Alone in the jungle

Five of our group (Sarah, Holly, Craig & Jana and I) opted for the three days side trip to the Amazon jungle. The flight from Cuzco to Puerto Maldonado was probably the shortest in my life so far with just 30 minutes. When leaving the airplane, we were overwhelmed by the hot and humid air, so different to the clear but thin air in Cuzco.

In the small Amazon hub city we mounted a boat on the Tambopata river that took us on a three hours upstream ride to the Tambopata Eco Lodge. Another group of G Adventure travellers had joined us and they were a nice company altogether. The landscape was lush and green and the sky blue, at least at the places where the fluffy clouds left some gaps.

On the way we stopped at a checkpoint to get our passports stamped with another nice jaguar iconography. It also was the latest place to put on some insect repellent to avoid the dreaded mosquito bites.

The guide, Ivan, stopped the boat several times to show us howler monkeys, a baby caiman and capybaras. A few macaws fly past in the distance. But compared to the abundance of wildlife in the Pantanal in Brazil, this was only a faded copy of what I had seen already.

The eco lodge indeed was eco. There was no electric power in our apparently very beautiful bungalows and instead we had to use the romantic candles to light it up after the sun had gone down.

We only arrived in the late afternoon and took a shower after the sweaty boat ride. But there was this thing from Thailand again: After the shower was before the shower. The sticky weather made you sweat right after it and the only difference was that you had to apply the layer of DEET all over.

The food was good and the staff very friendly. But before dinner, we had to go on a nightwalk through the jungle. It was a great experience and we found lots of insects, a huge tarantula and several frogs. The information about what to pay attention to was passed by repeating the message to the next person at the back and so it was a constant flow of “Mud!”, “Spider on the right!”, “Hole on the left”, and so on.

And then, Ivan said, we better go back now. When I asked why, I already could hear a faint noise in the distance that got louder every second. Mother nature had decided to tell us, what the word “rain forest” actually meant. In played panic and excitement we dashed back through the pitch blackness of the forest. With the head lamps providing only spotlights of vision, it felt a little bit like in the Blair Witch Project movie. After a few seconds, the rain was upon us and we were defenseless.

After ten minutes or so we reached the lodge again and had a fine dinner in wet clothes. Still being exhausted after the Inca trail, there was not much more to do than to get a good sleep in our bungalows.

In the early morning, we went on a jungle walk through deep pools of mud, much worse than the day before. Luckily, we had rubber boots (wellies?) that made the experience a lot better. The trousers were covered in mud after the walk regardless.

After around an hour we arrived at an ox-bow lake. These are former parts of a river that have been cut off by the river changing its main path. We got onto a very small and shaky boat and crossed the river. We had the chance to see a heron, stinky birds and sleeping bats. On the other side, we encountered two massively huge trees, around 500 years old.

In one of them, you could actually climb inside, because it was hollow. Pretty impressive to stand inside such a tree and look up into the sky…

On the way back we fed some fish including piranhas with crackers, but we didn’t get a clear view of them compared to the Pantanal where we could actually fish them out of the water.

There were all kinds of weird creatures like a funny looking bug and strange funghi in this forest. We were quite lucky to see a snake that didn’t really try to get away quickly.

In the afternoon some of us visited a fruit farm. Unlike elsewhere in the world, monoculture is practically impossible in the Amazon. The ecosystem is very fragile and highly complex. Take, for example, the brazil nut tree. This tree is only pollinated by a very special small bee, the Euglossine bee species. It only flowers two or three days a year and these bees are only found in undisturbed forests as they rely on a specific orchid species. Moreover, the nuts of the tree are only opened by one specific rodent, the humble Agouti, which is the only one to open the hard fruit and release the nuts. Take anything of these components away and the tree will not be able to reproduce and eventually die out.

95 percent of the nutrients are stored in the living biomass and only 5 percent are inside the soil. Thus, burning down the forest results in very poor farmland. Why this is still happening on a broad basis is a miracle to me. A stupid one.

We saw and (partially) tried some of the very strange fruit that can be found here. Among it was a pale greenish fruit that smelled like cheese, Harz cheese, to specific. Other fruit encountered was papaya, avocado, pineapple, cocoa, passion fruit, bananas and a few other ones I cannot really remember their names.

In the evening we got back onto the boat to find some caimans in the main river. It was a hard job to find nly a few and I fell asleep during the ride a few times. But we got a good shot of a caiman walking along the shore before he slid into the river.

Maybe he knew that hell would break loose in a few minutes. It started raining so heavily that we had to put down the plastic covers on both sides not to be splashed by rain.

That evening we drank the three bottles of wine we brought with us and had a good last night in the eco lodge. First I thought I was too drunk, but there really was a leaf-cutter ant carrying away a cigarette filter — I’ve got a photo to prove it!

The next day was just completely wasted by getting up early, a long boat ride, a long wait at the airport and a short flight. We arrived back in Cuzco at our hotel at around 4pm.

The Amazon was a nice experience, but if I had the choice, I would rather stay a few days longer in Cuzco because I really haven’t seen much of the place. I didn’t got rafting, I didn’t go to any museum, which is a pity really.

Craig and I got ourselves a haircut (overdue) and went for snacks to Paddy’s Irish Pub (I had a fantastic shepherds pie). Of course we paid gringo prices, but hey, it’s still a lot cheaper than back home.

That evening I booked my hopefully last flights (maybe except for another one in North America) from Chile to Tahiti via the Easter Island further to the Cook Islands. I still need to plan the expensive part in Tahiti and Bora Bora. Sigh.

I was too tired to go out with the guys for a few drinks and got the necessary sleep. The next morning all of us were leaving for Puno and Lake Titicaca, just a seven hours bus ride away from Cuzco. This is why I was able to catch up with all the blogging, writing all of it down in a six hours marathon. I hope I can upload the 229 missing pictures in Puno, too!

Bye for now. I’m a bit tired and the laptop’s (or my?) battery is down to 15 percent.