Iquitos, Peru 2001                    Check out the Photos!

Thank you! to Julie F. for this tale from our Amazon Trip!

I've been back from Peru for a few days now and the rainforest seems very far removed from daily life in Chicago. It was a 24-hour trip home from the lodge, deep in the rainforest and few degrees south of the equator. This was the end of a phenomenal week, but I'll start at the beginning.

When people ask what the trip was like, my brief description is that it was like a camping trip. on steroids. From Lima, we flew two hours to a town called Iquitos, the largest city in the rain forest. My first glimpse of the Amazon came from the air: a chocolate-colored ribbon of river winding through mint-green peaks. In another hour we were preparing to land in Iquitos. I was surprised to see that the land had flattened out and seemed to have the puffy, cotton ball clouds resting right on top of the earth like blobs of frosting.

In Iquitos, the group boarded a boat and spent the next few hours on the Amazon and one of its tributaries traveling to the lodge. The Amazon has a distinct brown color, which became evident as we turned onto a tributary, the black Tahuayo. When the black of the Tahuayo intersected with the brown of the Amazon, initially the two colors ran parallel. We could see brown water to our right and black water to our left. Next the water on both sides looked like a cup of coffee where we had just poured in cream but hadn't yet stirred. Finally, the black water of the Tahuayo prevailed. We arrived at the lodge late in the afternoon and, armed with mosquito spray, prepared for a week of adventure.

While the lodge did not have electricity, air conditioning or telephone service, it was comfortably-appointed and clean. Potable water was brought in from the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Iquitos. This water was used for cooking, drinking and brushing our teeth. River water came out of the showerheads and was used for laundering our clothes. We were told not to open our mouths in the shower. Since there was no shower temperature control, it was a reliably shocking experience to jump into the shower after a long day of sweating in the jungle. You don't realize that you do sometimes open your mouth until you jump into a cold shower and can't react.

The lodge was run by a Peruvian woman, Dolly, married to a Tampa businessman. Her staff of guides was exclusively Peruvian, many of whom had families living in Iquitos. A few of the guides had grown up in neighboring river villages. (It was kind of surprising to go to the primary school of the closest village and see a bunch of miniature versions of one of our guides). Everyone spoke Spanish and some degree of English.

Every day we had a range of activity options: hiking in the forest, wading through the lowlands in knee-high rubber boots, flying through the tree-tops on a canopy line 80 feet off the ground, swimming with pink dolphins in the river, fishing for piranhas (in a different part of the river!), bird-watching, canoeing, basket-weaving, building a blow-gun, visiting a local village or Indian family, or just doing nothing, which we called the "hammock excursion". I had the opportunity to do just about everything other than the piranha fishing, as we were rained out that morning.

It being the rainforest and the rainy season, we did see our share of rain. After a village visit, where we saw 50 primary school kids from just 14 families, we were impressed by the birthrate. Our chief guide, Moises, helped us to understand by relaying a story of a friend who was visited by an American woman anthropologist. When they arrived at the home of his friend, the wife was nursing a baby. The anthropologist asked about other children, and Moises' friend introduced her to each one of his children, from youngest to oldest, one by one. This took some time, as there were 11 children. Moises' friend sensed the anthropologist's surprise at the size of his brood and offered this explanation: "In the rain forest we don't have electricity, so when it gets dark, we go to bed. We do not have screens to shield us from mosquitoes other than the mosquito netting around our bed. During the rainy season there are many mosquitoes and when it gets bad, we go to bed. It rains a lot in the rainforest and some days it is raining so hard that we cannot get any work done, so we go to bed.."

Over the course of the week, we saw pink-toed tarantulas, poison tree-frogs, pygmy marmosets, macaws, pink dolphins, two ants taking a wasp prisoner while getting dive-bombed by another wasp, toucans, vultures, hawks, snakes, bats, monkeys and bunches of mosquitoes. It was glorious on the river as we were speeding along in power boats-no bugs and a cool breeze. However, this part was always too short-lived and soon we would either shift over to a canoe or go ashore and hike through the forest. We were greeted on shore by a swarm of mosquitoes. The temperature was in the eighties, the humidity was close to 100%, we were dressed in long pants, long-sleeved shirts and hats. We applied Deet to all exposed areas: backs of hands, palms, necks, ears and face. The mosquitoes would buzz right up to us. If the Deet hadn't yet sweated off you, they would just buzz around and not land. If the Deet was gone, you were fresh meat and they were merciless. Despite my religious fervor in applying Deet, I brought back my share of mosquito bites.

On the last night of our visit, the camp was visited by the local shaman, or medicine man. He performed a "Good Luck Ceremony" for us and we were all blessed-this involved a community drink of a rum concoction made with fresh garlic and a smoke of his special tobacco to enhance the drink. After we had shared in the smoke and drink, he went around with a branch of dried leaves and chanted to each of us as he brushed away the bad spirits with his branch. If you didn't know what was going on, it looked like people were getting thrashed by this eighty-year old for crimes unknown. After the ceremony, the guides played traditional music for us and we danced to exhaustion. At the primary school earlier in the week, we were told that the funniest thing the kids had ever seen was gringos dancing, so I imagine that it was us entertaining the guides rather than the guides entertaining us.

All in all, it was a great trip and I look forward to my next trip down to Peru. My lasting impression is of the people. They were so kind. One of the guides, Pedro, asked me in Spanish on the last day, "Julie, cuando vas a retornar?" My Spanish is functional, but limited. I've forgotten a lot of words and retornar threw me at first. Then I got it, "Julie, when are you coming back?" It made me see the trip from the perspective of the guides who get a new group every week and rarely see the same people twice. It made me sad. All I could think to say was, "en el futuro, Pedro", in the future. I hope that's true.

Julie did not join us for the "Survival" portion of the trip, so here's the story about that. - Ren

I had a distinct impression of what to expect when I signed up for the 'survival' portion of the trip. There we would be in God's most enormous salad bar, gingerly picking vegetables and fruits off the trees, with our guides showing us what herbs to mix up to make the jungle version of a raspberry-vinagerette dressing. Then I saw the video at the ATS meeting, and read the article in Outside magazine. Not a pretty picture. Bony fish, and (on a good day!) grubs! Yummm.

The five of us (Andy, Lisa, Steve, Kathy and Myself) set out with Moises and Jocius (sp?) on the morning that the rest of the group left for the market. It was about 4 hours up the river, with a stop to dig up the famous "Barbasco" root, and to eat a lean lunch of passion fruit and "jungle candy". Soon we passed an overhanging tree branch that had a large, red, poison tree snake in it. We all took pictures, and then when we started to pass it, Moises stopped and, with a devilish grin, asked "You want for dinner?" Before any of us could get our cameras ready, Moises had speared it just behind it's head. Hmmm. The menu's starting to look pretty interesting.

When we got into the nature reserve, we found a place to make camp. We used machetes to clear the underbrush, and then started to build our shelter. This was made with uprights to hold the roof up, and then cross branches to hold a roof of palm leaves. The roof was about half-way on when it started to rain. When the roof was done, it stopped raining. We put more palms down on the floor and put up the mosquito netting, and then the heavens opened up. It was about 6:00 pm (which is when the sun sets down there) and it poured in sheets of rain until 2:00 am and then merely rained until dawn. The roof held well, except for one very annoying leak between Kathy and Lisa. Moises and Jocius chose not to sleep in the shelter with us, a choice I think they later regretted.

In the morning, Moises discovered that the snake we were supposed to have for dinner the night before, but couldn't because of the downpour, had gone bad. So, he suggested that we go fishing. Once we found a very slow moving creek that fed into the river, we smashed up the barbasco root ("you must be very smashing", Moises said) and tied it to the ends of some long poles. We then swished that around in the water, which clogs the fish's gills, and brings them to the surface. That is after you wait an hour or so, and the fish are very, very small. We then speared them. We managed to collect a dozen or so of these tiny fish, which we put in a kettle and boiled, or wrapped in a leaf and smoked. Mostly they were bones, so we spent most of the time gnawing and spitting. We supplemented this meal with heart of palm, and raw tapioca, which tastes remarkably like a combination of grape-nuts and sawdust.

We then went on a walk where Moises and Jocius showed us a number of interesting trees that yield medicines, nutritious sap, or bark or vines that could be used as rope. After that long walk, this huge, ugly frog that had been hanging around camp started to look pretty tasty, so we did him in. It's surprising how little meat is on a frog that size. We each got about a table-spoons worth (it really does taste like chicken!) and we had some more heart of palm and tapioca with it. Moises promised us a real treat the next day, in the "jungle chocolate milk shake".

The next morning, we started on a hike in search of a particular kind of palm tree. Once we found it, we cut it down. (your fearless web-guy was bonking so bad at this point that I might as well have tried to slap the tree in half for all the good I did with the axe!) At that point Moises and Jocius cut down palm leaves and made two different kinds of backpacks out of the leaves! Very cool! We picked the fruit and Lisa and Kathy brought it back to camp in the backpacks. At camp we used a big wooden stick to beat the fruit (this fruit was basically a large seed with the fruit part being the thickness of a grape skin on it) and then a stick with three little branches on it that we spun like a "jungle mixmaster". We then soaked the fruit in water, and drank the water. I thought it had a faint grape taste, though some of the others felt there was a hint of chocolate.

We then piled into the boats for the ride home. The rains had raised the river about 7 feet, and so on the way out we were much closer to the large WASP NESTS than we were on the way in. Moises cautioned us to keep our ponchos handy, as we might need them as armor, in a hurry!

When we made it back to the lodge, we sat down to a very large lunch. As we discussed our adventure, we realized we were probably eating twice as much in that meal (really a pretty average sized American dinner) as we did in the whole 48 hours of our 'survival' trip! But still, it was a fabulous time. Thank you Moises and Jocius!