Amazon Jungle – April 11
Our flight to Iquitos was at 6:45, so we were up and out the door at the appalling hour of 4 am. Because of our fancy, late dinner last night, I’m pretty sure I slept for exactly 0 minutes last night. This will not be the last ungodly early morning. Good times.
Quick side note: Interestingly(?), the cabs all play English 80s rock music at high volume. Nobody knows why.
Domestic flights in Peru permit carry-on liquids of any size so we absolutely took a bottle of wine in our luggage for the jungle trip. After a quick 2-hour flight, we met our personal guide Oscar in Iquitos (holding another personalized “Risa Rene” sign) where we loaded into a van with two other private tour groups and their guides and headed off for a two-hour drive to the town of Nauta. This was the most hellish drive* along severely potholed roads.
Iquitos is a ramshackle town of half a million people with no access by road – goods are floated in on boats or flown in. The town/city seems to be one long paved road interconnected with side dirt roads, and is full of 3-wheeled “motokar” taxis, cats, and many mongrel dogs. I swear I saw one dog that looked like a hyena from Lion King.
Just when I thought motion sickness was going to win, we arrived at the dock in Nauta and boarded a covered aluminum speedboat to navigate the various rivers to our treehouse lodge. We were visiting during “wet” season, so the boat ride only took an hour because the high waters created a short cut. During dry season the boat trip takes two hours. Two hour increments is a common duration of trips in Peru.
At the treehouse lodge we got the run-down on things – where our personal treehouse was located, when and where meals would be served, how to get clean drinkable water, and other important tips. Then we met with Oscar to start planning our tours. Oscar will be our guide for every excursion, and was willing to customize things to suit our wishes. Our first tour was that day at 3:00, a sunset jungle boat ride to see pink dolphins and maybe a sloth.
The treehouse lodge is exactly as it sounds, a collection of single-room treehouses built in the jungle canopy and accessed by steep staircases and suspension bridges. To protect against insects, each lodge is fully encased in mosquito netting (as is the food / recreation building), and the king beds are further protected by another layer of netting. There is a sort-of-private bathroom in each treehouse with a shower, although no hot water. The tap water is non-potable, but it turns out this is the case everywhere in Peru. Bottled water is always available, and we learned the hard way that it is advisable to use the bottled water for teeth-brushing as well as drinking**.
Lunch consisted of a breaded arapaima (known here as “paiche”) appy and a main course of chicken. The treehouse staff gets extra kudos for presentation. I got a bit of grief from the waiter for not finishing my food as it was “wasteful” and I suggested in that case that he bring me smaller portions. From this point on, my meals were approximately 10% smaller than the norm. I would have preferred closer to 50%.
The river tours at the Treehouse Lodge were run in a little aluminum boat. We would spend many, MANY hours in this same boat. The river level of the Amazon fluctuate by as much as 15 metres (metres!!) and we were visiting during high water season. This meant 90% of our tours were on the water and it also meant we could take the boat into many little forested areas. Our afternoon river boating adventure lasted about 3.5 hours, during which time we saw many, MANY birds, the famous pink river dolphins, a couple of iguanas, and a quick flash of a family of squirrel monkeys,, but my favourite were the sloths!
Despite being DEAD tired we went on a 40 min night time jungle walk after dinner and were treated to the likes of a baby pinktoe tarantula, who I liked very much, and a scorpion spider, who I did not. We also saw several species of ants: leaf cutters (good), fire ants (bad), and bullet ants (very bad). And we saw a cute little Amazonian tree boa, some sort of large Amazonian frog the name of which I didn’t catch, a couple of opossum,, fruit bats, a sleeping dove and a pair of screech owls.
Amazon Jungle – April 12
Today was an extremely adventure-filled day, although we later found out this was likely because our guide Oscar thought we were leaving tomorrow (Monday) instead of Tuesday due to a miscommunication with the Treehouse staff, and he was probably trying to cram as much in as possible. So there may be some repeat adventures on Monday.
As if getting up at 4 and having a fun-filled day yesterday wasn’t quite enough, today we were up and at the dock ready to leave at 5:30 am for a sunrise and birding tour. We boated out to the main part of the river to watch the sunrise but it was very cloudy so once it was light enough we headed off down an assortment of tributaries to do some extremely successful birding. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some – I will later start keeping notes in my phone – but based on the birds I could remember, I estimate we saw about 20-25 species in an hour. No photos here, but I’ve compiled an extensive bird photo gallery in the next post.
At 9:00, after a buffet breakfast, we headed right back out on the boat for some piranha fishing. Piranha fishing is pretty simple. It involves scouting for a tiny spot on the water tucked in a grove of several trees and then taking a piece of wood (bamboo maybe) strung with about 3 feet of fishing line and a hook. You simply drop the hook baited with meat into the water, attract the piranha by swishing the end of the “pole” back and forth rapidly in the water, and then just wait for a bite. When piranha hits, you just pull the line straight up. Sounds simple but we sucked at actually hooking the fish, although there were plenty of them around. You could actually watch the disturbance on the surface of the water as they swam to the bait. We caught many tiny little piranha and Jeff almost hooked a full sized one. In the end our guides gave up and saved the two biggest tiny ones for us to eat as a lunch time appetizer. It’s probably worth mentioning that when I say “eat” I mean they cooked the fish for us and served it to us for lunch.
Right after lunch, again because our guide was under the incorrect assumption that we were leaving the next day, he decided to combine a wildlife / birding tour with an evening nocturnal wildlife tour, for a 4.5 hour adventure on the water. I think it’s worth briefly mentioning at the point that during all of this we were both suffering a bit due to the contaminated Peru water** … make of that what you will, this is as much description as you’re getting (you’re welcome).
Apparently on the night tours that normally go out after dinner (I think?), the guides head to lakes to find caiman and will catch them for the tourists to hold for a photo op. Either because we were out earlier or because caiman luck wasn’t on our side, we were unable to catch any. We did manage to see both grey and pink Amazon dolphins, sloths, and various monkeys (squirrel, monk sake, and grey titi). The birds were too many to name (perhaps there will be an appendix in case you are having trouble falling asleep), however the most prehistoric and fantastical bird was the hoatzin. We only have very bad photos, so I included one from Merlin for your enjoyment. Apparently hoatzin hatch with tiny little claws on their wings, like baby pterodactyls, which fall off during their first molt. The most glorious sighting was a pair of blue-and-yellow macaws shimmering in a patch of sun. Breathtaking.
This seems like as good a time as any to insert a gallery of our amazon boat tour photos:
Amazon Jungle – April 13
Remember when our guide Oscar thought we were leaving today? Well, he hastily put together two simple tours for us. A morning wildlife tour that joyfully didn’t start until after breakfast, allowing us for once to sleep in, and an afternoon jungle walking tour to explore Amazonian medicinal plants.
On the morning tour, Oscar specifically wanted us to find a rare kingfisher. No bueno on the rarity, but we did find 7 new species of birds, including a stunning blue-crowned trogon, as well as most of the usual suspects (striated heron, cacique, parakeets).
Our afternoon walking tour was actually the most humid and jungly thing we did. Our boat driver became our trail blazer, complete with a machete for hacking away vines and breaking open fruit and nuts. It was also very muddy, and our clothes are in major need of a proper washing machine. The interesting plants that I remember:
- Cats claw – a woody vine traditionally used to ward off disease (but probably doesn’t, really)
- Açai palm – used to treat dysentery (I considered loading a handful into my pocket…)
- Wild garlic
- South American palm weevil, the larvae of which are apparently a source of minerals and vitamins. It’s about the size of a june bug larvae, our guide ate one and claimed it was “milky” and “delicious” (we declined, “milky” not being an appetizing descriptor for food IMO)
- Copal tree – used for fuel
Two Tips for the Amazon
- Do not touch the trees- they may be covered in fire ants, or toxic spiky things, of some random bug or spider. I chose to not touch any plant life at all. Or anything at all for that matter.
- It is very humid, although we were out on the boat a LOT and it was a bit rainy so it didn’t feel as hot as expected. However the pages of my notebook were constantly damp. And any clothes I washed out didn’t really ever dry.
Amazon Jungle – April 14
It’s a travel day, and for breakfast I focussed primarily on toast – both plain and French. At 9:30 we began the gruelling 8 hour boat-van-plane-taxi trip back to Miraflores. It wasn’t as bad as feared until we had a 40 min frustrating delay on the plane in Iquitos because someone “didn’t close a hatch properly”.
We arrived back at Paul and Vanessa’s dirty (no cold shower this morning, and still wearing our jungle-mud-covered clothes) and discovered that five of Vanessa’s friends had shown up unexpectedly for an impromptu dinner party to meet her friends from Canada. They were all dressed in Peruvian style – beautiful clothes, hair styled, makeup, jewelry. We did not blend, so we tried to clean up and find something in our minimalist-packed suitcases to wear that looked even halfway fancy.
Best treat – Peru melt-in-your-mouth cookies with a caramel filling, called “alfajors”. My new fave.
*We had yet to experience the roads in the Andes.
**Montezuma’s reach extends much farther than Mexico.