Geocaching in Jauja

Tomb at Shutuy Marca ruins

This post actually is actually out of order, all about our weekend over 3 weeks ago.

The Road to Junin
Traditional Andean life is not that distant from Lima. As the crow flies, Junin province is just 100 miles away, with towns where small ladies wear traditional hats, children have cheeks polished by sun and wind, and the earth is often tilled by hand.

Taking the central highway due east out of Lima put us at 15,800ft above sea level, in a mountain pass called Ticlio. It's the highest I've ever been. There we were, not mountain climbing, driving our Hyundai at 1,000 feet higher than Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the contiguous 48 USA. We had left while it was still dark, but the sun rose rapidly while we left the fog and smog of the city behind. We watched the river canyon squeeze in around us and the road start to fold back and forth on itself, eventually passing under snowy crags at the pass before winding down a long canyon to end up at a town called Jauja (how-hah). You may know that Carter and I are fans of Tintin and, in The Temple of the Sun, he and Haddock come up this canyon by train and meet the boy Zorrino in Jauja. So we enjoyed seeing the book come alive, though the train only runs seasonally now and lost it's status as world's highest railway in 2006.

Simply driving this route is no small feat, it's a road of overloaded and underpowered trucks, spewing black fumes, serving the mines or the oilfields over in the jungle, and big suicidal buses. This route is notorious for epic traffic snarls that have trapped people we know for up to 5 hours. The truck we saw flipped on its side was not all that unusual; at least it was off to the shoulder. There are certain tight turns where only one truck at a time can pass, but we were lucky and none of these spots got jammed up. I passed the trucks when possible but also kept a wary eye for the oncoming cars inexplicably passing trucks around blind curves, forcing me to break suddenly or roll along the shoulder. Once, we only avoided being muscled off the cliff by coming to a complete stop and letting a truck come within millimeters of us. At another point, we were forced to pass a large careening bus listing dramatically to one side. The climb up the canyon is so long and steep that we burned half a tank of gas on our way up while our return down would later burn only a quarter tank. If I ever had a moment to see beyond my white knuckles or the road, I appreciated the rugged beauty of sheer rock faces dotted by cacti and epiphytes, dusted atop with snow.

Jauja
Eventually we crossed the pass, coming quickly on a large mine community and following the polluted river down to Jauja, a town of 20,000 people at 11,000 feet. It had taken us almost 5 hours to go 160 miles. Jauja is very provincial, but it served the conquistadores as their first capital in Perú (probably for the simple fact that the Inca left behind a couple year's worth of supplies and riches). We checked into a very simple but friendly hostel and set out to find a cup of coffee. Though some of the world's best coffee is grown just over where the jungle is, it's not easy to find a cup in Junin, the people  drink a hot barley drink instead. But we asked around and ended up under a tarp at the market stalls where old ladies serve food and beverage. Along with the coffee for Jen, I felt obligated to purchase a bowl of "patasca", the specialty at our stall; it turned out to be an unpleasantly tepid bowl of soup, with choclo (fat corn like posole) and grizzly chunks of meat I only later realized was goat head.

Geocaching
Geocaching is a kind of high-tech scavenger hunt in which a hand-held GPS or phone guides you to specific coordinates where someone has hidden a little treasure or "cache". Typically, you sign a logbook and trade a little trinket for one from the box. The best caches also take you someplace new or interesting (e.g. I did it once in Oregon and was taken to a relatively unknown pioneer cemetery) or even take you on a kind of tour. That's what the local Peace Corps volunteer has done here to encourage ecotourism, she has set up over 40 caches that introduce outsiders to local culture, history and environment (https://www.keteka.com/geocaching/). We spent the day with her and a local guide and artist named Chasqui (he is called this, the term for the ancient Inca long-distance runners, because he used to be an extreme athlete, once running the Inca Road from Ecuador all the way down to Bolivia). Carter has been developing the idea of himself as explorer, so we all enjoyed searching out 5 caches over the course of the day.

The first cache was in the valley floor, well-protected under the spines of a cactus, close to a small river where women were washing clothes. Another brought us into the little village of Acolla where locals were practicing a kind of street art, spreading colored sand and flower petals to create large images like carpets on the dirt road. Eventually we headed to an even smaller and more remote village called Saca and got out for a long, breathless climb up a peak there, at times walking portions of the Inca Road. At altitude like that, we rested often, taking in the view and checking our GPS signals. We passed a father and a daughter who was roughly Carter's age, turning the soil of their 45-deg slanted field by hand. The coordinates eventually brought us to the top of the peak where we came upon Shutuy Marca, the pre-Inca ruins of a small community. The ancient people here were not particular friends of the Inca, but this spot was off the beaten track even in those days, so perhaps the Inca let them be. Chasqui blew on his conch shell, asking for permission of the spirits before we entered among the stone walls, many still partially standing, with a dozen or so small circular houses clustered around the peak, a couple still showing large lintel stones over their doorways. The cache was hidden in a nook behind a small funerary tower still holding bones (though the age of the bones is hard to know). Alane, the Peace Corps volunteer, had brought some bright Indonesian fabric along so that she and Carter could play/dance in the wind, flying bright gold and scarlet in that landscape of brown grass and blue sky. But the light was waning, so we hurried down the steep slope to a little canyon where the wind and brush was replaced by the tinkling of a stream and green turf. We found the last cache hidden in a little dell along the stream and walked back to our car. It was rush hour; but since ours was the only vehicle apparently in the village, the commute consisted only of the shepherds bringing in their sheep and cows for the night. We had to stop for a while because the traffic jam of sheep in front of us blocked the entire road. Before leaving the village, a dozen local kids ran up and when we asked, only about half said they had seen gringos before. Sadly, we were so exhausted that we could not do more than take a few photos with the kids.

Leaving Junin
We took Alane and 4 other PC Volunteers out to dinner and then quickly crashed into our pillows for the night. I was up pretty early on Sunday, so I walked out of town and up to the high hill where the remains of the Inca fortress are. Walking like that seemed to highlight little things: the man who shook my hand because he was proud I was walking up to the ruins, the stone in my hand to throw at the blustering dog, the rebar and neon cross set on the hill amid the ruins, the little girl crying as her mother painfully combs her black Andean hair before going to market, the campaign murals that look like folk art, the priest sprinkling holy water on the engine and interior of a minivan as the family watches. Something about the air and light in the Andes makes me feel awake. The attendant at the locked lot where we had parked was not awake, however, but luckily a couple of local kids knew where he lived and went to wake him up. I returned for Jen and Carter with fresh rolls and squeaky cheese and yogurt; thus fortified we drove back up out of Junin, back towards the pass. We almost got stuck when traffic nearly locked up in a small cliff-side town where the highway squeezes through very narrow lanes…2 large trucks got pinned at tight corners several blocks apart, blocking the highway, and it was only by luck that Jen was able to get out and find an alley and direct some traffic and get us out of that town.

Heath River, Boliva

Giant blue morpho

tree frog

From Lima, one can fly southeast over the Andes and land in the jungle near the border with Bolivia, at a steamy little town called Puerto Maldonado. I flew in to join Benjamin, a friend from the Amazon raft race, and explore the jungle downstream, just across the Bolivian border. Both of us wanted to explore the jungle deeper than we had before; our time in the raft race was strangely devoid of "jungle", it was a lot of time surrounded by brown water, and we expressly were not traveling with kids so we could go push deeper than other trips. It turned out that he and I were the only guests at the lodge and, other than the 5 staff and our guide, we saw no people after the Bolivian border guards on Thursday until our return on Sunday. Instead, we were introduced to creatures of all sorts, memorable characters all of them.

MADRE DE DIOS
The Madre de Dios river is wide and strong, without a lot of people downstream from Puerto Maldonado. But even that slight human presence shoos the wildlife away from the banks, so the 3 hours to the Bolivian border were relatively tame. Every now and then we would see a dugout canoe with it's "put-put" engine, or illegal miners spraying a jet of water and sluicing for gold on the banks, but rarely. When we hit the border, our boatman checked in with the guards on both sides, dropping off eggs at the Peruvian post while the baby-faced Bolivian guards took pictures of us. We changed the boat's flag and we headed up the Heath River, which defines the border in these parts. Immediately the scene began to change. The smell hit us first, green and funky, and our guide Paolo started pointing at birds. Egrets and herons, sporty kingfishers, darting river swallows, fat flapping turkeys and giant ducks, we even rousted a dozen blue-and-yellow macaws from the fruit tree they were enjoying. The boatmen were careful, sounding the shallows with a stick and navigating around rocks and limbs.


HEATH RIVER
The Heath River Wildlife Center is nestled on the Bolivian side of the river, with trails into the jungle and only 7km from a completely different savannah called the Pampas del Heath (more on this later). The place is very like the Amazon lodge I stayed at: simple, screened cabins, a common area and dining area, electricity from a generator for a couple hours daily. We took cold showers several times daily, to cool off and rid ourselves of sweat, appreciating that we could at least sweat cleanly for an hour or two. Being the only guests, we had our choice of hammocks and we were served meals when we wished. The fare was hearty and basic, though a fabulous catfish cebiche was amazing, and we were served a series of fresh fruit juices that never repeated, including some fruits absolutely new to me. The jungle was never quiet, with a never-ending sound-wave of birdcalls and frogs and cicadas. We were usually awake by 4:30am, when the birds seemed to really get going and, on Sunday, we had the addition of red howler monkeys whose sound can easily be mistaken for an airplane.

Macaw Clay Lick

We spent the next 2 full days on various outings, inevitably coming back drenched in sweat, wiping off a layer of cobwebs and dead bugs and brambles, happy, with new animal sightings to discuss. Around the area, the guides know of various collpas (clay-licks, where animals frequently come to eat the clay which acts much like an Alka-Seltzer and offsets the acids of their jungle diet). The signature collpa for the lodge is an eroded bank of the river where macaws and parrots come. We set out at 5am and entered a floating blind they have placed as close to the bank as they dare. We arrived during what was apparently parrot hour. We quickly identified 4 varieties of parrots, all squawking exuberantly, including the Peach-fronted Parakeet, found only in the Pampas del Heath. The feeling of having seen something that exists nowhere else is gratifying, even strangely affirming. The parrots left and we settled in to wait for the arrival of red-and-green macaws, the biggest macaw around. They mate for life, sometimes adopting one other bird, so slowly they arrived in twos and threes. They are skittish, so they wait in the trees and do flyovers to check the scene and, indeed, at one point a distant vulture drove them to flee. But at some point one macaw landed on the clay and quickly there were up 35 hanging around, eating clay, squawking, resplendent in red blue and green.

"Chicken" Tarantula

All walks on the jungle trails have some things in common: frogs bouncing about, toads glaring, giant blue morpho butterflies fluttering about in shafts of sunlight. At night, the trail would be peppered with tiny, glittering jewels as the eyes of unseen spiders would glitter from the light of our headlamps. There were some biting flies, we steered clear of inch-long bullet ants that can give painful feverous bites, but truly we rarely felt pestered by bugs and I was much more discomforted by the heat rash my galoshes gave me than any bug. We crept up on spider monkeys and capuchin and, at night, got a glimpse of the world's only nocturnal monkey, the owl monkey. I was introduced to the golden orb spider, spinning a line of it's bright yellow web, strong as Kevlar. Every so often we would encounter little foot-high clay towers rising up from the path, looking for all the world like lost dildos (they are, in fact, built by cicadas to protect their dig 15m down into the earth to lay their egg). More impressive, however, was the araña pollito, which is in the running for largest spider in the world. This tarantula can be as big as 10 inches and is so named because locals claim it can drag off a small chicken. Paolo noticed a burrow and enticed the beautiful black creature out with a wiggling stick…she was the size of a tea saucer, pretty small for her species.

Olingo (from google images)

Perhaps the highlight for me was being out on a night hike when Ben just happened to sweep his flashlight through the trees where two eyes suddenly glinted back at us. Viewing through my binoculars, I was surprised by a face as fuzzy as a teddy bear, but with small sharp teeth. Paolo had to identify it later, but it seems we had stirred an olingo, from the same family as racoons, with 3-feet of buff-colored body and another 3-feet of poofy tail. It yawned and stretched for a minute, then wound its way down around the trunk right in front of us, and went off to hunt for the night. It was only the second sighting Paolo had ever had of an olingo. I wish we got a picture.

PAOLO

harvesting Brazil nuts

In addition to being a very able guide, Paolo talked to us about what life is like for him. The situation for him illustrates some of the factors at play in Madre de Dios, the tension between the need to protect the environment and the need to feed your family. He is very glad of his tourist work, having taught himself enough English by listening to visitors and studying a book (for us, we kept everything in Spanish). But in the off-season he is compelled to earn money one of the few ways available, by going out and collecting Brazil nuts. He showed us the process; he roots around the base of a tree, watching out for snakes and spiders, and gathers the large pods (like coconuts). 4 or 5 good whacks with a machete open the pod, assuming you have not chopped off a finger, and each pod yields 15 nuts. A day's work will yield a large sack of nuts that can be sold for about $6. In the past, he tried his hand at the two other more lucrative options: illegal gold mining (in which he knows some people who got lucky rich, but also others that are sick from the mercury they use) and illegal logging (in which he signed on with groups that go up to 21 travel days into the wild, out where the uncontacted tribes are, and cut trees). Both are rife with official corruption and powerful middle-men and various dangers, plus he prefers to avoid such environmentally damaging work. Brazil nuts are, if not lucrative, sustainable. All this will be going through my head the next time I encounter a small $8 bag of Brazil nuts in Trader Joe's.

OXBOW LAKE

Hoatzin

Charichuelo fruit

Late one afternoon we went downriver a ways and then walked inland to a canoe waiting at an oxbow lake. Along the way, Paolo introduced us to a jungle fruit we'd never heard of, charichuelo, a pleasantly citrusy pulp inside a perfectly yellow prickly ball. Paolo paddled the canoe, taking us through quiet waters as the light dwindled. An ancient-looking lungfish called paiche, native to the Amazon River and found sometimes to be over 400lbs, has somehow been introduced to this area. So in one area we saw clusters of paiche babies, all coming up to breathe in the same platter-sized spot, roiling the water weirdly. As if that wasn't prehistoric enough, at the end of the oxbow we came close upon 3 Hoatzin, weird turkey-sized birds with a mohawk and 3 stomachs like a cow. The stars came out as we paddled back and our lights began to reflect back the orange glow of small caiman eyes along the banks. In fact, after a few sightings, Paolo did not point out caiman any longer…there were just so many of them.

PAMPAS DEL HEATH

Pampas del Heath

The Pampas del Heath is perhaps the last pristine Amazon savannah. 3 miles from the lodge, we suddenly stepped out of the jungle into the low scrubland. It was as if we had gone through a portal to a new universe; the jungle literally stops on a line and the new ecosystem starts. We were near to two different birds of prey, an eagle and a caracara, in a couple of the trees that sprout up here and there. Our lunch at a rickety viewing platform built in a tree did not yield more wildlife sightings, but simply being in that environment was interesting. Ben mentioned that he would rather be lost in the jungle than the faceless wilds of the Pampas and, indeed, Paolo said some new workers at the lodge once got lost out there for a week.


TREE CLIMB

The ceiba tree climb

On one outing, we put on helmet and harness and climbed 7 stories up a laddered ceiba tree, finally looking out over the canopy of the jungle. The climb was a bit nerve-wracking and  slightly overhanging, so it required some effort. Ben and I were both sweating buckets at the top. We were rewarded by a rare sighting of a troupe of red howler monkeys just a couple trees over, and we were buzzed by a quartet of blue-yellow macaws.

RETURN TO PUERTO MALDONADO
A long boat trip back the way we came brought us back to town. Ben and I had an hour before needing to go to the airport, so we jumped in a motorcycle taxi and I got to see a little bit of the sleepy town. The main plaza has a vaguely Japanese-styled tower set on a circle of cement like Japan's "rising sun" design; apparently the town had a Japanese community and in WW2 constructed this bit of patriotism. Ben and I got some sandwiches and a beer, then headed over to a very popular ice-cream shop where I had 2 jungle-flavored scoops, camu camu fruit and Brazil nut.

White Caiman

moth