Friday, June 1, 2018

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.

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