Hey guys. I have a lot to share with you, so heads up. I think I’ll start with my adventures in Puerto Maldonado first, because it works better for where I’m headed here and beyond.
The Peruvian jungle … where to begin? This incredible, mysterious, magical place is a place I’ve yearned to go to for so long. The air is wonderfully hot, sticky with humidity, and thick in its consistency as well as with the sheer amount of life! In this world, cold is an import, not a native commodity, and I love that! I seriously want to spend some part of my life in such a place. An enclosure of vast unknown. A delightful, dripping tangle that never ceases to amaze! If you need a remedy for this or that, it’s ALL here! The smell was … how else can I describe it … green. I’ve heard some accounts of the smell being rotten on account of the nutrient-poor soil that is shielded from the sun by a thick canopy, but this was not the case at all; it smelled all green. Just imagine what green in nature smells like for you–you can’t go wrong. Then expand that smell and intensify it by two times or maybe five times or maybe even ten times. All in all, the Amazon is so beautiful, and what I can’t share with words I’ll share with the most pictures I’ll probably ever take anywhere in Peru. In addition, when they say that the wildlife in the water and on the ground and in the trees and in the air creates a symphony, they aren’t exaggerating. The cicadas are the main melody, and then the hundreds, if not thousands, of other animals add in their parts. It is especially noisy at night. Ever since coming back, I’ve realized how much we humans dominate the environment with our noises and lights and a multitude of other things, as opposed to the rain forest near the Tambopata and Madre de Dios rivers, which was dominated almost exclusively by nature.
Getting there was more of a hassle than it needed to be. With few exceptions, punctuality down here isn’t as bi a deal as in the United States, which left me unprepared for the no-nonsense, by-the-clock way that the bus company I took ran things. As a result, I missed my original trip down and had to arrange for another one the next evening. I showed up on time for that one, and everything else went smoothly.
After I checked in to my hostel, I changed into more appropriate clothes for the hot, sticky stuffiness that now pervaded and, a little later on, went out to eat. This city is the fastest Peruvian city I’ve yet been to. People haul butt, most commonly in motorcycles, and the taxis down here are like go-carts, except significantly faster. On one occasion I rode on a motorcycle for a taxi. When I was told to get on, I was rather confused at first until the guy told me that yes, his taxi was a motorcycle. Because motorcycles are the most common means of transport down here, it wasn’t unusual to find them parked alongside and sometimes on the sidewalks. The food down here is great! Just take some elements of food from the Peruvian highlands–potatoes, rice, and eggs, for example–and put it in a banana leaf, or add some fried plantains to it, or add some spicy sauce to it, or a variety of delicious juices taken from fruits that grow in the selva, and there you have it. In a lot of places I’ve been to throughout Peru, the spiciest thing that Peruvians eat is ceviche, and while it is spicy, it’s nowhere near the infernos I’ve eaten with delight, so on one or two occasions when I was eating with others who are accustomed to the relatively low standard of spiciness for Peru and I took and poured this much hotter sauce all over my food, they were astonished, and even more so when I didn’t supplement it with anything to calm the fire. Maybe it’s because we share spicy things with Mexico. As far as spice, Peruvians in the Amazon know what’s up.
After lunch, I went and walked around the city. I looked up a lookout over the Tambopata River on Google Maps and found the vicinity, but I don’t ever think I found the lookout itself. In any case, Puerto Maldonado is my second favorite city to explore, after Cuzco. On the way to dinner later on, I encountered my least favorite thing about walking through it: There was one street whose sidewalk, if it had one at all, along with the side of the road, was completely taken up by vendors. Furthermore there were motorcycles parked near the vendors, so this left me little room to walk alongside the swiftly flowing traffic; thus I stopped frequently as an added precaution. I bring this up, though, because it was an obstacle that I figured out how to deal with in the moment, something I’ve gotten good at down here, and to me it’s another win: Some people would insist that I stick to clean, orderly urban blocks where everything is well-defined and clutter is minimal at the most. But I proved to myself yet again that I can solve unique problems and negotiate sometimes appalling messes as safely and successfully as anyone else. After how hard I’ve worked to adapt and how hard I’ve worked to get to Peru, to have such a realization is a big deal. Now to apply the same level of creativity and ready enjoyment to things like my internship … I’ll get to that later.
So anyway, my excursions throughout the city were quite fun, from eating lunch and watching a guitarist, a flute player, and a singer provide live entertainment to walking to the outskirts of town to riding in different vehicles. Promptly after settling into my room, I had gone and booked a three-day, two-night tour in a piece of virgin jungle near the Tambopata River. While it was incredible–no exaggeration!–afterwards I talked to others who had been there and whom I had told I was going there, and I wished I had prepared more. They asked me things like, “Did you visit a native community?” or, “Did you go to Monkey Island?” I had seen monkeys, but I never got to visit any American Indians from the selva.
As far as the tour, I was picked up the next morning, along with a couple from Spain, a guy from Scotland, and two people from Israel. We were taken for a half-hour drive to the banks of the Tambopata River and loaded into a boat. After a short boat ride down the river, we arrived at our lodge, which was luxurious! Before climbing to the deck, which was complete with kitchen, bar, pool, and bathroom, we took our shoes off. The food was great, as always–food typical to this region, variations of rice, meat, plantains, sometimes beans, and sometimes other vegetables, and juices of various kinds of fruit from the surrounding rain forest. After our first meal there, the personal guide they had hired for me took me into the jungle for about four hours and told me about probably a hundred different types of birds, other animals, trees, and plants, some of which stung as if they were bees with their minuscule spines. The jungle is very green, it is true, but it is also so colorful, from what he told me. The trees here are massive, some of them hundreds of meters tall! The roots are no joke. Where I grew up, they were skinny little things that you could step on or over with little thought. Here they are thick, long, and in some cases half my height. The vines here are thick, long, and ropey, and the leaves aren’t leaves you would sweep up with a rake come autumn–they are also large, and from the sound of them as you walk by, they could very well be paper constructions put there to make you think you were in the jungle. At one point during our time in this paradise, the guide showed me this tree, and I wanted to climb it because it felt in every way like a rock wall. In Puerto Maldonado itself, it was definitely humid–I felt like I was back in Louisiana or Florida–but out here, I could hardly stop sweating. It was perfect!
When we went out on kayaks on Sunday afternoon to go fishing and swimming in the river, the water, while not as warm as bath water, was the warmest body of water I’ve ever been in, with the exception of Flaming Gorge in August. To paddle amid huge trees and a greater variety of life in one place than I have ever seen before is something I’ve seriously wanted to do since childhood–and then to swim through it! This was one of the kinds of scenes that came to mind whenever I thought of South America, and now I was living it, while speaking Spanish almost exclusively! Down here, cumbia and other such music is some of the most delicious aspects of tropical America I’ve heard–and then there’s the rain forest itself that manages to rival all that!
Monday was our last day here. After breakfast, after I had to strongly insist to my guide and the other person that I in fact could and should be a part of the group and not off on my own with the private guide, we set off on a sweaty, sticky, wet, tangled, wonderful hike. As much as I appreciated my guide’s elaborate explanation of what was around us, I also just wanted to be in it, and so I managed to a great degree to block out people around me and just bask in everything I could hear and smell and see and feel–the sunlight filtering through the canopy, sometimes no light at all, and even the bugs (I had started out virtually untouchable this morning by virtue of my repellent, but by the afternoon that was no more). For those who know me, you know that hiking is one of my favorite things to do, and some of you, if you are reading this, will remember going on hikes as a group of us once a month on weekends throughout this past summer (we met weekly during the evenings throughout the fall and spring semesters). You might be thinking, as some people have commented to me, “Man, I wish I were there.” As we hiked around deep in this beautiful, exotic world, I started to think about the things I miss about home, because the end is close, and to be honest, I miss being able to share experiences with familiar people more than anything else. It’s cool to pick up acquaintances on the fly, but seriously, I thought about how much I wished I were sharing this with people with whom I’ve done things like this on a regular basis, where I don’t have to explain myself from scratch every single time, where we can just be ourselves. So, to flip the switch, in that fanciful moment I dearly wished you were there, all logistics satisfied.
Okay, there’s my sentimental tangent.
While out here in the selva pura, I really enjoyed having Luis as my personal guide, but in all the tours I’ve been on in the mountains and in the jungle, there’s this thing that tour guides do that I really don’t like: When we go out to eat, for example, they’ll separate us into their groups, and we’ll eat together only in our groups. I wanted to meet people! I finally managed to help Luis understand that I needed space, and thus I was able to make friends with the Israelis and two women from Lima. This latter friendship resulted in a day following our Tambopata adventure on the Madre de Dios and Lago Sandoval, followed by an evening in the town market and a dinner of Chinese-Peruvian food–chaufa, rice, plantains, and something else, which was really good. It was on Sandoval Lake that I got as close to monkeys in their natural habitat as I’ve ever been. We watched troops of thirty to fifty of them scrambling through the trees from a boat. We weren’t allowed to swim in the lake because there were four types of pirañas.
After one of the most incredible adventures I’ve had–the only regret, after it was all said and done, was that I didn’t manage to go to a nightclub–I barely managed to get my stuff to the bus after a hurried hour and a half of packing and left this beautiful, peaceful, lively, and altogether different world behind for the more familiar one consisting of mountains, llamas, stronger sun, etc. I think this was the most rejuvenating, too, because there has been a difference in how I’ve gone about things. I’m slowly getting my foot in the door at Colibri, the after-school program. I have good days where my supervisor, Reinaldo, helps me to be an active, contributing part of his team. I have bad days when I feel like all he wants me to do is exist, and so I end up not doing what he asks–just sitting there. But I’m figuring it out. And I’m realizing that while I can meet many of my goals for my being a volunteer there, there will be other things that may not fully happen. I just hope I can be the same person in the classroom as I am outside in crazy situations that present new challenges. I hope I leave nothing undone that couldn’t have been done, because I really find fulfillment there.
Traveling in Peru 