The journey home

I knew today would suck, I guess I just didn’t realize how bad until I had to take three flights to get home, with substantial layovers between them.  Add to that the logistical switch of leaving from Heath River (5 hours from Puerto Maldonado) vs. Lake Sandoval (45 minutes) and it sucks even more.

I slept well again, despite it being freezing cold.  I wrapped up in two fleece blankets again, beneath 2 comforters.  Surprisingly I slept well.  Out cold around 9 and slept right through until 4:45 when I heard Pat and Wally’s phone go off next door.  None of us took a shower this morning.  As nice as it would have been to be warm, sitting in the cold open boat after that would not have been advisable.  The staff at Heath River gave us blankets and comforters for the ride.

We opted to eat breakfast on the way so that we could sleep later.  Pat and Wally’s flight out of Puerto Maldonado was at 1:15 so we left at 5:30 and began the 5 hour journey in darkness.  How the captain of the boat could see is beyond me, or maybe he was just doing it by feel.  It went by surprisingly fast though and was really only cold for the last 45 minutes or so when we were going straight into the wind.  We still had to make stops at the ranger station, the Bolivian checkpoint and the Peruvian checkpoint.  We picked up a ranger along the way and he hitched a ride back to PM with us.  We got there around 11 and nearly burst, we had to pee so badly!   No rest areas along the Tambopata River!  But not surprisingly, it’s blue skies and sunny today.  Of course it is.

A quick change of clothes (hallelujah for something warm and dry!) as we were reunited with the luggage we left in PM.  Then we had to pack everything in the backpack back into the suitcase, which I somehow did easily.  I tried to pack everything wet or damp or sweaty into Ziplock bags, which I think helped squeeze everything in.  No rest for the weary though as Wally and Pat had to check in by 11:30, so off to the airport we went.   I checked in then and left them here since the InkaNatura guide was taking me to the Butterfly Sanctuary outside the airport to kill some time.  I thought he’d be taking me to lunch and back to the airport, but he just said farewell and told me to walk back to the airport myself.  Hmmmm.  It was maybe 1/3 of a mile, but my carry-on weighs a ton.  I guess it won’t kill me to take it on one more trek.

The butterfly sanctuary was nice and serene, and warm and sunny, which I didn’t get much of the last few days.  I took some photos and started to dry out.  The sore throat I’ve had since I got to the Amazon is going away; I sort of knew that was from breathing in and sleeping in the extremely humid air.  I enjoyed an Inka Kola on the patio there and then walked to the airport.

I now have 3 hours to kill until my flight out of PM.  The terminal is tiny and I’m alone here but for the vendors at the various food stalls (three).  I had a cheese empanada and a cinnamon juice drink while I wait for my iPhone to recharge.  Ahead of me I have a 6 hour layover in Lima, a 6 hour flight to Ft. Lauderdale, then a 4 hour layover in FLL before a 3 hour flight to Boston.  I like having a schedule cushion in case a flight goes awry, but this is nuts.  It’ll be almost 2 days between showers, which is just gross.

I’m trying to wrap my head around how I feel about the trip.  It’s a tough balance because I absolutely loved the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu.  It was such a high for me to be there finally and to take on that hike and nail it.  I enjoyed Cuzco to bits, it was fun and I consider myself blessed by the travel gods to have been able to see the festival.  That was fun.  I had higher hopes for decent wildlife encounters in the Amazon and I feel very let down.  After 4 trips to Africa, I know better than anyone how fickle Mother Nature can be, but I really just wished we’d have been tossed a bone.  It didn’t have to be a jaguar, but a parrot or macaw or tapir would have been nice.  The howler monkeys was an amazing encounter, but so fleeting.  The otters were great too and we were lucky to have that second sighting of them in Heath River.  Never in a million years did I think that the “occasional cold blast in the Amazon” would hit the days I was there, but it did.  (I strongly advise bringing at least one warmer outfit no matter when you go.  I wish I’d had more layers and a better raincoat.). Ultimately I think I’d go back to Peru because there’s so much I didn’t get to see.  But whether I have the stomach and mental fortitude to try the Amazon again is the question.

Wrapped up the trip with a quick shower at the spa at the Wyndham at Lima airport and then a nice dinner of ceviche, causita and a Pisco Sour before heading for my red eye back to the US.  I may be back...

Parrots or bust

I was out cold pretty much instantly when I got into bed at 9:20.  To say it’s cold here is a vast understatement.  I’d read that every month or so the Amazon gets a cold blast where it hits 50 or lower for a few days.  I never thought that would actually happen to me, but it has.  And all of my warmer clothes are back in Puerto Maldonado in my suitcase.  I saw 70s the last time I looked at the forecast for this weekend, not 50s!  I took a second comforter off the other bed and wrapped my legs and upper body in fleece blankets.  Believe it or not I slept pretty comfortably!

However, I did hear rain on and off all night.  As late as 3:30 I was still hearing it but I crossed my fingers and begged the travel gods to cut me some slack, although I’ve had pretty good luck on this trip so far, I shouldn’t push my luck.

I heard Pat and Wally up and about in the cabin next door and it was 3:45.  I wondered what they were doing but knew I had another hour to sleep because we weren’t due to leave for the clay lick until 5:15.  I tried to go back to sleep and was just successful when I heard footsteps and saw a light coming up my steps.  Pat called out “Amy are you coming?”  I looked at my phone again and it was 4:30.  I said “I still have 45 minutes”, she said, “no, it’s 5:30 and I know you don’t want to miss this.”  Now we’d been having some debate about what the time on the clocks would say since we are technically in Bolivia which is Eastern Standard Time whereas Peru is Central Time and an hour behind.  We all agreed to leave our phones on Peru time and would always confirm times to depart as “Peru time”.  In my near-sleep fog, I shouted that I’d be out in 10 minutes, and managed to do just that, not putting in my contacts doing my hair and thankfully just stepping into the clothes I laid out last night.  It pays to prepare ahead!

I got to the common area and Pat said not to hurry since there’s no sign of Pepe and the staff aren’t done preparing our breakfast to go yet.  I asked one of the staff in Spanish what time it is and he said 4:45.  I confirmed Peru or Bolivia time?  He said “Peru time”.  So we all could have had another hour to sleep.  We’re still unsure how Pat’s phone got an hour ahead.  I went back and did my hair and contacts and we were on the boat by 5:15.

With all the rain we’ve gotten here in the last two days, the rocky beach about 50 feet from the base of the stairs up from the river is now gone.  The water runs right up to the stairs and pretty deep too.  All of the shallows we had to navigate around are gone as well.  We pulled up next to the blind in the middle of the river and in front of the clay lick.  It’s essentially a raised platform with a roof from which we can watch the clay lick.  And that’s really all we did for 7 hours: watch the clay lick.

It turns out that not much wildlife likes the rain or the cold or the wind, and we had all three today.  We sat from 5:30 to 12:30 and while we saw some macaws fly overhead, that was the extent of the macaws and parrots at the clay lick.  I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.  I know full well from my trips to Africa that you just can’t control Mother Nature, but I’d be lying if I said this isn’t immensely disappointing.  It is really the draw for this area and we struck out two days out of two.  There’s not a third shot at this.

We did have a good time chatting about the British royals and tv programs worth watching.  So all was not lost.  The chef sent us with fruit salad, pancakes and little sandwiches with the crusts cut off (mine was olive) and loads of coffee and hot chocolate.  I had on a t-shirt, my long sleeved shirt, the hoodie (my uniform of the last 2 days) and wrapped myself in two blankets and draped my still-wet raincoat around me and I was still shivering.  We thought for sure around 11:30 the macaws were coming since we saw about 12 circling around at various points and they seemed to be calling to each other, but they just never landed.  The best I did for bird photos was a yellow faced vulture and a roadside hawk.  Pepe called it a day at 12:30 and we went back for lunch.

Lunch today was good.  I had cream of asparagus soup, tuna salad with a half of avocado and a delicious rice pudding.  I also had a cup of tea to try to warm up.  And the juice today was pineapple, which just might be my favorite so far, although I think I say that about all the juices.

I came back and took a steaming hot shower (thankfully the hot water is very hot here) and climbed into bed with all my blankets and comforters.  We’re due to have a nature walk at 3:30 if it doesn’t rain.

I don’t look forward to the 5 hour boat ride tomorrow morning to get back to Puerto Maldonado.  Especially if it’s this cold, which Pepe says it likely will be.  Ugh.

The jungle walk was pretty neat.  We saw absolutely no wildlife clear enough or close enough to take photos.  The macaws flew over a few times and we heard toucans, but nothing we could see.  That’s the downside.  The upside is no snakes.  

The trees here were pretty impressive though, from cedar and mahogany to one with fluorescent red bark.  There were trees growing around trees, trees over 300 years old.  The vines growing up and around trees ranged from leaves adhering themselves to the bark to vines so thick that they’d become winding trees of their own.  The smells were wonderful, very fresh and clean and sometimes even floral.  There were lots of tree roots above ground, which Pepe is said due to poor soil quality about a meter down.  We saw a few termite mounds built on sides of trees.  Pepe was good about picking pieces of bark or flowers for us to smell or see up close.  He really knows his stuff.  Overall I really enjoyed the walk, I just wish there’d been more birdlife or something in the animal world I could have seen.

Before dinner I got as packed as I could be.  I won’t be showering tomorrow if I have to then go out and sit on the boat for 5 hours. I’ve found some semi-dry clothes to put on.  I hope it’s warmer at Puerto Maldonado so I can feel warm again and dry out a little.

Dinner tonight was a vegetable soup (so good when it’s this cold!), a vegetable stir fry with rice and french fries and mango for dessert, which was absolutely delicious.  The juice tonight was black corn and it was incredible!  I would have thought it would taste more like beet, but it was sweeter.  I had a pisco sour before dinner with some popcorn as the bar snack.  I have to say it might have been the best pisco sour I’ve had so far.  Little Jesus made it and instead of bitters he put cinnamon on top of the egg white, which was pretty nice.

In bed at 8:30.  I’m beat from the long day and gearing up for a long day and a half of travel ahead!  Right now I’m focused on getting to Puerto Maldonado and getting some warm, dry clothes!  It’s a 5 hour boat ride...

Parrots MIA and still it rains

Well the plan was that we’d be out at 5:15 for the clay lick unless it was raining.  And it rained.  And rained.  I heard it start around 1 a.m. and heard it on and off all night.  There was thunder, lightning and winds to go with it.  When I woke at 4:30 and it was still coming down in buckets, I reset the alarm for 7:30 since Plan B was breakfast here at 8.  I ended up getting a fairly sound 10 hours of sleep, which I think I desperately needed after the ridiculous treks to and from Sandoval Lodge.

At breakfast we discussed Plan B, which was essentially wait it out.  It seemed to almost stop around 9, so we said we’d reevaluate at 10 and maybe do a walk on nearby trails.  But the rain picked up again and continued until lunchtime.  At lunch we decided we’d try to go out at 3:00 and do a catamaran ride around another oxbow lake.

Breakfast was another good one with scrambled eggs, pancakes, fruit cocktail and starfruit and banana juice.  Lunch was a potato and egg salad with a light creamy chili sauce, a Peruvian speciality, followed by spaghetti with soy meat, tomato and onion.  Another fruit design for dessert, this one shaped like a bird in flight out of honeydew melon.

The in-between parts here were spent chatting, reading, talking about wildlife, talking to Pepe, a quick catnap and drinking lots of hot tea and hot chocolate.  With the rain and the wind and no sun, it’s gotten cold here.  Who’d have though the Amazon would be this cold? Fortunately I threw one long sleeved shirt in my knapsack and I’m glad I have it, but I have a T-shirt and hoodie sweatshirt on too, and I’m still shivering.  My rain coat is apparently not waterproof, only water resistant, and will never dry out by the time I leave here.  Everything else is in various stages of damp.  I was most concerned about my camera but I think the silicon packets I learned about at Hunt’s photo class were a smart idea because so far so good.

We regrouped at 3:00 and took our boat from our Bolivian side of the Heath River over to the Peru side, jet setters that we are.  When the driver pulled the boat up to this steep muddy cliff, I thought they were joking that this is where we were getting out, but I should know better by now, they don’t joke.  So we climbed to the tip of the boat, across a narrow gangplank they threw down and then the two guys who drove the boat helped yank us up the muddy slope to a set of steps that led into the jungle.  We walked in about 5 minutes and then there was a little thatch-roofed covered dock there with a homemade catamaran (two canoes with a platform across them) waiting for us.  The guys scooped out all the water in the canoes and we climbed on the platform where we could sit on benches (with railings around them).  I know, if you’d told me I’d be doing any of this, I’d never have believed you.  Just getting to that point was a lot and now here I was on a catamaran in Peru on a lake with no one else there?  Crazy.

Pepe brought three fishing poles with him and some raw meat for bait.  He asked if we wanted to fish but only William, the gentleman from Australia, wanted to.  Pat and I took photos.  It took all of 2 minutes and Pepe was holding a piranha in his hand!  It was small and yellow and had a great set of teeth!  The good thing I learned is that piranha will only go after you if they smell blood.  But since I had no intention of going in the water anyway, that wasn’t a concern.  Pepe asked if we wanted it for dinner but I told him to throw it back. Now that I’d met it and put a face with a name it didn’t feel right to eat it.  We didn’t catch any more fish.

The guys started to paddle and we drifted along, seeing a few stinky birds (quoatail?) and hearing some macaws.   Suddenly we saw three heads pop up ahead of us and it was another family of otters!  Pepe said they don’t often see them in this lake and since there aren’t a lot of visitors here, they aren’t habituated to humans, so they were chuffing at us telling us to get lost.  The guys stopped paddling and just drifted as we watched them cross in front of us and beat feet away.  That was pretty cool though, I wasn’t expecting to see them again.  We didn’t see much else of interest, it was just neat to be floating in such silence and surround by so much and so many shades of green!   Every few minutes there’d be something that would break the surface of the lake and pop back down leaving bubbles and the circles on the surface cascading behind it.  We never saw what it was but we wondered if it wasn’t a bigger fish.

It started to get dark so we turned around and head back.  I successfully made it down the muddy slope without nosediving into the river and we came back to the lodge for a hot shower.  It felt great!  Pepe says it’ll be warmer tomorrow, so I just have to suffer through one night of being cold.  The cabins here are essentially screened in porches with privacy screens 3/4 of the way up, so no way to shut out the wind or the cold, but I have three beds in this room so I may take the comforters off the other two and pile them on mine for added layers!

There are two resident cats here, a black calico one and a white one with stripey paws and back.  I swear that one is female the way she is vocalizing.  They are meant to keep the rodent population under control but they know where the food comes from and sit at the kitchen door waiting for handouts.  Hearing and seeing them makes me miss my kids!

The chef here is really trying to accommodate both my vegetarian diet as well as Pat’s lactose intolerance.  In some cases, it means making three meals, one for her, one for me and one for Wally and Pepe.  He doesn’t seem to mind and he’s a very jovial, funny guy.  So far so good, but tonight was crazy good for me.  We started with a noodle soup, which they swear wasn’t made with chicken.  It didn’t taste like it was, but the others had chunks of chicken in theirs while mine did not.  My main course though was divine.  I got a huge plate of guacamole and chips!  It’s like a dream meal!  All to myself!  The avocado here is to die for, so much more flavorful than what we get at home, so this was insanely awesome for me.  I don’t even remember what the others had, I was so consumed with mine!  Oh and the chef has also been making homemade chips for us before dinner; tonight’s was sweet potato, the night before was plantain.  Delicious! Our dessert was done by young Jesus again, this time it was a papaya cut to look like a piranha with sharp pointy teeth and a papaya sauce inside.  It was served with flambé bananas which we put the sauce over.  It was cute and very tasty.

We all hit the hay early since we are going to try for the macaw clay lick again tomorrow.  Fingers crossed!

Howlers and when it rains it pours

Pepe told us at dinner that it would be an early start so we were up at 5 to get the day going.  It was just starting to get light out and was cool and comfortable, but still ridiculously humid.  We jumped (or as I do, leisurely stepped and prayed for the best) into the canoe and off we went.

I’m not necessarily a bird fan but there are certainly a whole lot of them here to enjoy.  I won’t see anything like them at home or in Africa, so I’m enjoying them and taking photos.  I wish I’d thought to write down the names of them but I can’t multitask while also balancing upright in the boat.  It’s enough to juggle my camera plus the iPhone.

We saw a caiman, South America’s largest crocodile.  It was just sort of hovering under water, watching us with eyes and nose above water.  But the reason we were up and out so early was to find the giant river otters that are resident here.  There are five in this large lake and we struck it lucky by seeing them all this morning.  They’d pop through the surface long enough to take a snuff of air and then submerge again, looking for fish.  Pepe says they find them with their whiskers, not by seeing underwater.  Once they found a fish, they’d resurface and crunch the fish loudly, eating with only its head up.  They make quick work of the fish and then off they go looking for more.  I loved that, they were pretty cute, large canine teeth notwithstanding.

We took the same narrow inlet that led us to the lake yesterday and saw a very small baby caiman resting against a tree.  Pepe gets excited about the caiman, especially smaller ones, so I wonder if that’s a great sighting.

Suddenly a sound overtook the jungle we were floating through.  It was otherworldly and I can only say it sounds like something you’d hear as a really bad guy in a Harry Potter movie executes a curse.  It was just this rushing, roaring sound that felt so guttural and overwhelming.  Turns out that a pack of howler monkeys was confronting another.  They were high up in the trees and tough to photograph, but we could see them jumping from branch to branch from our point in the canoe.  Pepe decided then that it would be a good idea to disembark at the little dock where we started our canoe journey yesterday and walk the bank to try to get a better view.  Ugh.  As much as I didn’t want to, I went.  And it was worth it (vale la pena, again?). We had a really nice view of the alpha male making this threatening sound and what appeared to be three others on a branch behind him.  I noticed though that a baby was attached to the third adult on that branch.  The howlers are a bright orange color, even more brilliant in the early morning sun.

We hopped (or gingerly stepped) our way back into the canoe and headed back toward the lodge for breakfast.

I noticed what I thought was another otter head popping up above the surface but it was really “just” a very large fish.  Go figure.  We also heard a large crack that sounded like a a gunshot, but Pepe claims that was a fish with an enormous paddle-like tale hitting the water.  Ok then.

We made our way up the stairs from the dock to the lodge and saw a bunch of capuchin monkeys chasing each other in the trees right overhead and so close to the lodge!  I tried to follow them and get a photo, to no avail.  It was fun to watch them make an enormous leap between trees and grab on and nail their landing, as if “I’ve got this”.

Breakfast at the lodge was good.  We each had a fried egg, fruit cocktail (honeydew, watermelon, cantaloupe and grapes) and pancakes.  And man, they were the thickest pancakes I’ve ever had, but tasty with some strawberry jam on them.

Pepe was talking to us about the wildlife around here and how it’s becoming obvious now that perhaps the clay licks for the birds are more of a social gathering point than anything.  He says there are two months when the birds don’t visit at all but are seen on the Brazil nut pods, which are soft from the rain and full of water and unripe nuts.

He told us he’s seen sloths swimming in the rivers and lifted them back into the trees.  Just because they can swim doesn’t mean they like to.  The tapirs and wild pigs swim as well.  He prepped us for the macaw lick tomorrow, which sounds like a pretty good experience.

After breakfast I packed up because we were making the journey to Heath River Lodge this morning after Pepe gave a talk on the Brazil nut.  I actually learned quite a bit from that including how to break it open to then get the nuts out of the pod that you then have to break open again.  It was these inner nuts that I was most familiar with having seen before.  It really is a painful industry in that they get paid so very little for 100 kg of nuts, which in turn we buy for 100 times their payment.  And it’s very manual labor too, from the teams or families who collect the pod when it falls out of the tree when it’s ripe, to the women who sit for 10 hours a day doing nothing but breaking the pod open to get to the nuts.  The pod that Pepe broke open for us had about 15 nuts in it, which is about average.  He broke them open for us so we could try fresh Brazil nuts and that was pretty cool.  Doesn’t get any fresher than that!

As Pepe was giving us the Brazil nut lecture, we noticed the sky darkening and the clouds rolling in.  Rumbles of thunder could be heard in the distance.  We were supposed to leave at 11 but Pepe decided we’d leave earlier.  We made it down to the dock and part of the way across the lake in our little paddle canoe when the rain started and there was a lightning strike off to our left.  I thought sure being the tallest objects in the middle of this massive lake was a death wish.  Never have I thought there was a chance I would die on vacation until today.  The rain picked up and turned torrential just as we pulled up to the dock at the start of our trek.  I hid under the roof of the keeper’s hut there thinking surely we’d sit that out until the rain let up.  Pepe thought otherwise.  And so off we went.

The next 2 hours or so were misery.  The track that I came in on yesterday which was miserable then was so much worse today.  Small puddles were small lakes, the mud had multiplied and we were soaked through within minutes.  It was slow going as we all struggled to keep our balance.  I started to wayfind on my own, finding the right steps for me, so I thought, and ended up going down on my knees and dropping my bag into a huge puddle.  A string of curse words spewed forth and I decided yet again that this just wasn’t worth it.  I just wanted it over.  It was, by far, the worst 2 hours of any vacation I’ve ever spent.

Finally we made it to the ranger station where Pepe gave us the option to change into dry clothes since we now had to sit on a boat for the next 4 1/2 hours.  It was warm then and it seemed silly to put on dry clothes over a soaking wet body and no towel to dry off with, so we decided to muddle through.  Once the boat got going though, it got chilly.  We made it to the lodge around 5:40 and not a minute too soon.  I dread that we’re going to have to make that same journey again on Monday to get to Puerto Maldonado, but at least I won’t be walking that damn path again.

At first I was put out that the schedule was changed to do Lake Sandoval first, but in looking at the state I came out of that walk today, there’s no way I’d have wanted to do that walk, then go to the airport to fly to Lima to Fort Lauderdale to Boston either sweaty as hell or soaked through by rain.  So maybe the change was fortuitous.

We got another banana leaf boxed lunch like I had yesterday, this time with rice and veg only.  I think we all wolfed it down out of sheer hunger from the journey.

Along the route we had to stop at both the Peruvian and Bolivian border patrol, as Heath River Lodge is on the Bolivian side of the Heath River.  So I’ll be sleeping in Bolivia for 3 nights!  And I got another passport stamp.

Arriving at Heath River Lodge, we were greeted by friendly flashlights from the bank.  It was well dark when we got here.  All I wanted was a hot shower, but first I had to dispatch (or get Pepe to dispatch) a frog in my bathroom.  Oy.  There’s no electricity in this camp like we had at Sandoval.  Light in the bathroom is by candlelight.  There’s one large tap light in the bedroom area, and that’s it, so you do the best you can with what you have. Freshly showered I headed off to dinner.  It was quite good although I think the soup was chicken based so I didn’t eat it.  The main course was a teriyaki soy meat with onions and red peppers over potato.  The peach was dessert again, this time dressed like a turtle with a grape for a head and star fruit for legs.

Everything in my bag and my knapsack is either damp or soaked.  I’m worried about my camera especially but it seems ok so far.  I’ve spread clothes out all over the bed and chairs hoping they’ll dry but with humidity this strong it’s unlikely.  Ugh.

Early to bed tonight since we’re up at 4:45 for the macaw clay lick.