The Amazon
Trip Start
Jun 04, 2008
1
67
79
Trip End
Feb 20, 2009
Iquitos, Peru
Sunday, August 16, 2009
We spent the night at Mad Mick’s and headed out for the jungle bright and early at 6:45 a.m. We took a car to Nauta, and from there it was all by boat. The Amazon River starts where the rivers Ucayali and Maranon meet. It is so wide that in parts it actually looks like you are in the middle of a lake. We headed up the Ucayali, transferred into an even smaller motorized canoe, and headed out to the lodge. The lodge, like most of the houses we could see on the shore, was elevated on sticks about 5 feet high and a thatched roof and mosquito net walls that were mostly intact. Very basic, but functional. We asked why all the houses were lifted. 2 reasons: apparently, in the wet season, everything is flooded over 5+ meters and the villages on the riverbank become a small venice with everyone forced to get around on canoe for several months. And, in the dry season, which is what we are in now, animals and critters are everywhere on the ground and the elevated floor is safer. Fantastic.
We unloaded our stuff at the lodge and our guide, suggested a hike. He was raised in a small village inside the jungle and grew up knowing first hand the ins and outs of the wild. At this point we had already met a few jungle folk and appreciated the local flavor to which their names where chosen - Achilles, Diesel, and Gedrani. Our guide came from a family with no less imagination and was named Falcon. He grabbed a machete (the tool of the jungle. If you cant do the job with a machete, it probably cant be done) and we headed out the back door of the lodge and into the jungle. Within minutes, we realized just why we had paid for a guide. Falcon tapped a leaf with his machete and stood back. A bunch of ants just fell off of it. “Fire ants. The little ones. They are no problem, but your skin will burn like fire if they bite you.” He tapped another leaf and big red ants scurried up and down the stalk of the branch. “But a few bites from these guys will give you a serious fever in minutes.” We kept on walking, each of us mentally analyzing how we were going to manage walking through this impossibly thick passage of trees without brushing up some poisonous crawling things when even an innocent leaf held lethal fire ants. Falcon meanwhile continued to casually whistle out random bird calls. We saw hawks, termite nests the size refrigerators, loads of butterflies, and a group of monkeys. The monkeys jumped from tree to tree and made an impressive amount of noise for their small size. On a smaller termite nest near the ground falcon chopped off a corner with his machete, exposing hundreds of small brown termites. He showed us how you can hold your hand to the nest and let the termites crawl up your arm. You can then rub your hands and arms to squish all the termites to make an effective natural insect repellent. We mimicked and squished a few termites on our own skin. It would not be until later that we would fully appreciate a good insect repellent.
Near the end of our walk Falcon pointed out the base on a larger tree. First, lets point out the trees in the jungle are tall. Some easily towering no less than 100 meters above. Because of the annual flooding, the soil is permanently soft. So soft, in fact, that many trees hold themselves up in it. Everywhere you try to walk, or even take a canoe, you will come across a felled tree in your path. The taller trees standing above you have made it to this point by developing a huge root structure. As the ground erodes away underneath of them, the base of the tree becomes the roots. Some taller trees appear absolutely gigantic at the base because the roots are fanning out above the ground. We would find out latter these root folds in the tree were home to few interesting characters that come out at night. Falcon grabbed a dead branch of tree off the ground and swung it like a baseball bat at the exposed root. The flat and hollow root worked like a big drum and echoed all the way up the tree and out into the forest. “this is the jungle phone”. Its a distress call to others if you ever get lost. We all grabbed a club and started thumping away on the tree. Not sure how effect the SOS call would be, because with our enthusiasm, we should have had a barrage of help running in- but no one came.
We had lunch at the lodge and then headed out by canoe to a nearby indigenous village. Our first thought would be of people with face paint and loin cloths. However, this thought passed quickly when we realized we arrived during their organized weekly Sunday soccer tournament. Every village in the area rounds up a soccer team (some more equipped than others - read no shoes) to compete for a tournament. Eventually we got bored watching soccer and decided to walk around in the village-or the one street that it consisted of. The houses in the village were all identically elevated off the ground with waist high walls, thatched roofs, and surrounded by some nice looking rice fields. Mid-step Andy grabbed my arm and yelled at me to watch out, but I didn’t know if I was supposed to duck or jump or what. “You just about stepped on it!” I looked down to find a tarantula sitting smack in the middle of the trail It had hairy black legs and a brown patch down the middle of its hairy back. Falcon, our guide came over and picked it up. “The pure black ones are dangerous, not the brown ones“, he says. “This one is just a little baby”. It was about the biggest and hairiest spider I had ever seen. We all took turns holding the tarantula until he decided to run up Andy’s shoulder and Andy swatted him off. The tarantula didn’t seem to like that very much and ran-jumped away into the rice patties. We started to chase to pick up again, but he scrambled and proved pretty fast despite his “baby” size. After the third unsuccessful snatch, we thought to ourselves, “what are we doing!!??” We are trying to pick up an angry tarantula. So we let it run back into the rice fields.
We headed back to the lodge for dinner and as the night set in the mosquitoes started to come out. Being both the winter and the dry season, this is about as good as it will ever get for mosquitoes in the Amazon. And despite that, more and more mosquitoes kept coming out. They were as bad that night as they are in the Boundary Waters. We fell asleep that night grateful for mosquito nets and bug spray loaded with 98% deet.
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Thanks my freind for wrating this block, is very beautifull. Our new web page is : }
www.amazonexplorerperu.com.
info@amazonexplorerperu.com or ecologicaljungletrips@hotmail.com