Yanayacu River, Amazon Jungle

This is an account of our trip out to the Amazon jungle. In Jennifer's words: "It's too long." and I have to agree. But I already am leaving out so much. I record a lot of the overall experience here, but if you are more interested in the animals we saw, scroll on down to the "The Wildlife" section below. Highlight for Carter: catching a piranha. Highlight for me: swimming with pink dolphins. Jen really loved the jungle at night with glowworms, caiman and thunder. 
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We set off midweek for our trip with Farnaz & Paul to the jungle, flying very early out of Lima (taxi pickup at 4am) in order to get to Iquitos with time to take the boat out to the lodge by lunchtime. Iquitos lies in the heart of the flat Peruvian jungle (as opposed to the mountainous jungle), right where the Amazon River coming up from the south makes its big turn eastwards towards Brazil. Muyuna Lodge is 140km south of Iquitos, following the Amazon upriver.

On the 90min flight, I sat next to an Argentinian who proclaimed himself a Jesuit fanatic. He was traveling with a friend, a local from around Iquitos, and the two seemed to share a strange mix of camaraderie and patrician inequality. The Jesuit wore what looked like pajamas but are probably comfy in the jungle, while his friend wore a sharp-edged suit while he nervously peered out the window in anticipation of coming back to his people after 3 years away. Iquitos is a relatively big town, so perhaps it is just in my perception that it is populated with the high proportion of bizarre characters as befits an outpost. The return flight 3 days later was also populated with characters: the woman in the waiting room whose arm-hair was wooly enough that it brushed my arm even though we were a couple inches apart; the first-time flyer seated next to me in the exit row who obsessively read the exit-row escape regulations and started to pull on the escape lever until I told him not to and later turned on his radio; and I am pretty sure it was a transsexual stooping into the row in front of me.

There are no roads to Iquitos, arrival is by boat or plane only, so the streets teemed with motorcycle-rickshaws as the lodge's van drove us to town-center where we picked up galoshes and a couple of traveling companions. From the riverside along the defunct rubber-boom warehouses, our covered boat headed south on the Amazon. The banks are an almost unbroken line of jungle while the occasional habitations become steadily more basic as we get farther from Iquitos: cinder blocks and corrugate disappear in favor of thatch and plank homes, boats become less frequent, and people on the shore are more likely to stop and watch our passage. The one indication of modernity that seems always present, even as far upriver as our lodge, is the outboard motor. We saw many dugout canoes without them, but these motors are clearly integral to life out there. After a couple hours, we stopped for a break at the last "large" town, meaning they had some cinder-block buildings, school, clinic, and 3 or 4 floating dock shacks to tie up at. There was food to be bought, but I could not help noticing that the peehole Carter was using was hanging off the shack upriver from where the woman was washing her cookware. We stretched our legs a bit as kids followed Carter around and women unfailingly pointed out his blond curls. Days later upon our return at this same place, a group of teen girls hanging around the dock laughed and one, as Carter left, called out "Chau, mi amor!"

Eventually our boat turned off the Amazon onto a small tributary called the Yanayacu. It was hard for me to keep my bearings or get a sense of the terrain...there is just so much water and overgrown vegetation. There is a big lake out there, but to my eyes it was difficult to see the difference between lake and river. There is a maze of channels and shortcuts through swamps and consider also that the idea of "shore" is almost meaningless as the water level rises a good 15ft (?) from "dry" season to wet season. Trails become waterways, stairways become docks, etc. The locals see it differently than I, of course, and in time I could at least see some of the variation: river, lake, prickle palm swamp, water lily area, low flood-plain jungle, slightly-raised jungle.

(from Google)

We arrived at Muyuna Lodge about halfway into wet season, so the cabins were still on terra firma. The cabins and the communal area were nicely netted against mosquitoes, while at night the walkways were lit by smudge pots and each room given 3 oil lamps in lieu of electricity. The shower and toilets were murky river water, but much appreciated. Below I go into a little detail, including some of the challenges, but in no way as criticism...I put it here to underline how fabulous the trip was. We wanted to be out in the jungle far enough to see it's true wild nature. It's only natural that pampering was not part of the itinerary.

The lodge is simple and comfortable, no mojitos served poolside, or a buffet with 20 options, or even air-conditioning. They serve a small buffet usually featuring at least one unadventurous item to go along with some of the interesting local fare. Since this place is carved into the riverbank, there wasn't a ton for Carter to do. There was foosball, ping-pong and some board games, and the people there made a point of finding some crayons...but luckily Carter has started to really enjoy reading to himself. It is so hot and skeetery that no one goes outside playing frisbee. For our one trail hike, the lodge sent along a second person knowing that Carter would tire...this allowed he and I to be led back to the lodge without stopping the hike for everyone else. It is HOT out there. I packed 3-tshirts per day and ran out. The mosquitos away from the water are intense. We overdid it perhaps, with Deet, mosquito-net suits, even some heavier clothing. So we were super-hot on the hike, but I only have about 6 bites now as I type. I was able to cool off on the various boat trips.



Muyuna is a part of the community out there...not just an eco-lodge. They hire several locals. We waved at the boatman's kids up in their house. On an early-morning boat outing, we didn't eat all of the breakfast that was packed in the boat. On our way back, the guides stopped dugouts and people on shore to hand out the extras like fresh yogurt and bread (even pouring the extra juice into a family's bailing bucket). Seeing all this made our netted lodge with hammocks and lunch seem pretty darn luxurious in comparison.

So yes it's hot and there are mosquitos...two things I hate. And yet I can't tell you how much fun I had.

THE WILDLIFE

In general, we would go out on the boat, puttering through channels or chugging through vast expanses of reeds or floating river cabbage. Farnaz is a birder, so the lodge had hired a local bird expert to be our guide. Edson took us around, sometimes laughing because birds we remarked on were so common, other times he matched Farnaz in excitement. We saw enough white egrets artfully posing on green swaths of vegetation that they became literally unremarkable. Clusters of parakeets would cross overhead, or the square heads of noisy parrots, and birds-of-prey of all sorts were numerous. Farnaz added well over 100 new birds to her life list. Fish would jump at the sound of the boats motor, a barracuda even slapping Ingrid the Dutch girl in the chest. A very small village was near the lodge, so we would see them at their chores or building a new canoe.

Even around the lodge we were surrounded by wildlife...Amazon vultures hanging around, very "common" hawks , etc. There was always a background symphony, like a crazy, poly-rhythmic experimental jazz band made up entirely of birds and frogs. The arrangement was always in flux, though, and locals can set their watches by some of the sounds...and lord knows the birds could wake you up in the morning.

On our one hike, we saw a couple of pygmy monkeys, as small as your hand. After Carter and I had left, Jennifer availed herself of the local natural mosquito repellant as demonstrated by the guides: she placed her hand on one of the large termite nests until the termites ran out and angrily covered her hand, then she crushed them and rubbed the citronella-smelling results on her hands.

Our day excursions by boat were rich in feathered wildlife: toucan, sharply black & yellow birds that make long pendulous nests in the trees, big goose-like birds called donkey-birds, and more small colorful guys than I can remember. But we also saw a handful of sloth, a couple of water snakes, about 10 bats looking upside down at us from the bark where they were roosting, iguanas sunning themselves on branches, and held in our hands a little treefrog. The various ecosystems are really interesting...there's the Yanayacu River itself, of course, but other environments to which the flora and fauna have adapted specifically. On the big beds of floating river cabbage is a bird with extraordinarily long feet (allowing it to walk on the plants without sinking,  "walking on water"). The giant lily pads we saw, each almost 6ft across, apparently have a specific moth to pollinate them. One area was the prickle-palm swamp, forcing us to keep our arms inside the boat in order to avoid the spines (this is where we saw a prehistoric looking bird with a mohawk called the hoatzin).

We stopped in one area to fish for piranha. It's a simple as lowering a baited hook in the water, splashing a bit, and when you feel a tug...yanking with the hope that the hook catches on the fish. Our boat was relatively unlucky, but most of us caught one and Carter was proud to have caught the biggest in the boat. Later, after our dinner that included fried piranha, the guides cleaned and dried the teeth for Carter to keep. He wants me to make a necklace out of it.

Carter and Jen decided to skip the long early-morning outing to go swim with pink dolphins. I was never swimming closer than 10 yards to them, but they surfaced frequently. Bobbing quietly in the Amazon while the "piff...piff" of pink dolphins coming up for air is something I will never forget. The water is murky, so it was especially great when one would come up out of the water far enough to really show its face or fin. It was returning from this outing that Edson and Raphael were giving out our breakfast leftovers. At one family's riverside house, the young girls were hailing us by proudly holding their day's catch up high. Their dugout was full of fish and Edson translated that the family was very happy with their bounty...plus they got a bottle of yogurt. Another family we stopped at were, he told us, farmers. Their land is not good for hunting, and they don't live near the lake with the bounty of fish out near where the lodge is. It seems that territorial politics can play out, family by family, in the jungle.

On a night excursion, we took the boat out into the reeds and thick river cabbage, looking for caiman. There was a magical moment in one area as we realized that the dark waters were punctuated by green, glowing lights...like fireflies, but glow-worms on the river plants. After sliding back into the vegetation in the dark, flashlights went on and the Dutch girl screamed...there was a pink-toed tarantula on the reed right at her shoulder! But perhaps more intense was just the sheer quantity of nocturnal bug life crowding the vegetation over the water. Katydids, spiders, ants, all living out a nightly drama out there. We saw a small yellow tree anaconda hanging out over the river. But we sighted no large caiman, though Edson and the other guide, Raphael, did catch a baby caiman for us to see. The kept making baby caiman sounds saying, "The mother must be around here someplace."


All in all, it was an amazing experience. There are things we saw that will be etched on our memories for a very long time.

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PS: Farnaz and Paul had an epic all their own after we left and they stayed on a couple days. Her blog will go into detail, I don't doubt, but in the course of tracking down an elusive sighting of the rare wattled currasow bird, they were up to their armpits in water known to be inhabited by the venomous fer-de-lance snake, which can kill you if untreated for half a day. Also, they did not see a giant anaconda, but stumbled upon a dead juvenile caiman, all squishy in the midsection from having been squeezed by one. But her sighting of the currasow was remarkable and, she says, it seemed to be really special for Edson too.

Christmas Visiting

My apologies that this post is longer than normal. There was just so much that went on over the last month that I just haven't posted.

 The weekend before our Christmas visitors arrived, Jen and Carter ran in a race over by the Lima golf club. Jen ran 8k, while Carter sprinted in the 7-9 year old group mini race.

Lois and Laurie arrived the week before Christmas, relieving Carter's incessant anticipation of their arrival. Shortly thereafter, our good friends Tonya and Chad arrived, so we had a nice full contingent here for Christmas.

Prior to the arrival of Tonya and Chad though, we did a few things with Lois and Laurie. They have a ton of pictures, but I will make do with a couple of Google images.

Carter and I took them to the gold museum on that Friday. On Saturday, we went down and wandered around the colonial heart of Lima, taking a carriage ride around the Plaza de Armas. We stumbled into a free exhibition of Nativity scenes (many homes do elaborate nativities and, of course, artists and sculptors have taken the idea to dramatic lengths)...there was even a folk-music band in the courtyard. As it got dark, we headed over to the water park which instead of water slides features artful fountains lit up to great effect. Some fountains are clearly for cooling off on a warm summer night, and the park is full of families and couples walking around, playing in the water, and watching the laser & movie projections on sheets of water. Jennifer's inner-child is never far from the surface, so of course she and Carter were squealing in the fountain. Many formally dressed girls are there to take their quinceañera photos (15yr old girls have a big coming-of-age celebrations). After the park, we sat on plastic stools behind one of the many informal street carts outside and enjoyed some tasty anticucho de pollo (grilled chicken skewers).

At 1am that night, Jen and I picked up Chad & Tonya, got a quick pisco sour into them and got to bed in time to get up on Sunday and go to Punta Sal for a cebiche lunch overlooking the palisades in Miraflores. We walked down the steps to the surf area and out on the pier, after which I took the abuelos and Carter home while Jen stayed with Chad & Tonya for a seaside drink. 
 

On the 24th, Chad and I went early to the fresh market to pick up seafood for a fabulous cioppino for dinner. While there we could not resist having some cebiche at the stand we love there, even though it was 10am. The guys working the stand laughed when we promised to come back for lunch...and laughed even more when we did, in fact, return a few hours later with Tonya and Jen. The market is packed as people shop for Christmas (actually, all Lima seems packed with shoppers) and December is notorious for an increase in theft. In fact, just the week prior, Mariza and I witnessed someone steal a backpack at that market...chased by the angry owners.

Our Christmas Eve cioppino was fabulous and sent us to bed with visions of crawdads dancing in our heads. I snuck out to buy some things for Jen's stocking, having forgotten for yet another year. The streets were deserted except for clumps of street vendors and poor kids sitting on curbs waiting for neighborhood fireworks after having worked up to the very last minute. Since Peruvians celebrate late into Christmas Eve, by midnight the neighborhood became a bombast of high-caliber fireworks. At points it looked like daylight outside, and our car alarm kept whimpering. Carter somehow slept through it all.

Christmas Day, after all the unwrapping, etc., Chad cooked yet again. It was a relaxing day around home, playing Apples to Apples and having fun with some of Carter's presents. Early the next morning, Laurie & Lois & Carter boarded a bus for Paracas so they could experience the fun down there, going to see all the birds and renting kayaks (see my post of our previous trip down there). Jen, Chad, Tonya & I took the opportunity to check into a old-school hotel over in San Isidro, wanting the chance to be closer to explore some of the great restaurants that Lima offers. During this time, we took them to Huaca Pucllana (click here for earlier post) and the unprotected Wari burial ground 130km south of the city (click here for earlier post). On the way back from the burial ground we stopped at Asia beach, Lima's beach destination. The little restaurant worried us when the server opened 4 bottles of warm beer and brought them over with glasses of ice...luckily, the food was very tasty and we mimicked the other patrons who went next door and bought cold beers to go. A pleasant walk on the beach afterwards featured various seabirds and even dolphins.

Restaurants visited included Pescados Capitales ("Capital Fish" or by removing the 's': "Capital Sins", a humorous fish restaurant with a theme of sin). The fire-grilled octopus was simple and amazing. Panchita, a popular restaurant of Peru's culinary superstars Astrid y Gaston, specializing in amazing grilled meat, also introduced us to the algarrobina...a cocktail made from the syrup of a Peruvian tree. One night we met up with Julio and Maureen at Huaringas, technically a bar, but in addition to their fabulous pisco sour menu, the appetizers were culinary delights as well. Friday, Lois & Laurie & Carter returned.

Saturday was pretty mellow, with a visit to our local weekly organic market. Chad & Tonya had a very late flight out of Lima, so after Carter was in bed, we took them out for one last culinary experience...amazing steak at El Hornero not far from our house.

With Tonya & Chad gone, I joined Lois and Laurie for a visit to an exhibit of the 2 decades of internal strife in Peru, put together by their truth and reconciliation committee. It was a powerful insight into those years of terror and strife, roughly 1980-2000. Pictures of mass graves, bomb sites, students disappeared forever into the trunks of police cars, peasants and community activists killed by cadres supposedly fighting for the people. It would take a dedicated blog to cover it all, so I won't even try here. The exhibit leads you around the top floor of the National Museum, with all the photos and gauze covered windows. The second-to-last room is 6 or 8 of photos of the missing, with the audio testimony from their loved ones all playing at once, creating a murmuring coalescence of loss. And then you step into the last room which simply has a bench looking out a window finally without gauze, past the large buildings and kids playing in the street and up to the slum climbing the hill to the north. Powerful.

That night, after just about everyone headed off to bed, Laurie went out for a late-night "trudge", his version of power-walking exercise. He had done this earlier, just about getting lost, but finally looping all the way around the agrarian university until people directed him to our street. In our part of town, you just can't rely on walking a loop...it's just too irregular. So on this trip he ended up on the other side of the big hill where he met a family who helped him out with directions and finally drove him home. It was one of those rare experiences in which he made a kind of contact with locals not given to most tourists. The man told Laurie he used to be a policeman, even pointing to a house not 2 blocks down our street as being the famous house that American Lori Berenson rented and was found full of MRTA revolutionaries after her arrest. Coming on the heels of seeing the exhibit of the Truth & Reconciliation Committee, it was pretty mind-blowing for Laurie.

Monday was New Years Eve, for which Jen had heard that being down on the palisades in Miraflores was a great place to watch midnight fireworks. So we headed out to the Larco Mar mall where we could go to the movies and try to stay up late enough. Even after the movies, we still had a couple hours to kill and all the cafes and restaurants seemed to be prebooked. So we waited up at the little playground where Jen and Carter gathered a crew of kids for a late night game of tag. Just before midnight, the city erupted with fireworks. They may not have been the very biggest I've ever seen, but still pretty darn big and thw quantity being shot off up and down the coast was amazing. Not only that, but one set was being shot off right next to us...exploding just a few stories above our heads. On the drive home, the whole city seemed to be one cloud of firework haze.

The rest of the week was a chance for Lois and Laurie to do several of the things that we have enjoyed. Saturday they checked into their hotel with their grand tour starting on Sunday. Right now they are up in the Machu Picchu area.

Startin' to feel like Christmas

Last weekend was taken up largely by a 3-day Taekwan-do event in which Carter's group joined the 4 others from Lima. It was his first chance to don all the gear and actually spar, so he was pretty pleased. The final day's event was excruciating and running late, so we left early rather than being held hostage by our kid's activity. Carter moved up a belt level too.

Also that weekend, we went to a kid's birthday party at an embassy family's house. It is becoming clear to us that the Peace Corps housing is not as deluxe as some of the other embassy housing. The party was fun, the kids had a great time playing ball in the emptied pool, and they served the adults pisco sours.

 Meanwhile, we are heading into the Christmas season which is also the start of Carter's summer break. Carter will be out of school from Christmas through February. Three weeks of that will be in summer "camp" with some of his friends from school. He now has made enough friends in school and Taekwan-do that it's not uncommon to be out somewhere (like Pardo's Chicken today) and have a kid yell out "Carter" from across the room. Several of them are bilingual and it is fun to watch Carter and his friends free flow between English and Spanish, whatever seems to work.

This weekend started a little early with a holiday event at the embassy. Jen got her whole office to volunteer...note the elf on Santa's left! The event brought several busloads of special needs children to come see Santa, play on bouncy houses, facepainting, play-doh, etc. The elves were doing crowd control, while the rest of us were each assigned a kid to chaperone. Some of the kids were physically disabled, deaf, mentally challenged, recovering from injuries, or even 100% OK on the outside but fighting cancer within.  Jen could not stand the level of disorganization, and it seemed like more thought could have gone into making it fun for the kids.

Nevertheless, everyone I saw seemed to be having a pretty good time. I spent the morning with a boy named Jefferson, recovering from burns from the chest up. Inexplicably, he wore a baseball hat with the word "Texas" scrawled on it. He was quiet, or more than quiet, he seemed withdrawn in a way that made some think he might also be mentally challenged. We stayed at the Play-doh station pretty much the whole time until the Christmas show. So in spite of getting very sunburned, I had a pretty nice time, certainly less stressful than some of the volunteers I saw who were assigned mentally challenged kids that were "runners", suddenly making a break for the bushes. The show had some Christmas characters, a clown, and a line of sexy Santa's Helpers who had one dance that they did to the tune of Rudolph. They did the song twice. Afterwards, the kids all got a sack lunch, a bag of presents from Santa, and then headed back where they came from. Jefferson hadn't said much all day, and I'm not sure he even returned my farewell...but as his van drove away, he craned around an watched me until the van went around the corner a block away.

I joined in afterwards as Jen took her office out for a Christmas lunch at the good cebiche place not too far away. After I picked up Carter from school and went to Taekwan-do, we met up at McDonald's with Maureen and Julito for a birthday party.

Saturday morning we were back with the same Santa, this time for embassy kids. We had gone with Julio, Maureen and Julito, and afterwards went over to their apartment for a pizza afternoon. The boys played video games, but even us adults played their new Xbox Kinect, having a good time with the dance game, laughing a lot and looking pretty silly. Before leaving, Julio (who is a filmmaker) showed us his 20min film "El Hijo" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0495119/), a short jungle story filmed at his family's coffee plantation. It was great, and talking to Julio about how the jungle is a character unlike any other was interesting. His second film should be out in a couple months.