Jungle mishaps

Looking over my photos as I put together my Snapfish album yesterday, I was reminded of two big things I left out of my earlier post about everything that went wrong with my holiday. While we were in Peru, we spent the second part of our trip in the Amazon basin. To get to our lodge in the heart of the Tambopata River Reserve, we had to take a boat trip for four hours upriver. Our flight into Puerto Maldonado landed around 1 pm, so between collecting suitcases, getting over to the river, and loading everything onto the boat, I think we started our journey somewhere around 2:30pm. By around 5pm, it was starting to get dark, and I have nice pictures of sunset on the river. Once the sun had gone over the rim, we started to lose light pretty quickly. I watched our guide go to the front of the boat, pull out a battery and a big headlamp and start to connect the lamp to the battery. It was connected by way of red and black cables with clamps at the ends, and looked like the cables you use to jump start a car. Except that only the black cable had a clamp at the end. The guide stared at it for a while, looked back at the boat driver, stared at the cables again, looked at the boat driver etc. I should say here that the boat driver was about 30 feet back with the motor, as it was a pretty long boat. The assistant manager who was riding with us finally told the guide in Spanish to strip the protective covering from the cable without the clamp, and connect it that way to the battery. He proceeded to strip the plastic covering of the cable with a machete, of all things. At this point Vivien starting nudging me, saying "This is scary!" Meaning the darkness and no lamp. And me, well, I guess Tressa has rubbed off too much on me at this point, I was loving it, I thought it was a grand adventure. All I could think of in my head was her story about patching up a bus engine with duct tape in Africa, and the fact that now I finally had an answering story. I could say, "Oh yeah? Well, one time I was on a boat motoring up a river in the Amazon basin in the dark because our lamp was broken and we had no spare!" And the lamp did not get fixed, so our guide tried to use his personal flashlight, which was about as effective as a firefly. Luckily our boat driver was very familiar with the river, and did a good job getting us to the lodge.

Early the next morning, we got up at 4:30am for an early breakfast, and enough time to get an hour upriver to the macaw clay lick, before the birds arrived. Which they never did actually, we had to go track them down in other parts of the jungle. But we got back into our trusty boat, pushed away from the dock, motored maybe 10 minutes, and the engine died. We went through an hour of the driver starting it up, getting a few revs and coughs and some forward motion, then the engine dying and quickly drifting downriver with the current. We eventually ended up downriver of the lodge, at which point the guide got out a paddle, but with several stops and starts the boat driver eventually got us back to the dock. Once we were tied up it took him about 20 minutes to fix the problem, which was something to do with an obstruction to the gas line I think. Meanwhile, I was all upset, thinking we had missed the macaws. We got to the clay lick two hours late, and ran into another small group from our lodge who said we hadn't missed anything. And as you'll see from my pics, we had great views of the macaws once we found them elsewhere, with the help of our guide's trusty machete.

And finally, we went on several long sweaty hikes with our guide, the first one being a night hike right after our arrival, where we saw a lot of big spiders, including tarantulas. But we took another hike the following afternoon, after our morning macaw adventure. We had walked for it must have been an hour, tracking signs of wild pigs that we never found, when our guide decided to turn back, via a different path. We walked for awhile, then came out onto a wide path that was apparently newly blazed, since our guide stared at it in shock and then said, "This wasn't here before." We turned down the new path, but then soon off onto another one, but hadn't gone too far before he stopped, stared ahead, and then turned around and said, "Go back. The way is closed." It sounded like something out of the Indiana Jones Crusade movie or something. We went back out to the new path, and he left us standing there while he tried out two other paths, each time coming back and announcing that it was closed. Viv and I started to joke about being lost, and I think both of us were half-thinking it might be true. Eventually, the guide just decided to follow the new path out of the jungle, and we came out into the grounds of our lodge, a site where they were building two new cabins. He then told us we were never lost, and drew a little sketch on the ground to show us why he'd had trouble-- essentially, his excuse being that unless the narrow little paths are kept clear, they grow over with new vegetation quickly, hence the "ways that were closed." A reasonable enough explanation ;)