La Selva

  Puerto Maldonado, Peru
Sunday, July 27, 2008

So after four awesome, busy days hiking and enjoying Machu Picchu, Meghan, Yvonne & I headed off early the morning of July 6 to go to the jungle. While I have spent my first two months all in the Andean highlands around Cusco and the Sacred Valley, Peru has extremely diverse (and difficult) terrain. There is jungle basically all along the eastern portion of the country. The entire area is considered part of the Amazon Basin, while actual Amazon is in the nothern part of the country.

en route to our jungle lodge

We went to jungle near Puerto Maldonado, the best city to get quick access to the jungle. Quick access is a 50 minute flight from Cusco, 1.5 hour bus ride from the airport & 1+ hour boat ride on the river. We stayed at a jungle lodge, Explorerīs Inn, located in the Tambopata National Reserve just off the Rio Tambopata.

nature walks in the jungle

As you would expect, the jungle was completely different from the moutains. La selva (the jungle) is hot and humid, lush and green, whereas in the mountains there is little vegetation & pretty darn cold at night (as you may have heard me mention). However, it is the dry season in Peru, and you could tell as such -- some of the vegetation was less vibrant & there were not many flowers, however we did have a bit of rain each of the days we were there & it was very green.

nature walks in the jungle

Jungle life is pretty laid back (as is much of my life in Peru, but the jungle really was so). Our schedule at the lodge was something like this -- get up at 4:30, breakfast at 5, go walk and look for animals & plants, etc., starting at 5:30 (sunrise is 6ish) until maybe 9, 10, 11. Come back to the lodge & shower because you are all sweaty. Have lunch. Sit on porch and read or play cards. Take a nap. Maybe take another shower because you are hot & sweaty. Go for a night walk or ride on the river to look for animals. Have dinner & a beer. Go to bed. It was very relaxing, but also sort of just funny. Definitely need to slow yourself down to just sort of roll with the rhythms of the jungle.

monkeys raided the grounds of the lodge

We actually saw lots of animals -- monkeys, otters, lots of colorful birds (parrots, macaws, every other bird I canīt remember the names of), caimans, tarantulas , but no snakes (yay!). It was very hard to capture pictures of the animals & the jungle overall. Sometimes we got to sit and watch the animals for awhile ---- for example, one day about a dozen monkeys all of a sudden were just running & swinging through the trees of the lodge area; they were on their way to raid the banana hut. (The staff said they let the monkeys eat the bananas during the dry season because there is less food in the jungle.)

& then they found the banana room!

But other times the animals skirted away pretty quickly. So I didnīt really get many photos of the animals. Plus the light in the jungle was really hard, so you will see that I have the same photos in multiple settings on my camera to try to catch the most accurate light that was happening. I donīt know that I was particularly successful (& you obviously donīt either, since you werenīt there - sorry!), but know that it was beautiful.

Quick Parental Notice: Please note - on one of our jungle walks we were exposed to a tree named the īerotic treeī. You will know it when you see it in my photos & it is a little embarrassing, but obviously the photo needed to be taken. We actually didnīt take the photo the first hike we went on, perhaps we were feeling out what was appropriate. But Yvonne & I subsequently did go out for a hike looking for the tree and the photo opp. Apologies to anyone who gets embarrassed by the pictures.

sunset on the Rio Tampata

The lodge was nice, maybe even quite nice as jungle lodges go. We had a little cabin/bungalow with our own bathroom & a little deck out front. Of course there was no electricity, so we had candlelight at night & our headlamps and flashlights for reading. With no electricity comes no hot water, which was not that big of deal. One day the water did come out all brown for a solid 10-15 minutes & that was a little concerning, but just fine besides that. Each bed had a mosquito net, which seemed to be relatively effective with the bugs & also just pretty cool.

our jungle home, almost romantic you could say

Yvonne´s bday, looking hot in the wellies!

We celebrated Yvonneīs birthday in the jungle with some jungle activities -- some hiking, some reading, some napping & some playing of really old trivial pursuit. Actually Meghan left one day earlier than Yvonne & I so that Yvonne was not traveling or sitting in airport on her birthday. The exit travel was somewhat exiting for all of us. It turns out there was a national strike on the days we were in the jungle & the days we were in transit to leave. The strike made travel a little uncertain, particularly the road travel, because it was possible that the protestors (which I guess was most everyone; as I understand it businesses closed throughout the country to protest the rising cost of living and what the Peruvian government was or was not doing about it; I guess it was particularly active in Puerto Maldonado) would have started fires or put trees in the streets to block traffic & just tie up commerce. Given this, we got to get up at 3:30 the days we were leaving respectively to get up river & to the bus before dawn so that we could hopefully get through the roads easily before the protesting got ramped up. All went smoothly; we did have a support team of a guy with a chainsaw in our bus so that he could cut up any problem trees, but it wasnīt needed. It did just mean that we got to the airport at 7 am for a 1 pm flight -- & the only coffee shop in the 2 gate airport was closed for the protest -- but it was all good.

fun at 4:30 am headed to the airport