blobs of an insect. They taste kinds like the fat on some friend pork, but that could have been influenced by the woman having pork grilling beside her grubs.
After 2 good days spent chilling in Iquitos we got on a plane (which was a horrid experience for Sarah and I…planes are not our friends) and were heading back to our sites. The jungle was by far the coolest trip I´ve ever taken. It´s going to be a hard trip to top…fiestas patrias has its work cut out for it.
