We´re still in Iquitos, Peru, at the mouth of the Amazon. We fly out tomorrow, to Brazil for a few days and then off to Africa to meet Natalie for our adventures in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania and Egypt!
But, with no further ado, the Amazon journey!
After spending most of the night in the Lima airport, we slept most of the day of our first day in Iquitos. We got up and walked around in the evening though. It´s a bustling town at the edge of the Amazon. We could see some really cool floating houses that were seemingly improbably constructed on the river itself. During the course of the trip. we saw many of these including some that were no more than single person tents constructed of a tarp over a pole, that were only large enough to house one person sleeping in a small canoe.
Day 1 and 2 - Explorama Lodge
We were picked up and taken downstream for 50 miles to our first stop at the Explorama Lodge. (If anyone is interested in seeing the exact itinerary, you can look here.) We were told that the Amazon is more than 3,200 miles long and there are frequent container ships that head back and forth from Iquitos, at its western edge, to Miami, trading necessary goods such as tractors and other machinery for rainforest wood (unfortunately). But, I digress.
The Lodge here doesn´t have electricity and we find our way around by kerosene lamps along the wooden walkways, to the palm-leaf thatched huts with mosquito nets. Even with 99% deet, we can´t seem to avoid the little buggers though. Ah well, it´s the price you pay for visiting the rainforest. :) On our first hike in the rainforest, the coolest things we saw were bright red poison dart frogs (¨Don´t eat me!¨) that are used for the blowgun darts the indigenous population still use to hunt, and very cool looking mushrooms. One example was called the 'Artist Mushroom' because it is hard, easy to carve, and will dry and harden further for cool sculpture style work. Another example was one that looked like an upside down strawberry on a stalk. Later that night, we went out in an open boat to listen to the night songs of the jungle, and saw some sleeping birds and butterflies (who hang upside down when they sleep). One of the spontaneous-seeming rains began then, so the guides drove back to the lodge in a hurry. As we learned in Costa Rica, it can be dangerous in a rain forest when it rains as large branches and sometimes trees will fall unexpectedly. The jungle sounds here at night are amazing, and loud.
We are summoned to meals here by the big booming sounds of hanging wooden drums! They are essentially hollowed out logs with two small holes cut in the top to convey the sound. (The drums we saw the Explorama musicians use echoed a similar design, basically being backpack sized boxes with a circular hole cut in front, and they would hand drum on the front surface.) We went out in a small boat after breakfast and saw sloths, grey and pink river dolphins, some saddleback tamarin monkeys and all manner of birds! Those monkeys are very bizarre looking, as you´ll see in the photos that we will post next. This blog tool makes it a bit challenging to post text and pictures at the same time, which is why we keep posting (mostly) separately our text and photos. We also went piranha fishing with little cubes of raw meat! Both Jeremy and I caught some, and we ate the biggest ones for lunch. We gave the rest of them to a local woman. We both have the teeth of the piranhas we caught! They aren´t super big, but they are sharp. We also fed bananas to the lodge´s pet parrots and scarlett macaws, who just sit around on railings or do fly-bys on our heads when they are feeling frisky. One of them did the "hey pretty girl" style whistle at Jeremy a few times.
In the afternoon, we went out in the boat again and visited with some locals. They are very poor here, but the children are smiling and seem happy for the most part. We went slogging through lots of jungle mud and mosquitos, to walk inland from one house to where they have giant water lillies on a black water lake. We then visited an old-fashioned sugar cane processing building (still functioning but looked like the machine, which was pulled in circles by a horse, looked like it was from the early 1900´s). Since it would have been considered rude not to, we had to sample all four kinds of sugar cane rum they made there, one of which was made from several kinds of bark and was laughingly referred to as "liquid Viagra". This caused a long afternoon nap to happen after we got back to the lodge! :)
We spend a lot of the time we aren´t out exploring, sitting in the thatch covered hammocks by the river, reading or just swinging lazily and taking it all in.
The mud here has amazing sticking power, and makes even the cold water shower feel like a really good idea!
Day 3 through 5 - ExplorNapo Lodge
After breakfast, we again head downstream another 50 miles to ExlorNapo Lodge, which is on a small tributary of the Amazon, called the Napo River. The highlight there was hiking out to one of the longest treetop walkways in the world. It was a third of a mile long and at the highest point, was more than 120 feet high. We could see well over the vast majority of these Amazon primary rain forest trees! It was originally designed to be used for scientific research, but is now mainly a tourist attraction. The walkways were narrow boards on top of narrow ladders, held up by ropes tied to strong cables.
Another kick ass thing about this place is their pets! And when I say pets, what I mean is that they feed wild animals a little so they stick near to the place, but they´re wandering around free. There was Charlie, the Capybara (think Rodents of Unusual Size from The Princess Bride) and Dennis the Giant Anteater (who also had a certain fondness for soup!). It was really cool to even be near those guys and get great pictures of them. We even got to pet Charlie (he made sounds that sounded like lasers when happy - bummer that I didn´t get it recorded!), although we were warned to not approach Dennis, since they are super strong and can even kill a jaguar (or so one of the guides said) with their super strong forepaws. They apparently will play dead until the jaguar comes to take a bite, and then lash out with their powerful claws. The guides all gave him a very wide berth. Other animals just hanging about were Trumpet birds and razor-billed curassows. That night, I heard a "slurp, slurp, slurp" sound just outside our window and asked Jeremy, "Did you hear that?" He said yes, and we poked our heads out our window curtain, and there was the Giant Anteater lapping some water from a puddle just under our window! It´s hard to express how cool-looking this creature is. (Later that week, he came up onto one of the decks, and couldn´t find his way off, as their vision is naturally poor and they mainly rely on scent. Through clapping and whistling, Jeremy directed him back to the stairs, and he followed the sounds very well. It was amazing to watch, and Dennis wandered off happily. )
The next afternoon we were lucky enough to catch a three-toed sloth coming down from his tree just in front of our boat! We´ll put his picture on the next blog entry too. So cool! We also saw one of the most impressively armored prehistoric looking catfish that some locals had caught in their nets, and was maybe 2 1/2' - 3' long. Wow. It had sharp spines down both sides of its' back and razor sharp fins and tail. A fighter, for sure.
Our final morning at this lodge, we went for a short walk in the local shaman´s medicinal plant garden. We saw all kinds of tropical medicinal plans including the Coca Plant (which they translated hilariously on the sign as the Cocaine Plant!) and a plant that made very bright orange-colored dye when our guide Segundo put some on our hands. Our guide was the second son of shaman and indicated the three plants used to create the Ayahuasca drink shamans use to receive visions to help the people. And yes, for those of you who speak Spanish, he does have an older brother named ¨Primero¨. Not entirely creative child naming!
Days 6 and 7 - Ceiba Tops Luxury Lodge
After 5 days of wet, muddy Amazon adventures, we were very happy to get to Ceiba Tops, billed as the lodge that would start our return to civilization! Our room had a roof, a tiled floor, electricity, a large bed, clean and non-mildew-smelling towels, air conditioning and a bathroom!!! All things that were lacking when we were at the other lodges. Yahoo!!! And desperately required laundry service. Oh, the joys of laundry service. Laundry service was so necessary after the jungle mud that we paid the exhorbitant amount of $73 for about 7 tanktops, a few t-shirts, a few pairs of pants, and some socks to be cleaned. But, it was worth it. No, really, it was so worth it. We had sweat a great deal while hiking in the humid jungles. It was wash them, or throw them out. This place also had a gorgeous pool with a slide. Needless to say, we spent all our free time when we weren´t out exploring, sitting by the pool and swimming in the cool, clean water. Ahhhh...
When we weren´t by the pool, we went to visit a nearby Yagua Indian community. Even though things were obviously staged for the gringos, it was still cool to see the blowgun demonstration and see the indigenous people. We danced around the communal thatched hut with the chief and some of the women of the tribe, and we both got to try the seven foot long blowguns! Both of us hit the target at a considerable distance once out of three tries! A little girl there had a baby sloth and I got to hold it! So cute. We also got to hold a baby toucan on our finger. On our way back from there, Jeremy got to hold a baby alligator. A very cool visit. We did see a young boy covered with what appeared to be a severe case of something like the chicken pox, and were told it was just a disease the native people sometimes get when it rains a lot. It seemed painful though, as the boy reacted strongly when his sister put her arm on his back. It was a little scary before we had the explanation though, as he kept standing very, very close to us.
We thought that overall adventure might be the highlight of our stay at Ceiba Tops, but later that day, we went to ¨Isla de los Monos¨(¨Monkey Island¨). OH my goodness, there were over 40 monkeys running around free, who even greeted us as we landed there in the boat, including one who jumped right into the boat with us before anyone had offboarded! There was one baby woolly monkey who wouldn´t leave Jeremy´s arms the whole time no matter how many trees offered, or how many times he tried to set the little guy down on the ground. He just kept climbing back up. So sweet. At one point he also had a baby saddleback tamarin perched on his backpack at the same time. This time, he stayed well away from the Spider Monkeys! For those of you who saw our Costa Rica pictures from last May, you saw that Jeremy got bit by an adult spider monkey at the Sanctuary there. Monkey Island, another great example of locals trying to help sustain the native wildlife and not allow them to be exploited, was super cool, and we got all kinds of great pictures of the monkeys!
There was a dark side to sanctuary visit. During our hikes, we had seen very few of the larger non-tamarin monkeys, if at all. A guide explained the native people hunt the monkeys and very few can be found without going three hours walk deep into the forest. The monkeys we played with were all purchased from a market in Iquitos, where they were most likely taken illegally from a government protected park north of Iquitos. He said it was sad, but really was the only way for visiting tourists to see the many types of monkeys the local rain forest has to offer. So, they bring the monkeys to the sanctuary to avoid them being killed or sold illegally as exotic pets.
Still though, playing with so many very friendly monkeys all at once was more fun than words can adequately describe. : )
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment