Hola Familia y Amigos
This dispatch covers the four days along the Alto Madre de Dios River and the Manu Valley jungle, picking up where we left off, entering Pillcopata, the entry point to the Manu National Park and a region growing the Coca plant legally, for its leaves, storing them in ENACO, S.A. (Empresa Nacional de la Coca, Sud America) facilities. We stopped at a small Coca plant farm, standing in the fields next to the crops, while William provided details on how the system works with the government. We drove through the town of Patria where the dusty road split the wooden buildings lining both sides, the appearance of an old Wild West frontier township that was only missing the Earp brothers. In its heyday, it was a center for Coca production for the illicit drug market and consequently became a boom town. Our final stop before entering the Alto Madre de Dios River was the town of Atalaya, where we said good-bye to our 8 passenger Toyota Hiace and driver, lunched on the rocks above a tributary of the Madre, the Pini Pini, now with our canopied dugout canoe, wearing our life jackets, a waterfall cascading across from us, youngsters upstream leaping off rocks and drifting downstream. When we reentered our vessel, we would only be 30 minutes from our 1st jungle overnight venue, the Amazonia lodge.
Around 3 p.m., with thunder rolling in the distance, we left the lodge for our first jungle trek, walking along the perimeter of an Oxbow lake with our first sighting of the pre-historic looking bird, the Hoatzin (aka Stink Bird), with small claws on the bend of each wing, spiky yellow and red head crested punkish-looking feathers that overshadow its small head, a blue face, maroon eyes, a couple of feet in length, with a very hoarse and unmelodic call, some of them engaged in suggestive activity atop tree branches across the lake. We also encountered: Bullet ants, one inch long, whose bites can induce a 24 hour fever; Guans, long-necked, with black and white plumage, looking like turkeys and thought extinct until 1977; leaf cutter ants carrying their freight to a 2 inch diameter hole in a mound off the trailside that we eventually tracked down; and a caiman, whose head barely broke the lake’s surface, eyes on us, his broad menacing head staring at us, gliding alongside as we walked away from him. We closed this day sitting on the long, polished wooden porch of the lodge, with a feeling reminiscent of scenes from movies with the British colonizers in India and their resplendent domiciles. We watched hummingbirds and fireflies flitting about, viewing the Hunter’s full moon and then turning in for the night to our hollow, high-ceilinged room that had advertised electricity, a rarity in one’s rooms in the jungle, sporting a single bulb 10 feet above our bed, hardly the reading light we needed! Proof that we were in the jungle came when we were awakened at 3 a.m. by a cacophony of bird calls, ratcheting up in pitch and fervor until 5 a.m., then slowly falling off.
We set out early in our dugout canoe, continuing down the Alto Madre de Dios River for the Manu Wildlife Center (MWC) where we would spend 3 nights. The river bank, made slippery from the river rising several feet overnight, made our entry into our vessel a bit testy, especially for Marilyn whose left arm was in a sling the whole trip. Our boatmen were Wilfredo, manning the outboard motor and Ronaldo, riding the bow with his long pole, pushing us off shoals at low spots and rocks through the rapids, directing Wilfredo away from debris below the surface from his viewpoint up front. This daylong journey would see us traveling 150 km (90 miles). Along the way, when William wasn’t sleeping, we would be shown the likes of: the Tiger Heron, with its bluish grey head, black upper bill, yellow lower bill and a dark olive brown back, black flight feathers and a black line running from eye to throat; macaws; egrets; ospreys sitting on uprooted trees with their root ball laying on gravel bars in mid-river; small black neo-tropical cormorants on shore; the Swallow Tail Kite, with its split tail, white underbelly and black/white coloring; the Blue-Capped Heron, with its turquoise on aquamarine coloring and a white underbelly; the Roseate Spoonbill, its pink body, white neck and chest, with a bill-shaped beak; the Amazon Kingfisher, very small with a red breast, long bill, short tail, oily green colored body with a shaggy crest and a white collar around its neck; the large (2 feet in length) Black Hawk Eagle sporting four grey bars on its tail; and the not-so-pretty black and white Horned Screamers, related to ducks and geese, with a call sounding like donkeys braying, apropos to their looks!
Along the shoreline we would see stacks of bananas awaiting dugouts that would take them to market and small lodges hidden behind the forestation with only their small docks and dugouts to note their existence. Interspersed would be signs of more modern commerce, trucks appearing as if they were on top of the river, albeit on sand bars not visible from a distance. Most of the river though had no visible signs of human occupation. With the swiftness of the river and northerly wind, our five foot wide canoe was rocking from side-to-side, water spraying over us, listing a bit to our right where William and his heft threw us off balance. Before arriving at MWC, we went ashore at Diamante for a pit stop, wandering where we were allowed, as this area is home to the Mashco Piro who came out of the wilderness and are settled nearby, subject to outside diseases. This area also captured our imagination as it pays homage to the legendary Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber baron and obsessed opera lover, wanting to build an opera in the jungle. His efforts of the early 20th century were made famous in the 1982 Werner Herzog movie “Fitzcarraldo”, recounting those efforts in pulling a three story, 320 ton steamer up and over muddy 40 degree sloped hills from one river to another.
Leaving the river mid-afternoon, we walked to MWC and each of our standalone cabins. Ours was named Carachupa, with only a solar lamp and some candles to provide lighting. The only electricity available was via generator in the main Center facility, for a few hours in the morning and again in the evening. When quizzed about the meaning of Carachupa, our hostess said it was a ‘rat’; we later discovered another interpretation, ‘armadillo’ which we found to be much more acceptable! After settling in we went on a 90 minute walk around the grounds seeing: a Spider Monkey; the Saddleback Tamarin Monkeys (squirrel-sized, a black back, an orange rust-colored lower extremity sporting a long black tail). Later that night, a wild/tame Tapir named Vanessa wandered onto the grounds, knowing that food (carrots in this case) would be available. Vanessa was found orphaned sometime back, ‘raised’ by locals in the wild and shows up every once in a while, sometimes with her children. The next morning, the alarm rudely went off at 4:15 a.m. for the downriver ride to the Trocha Gaucamayo Macaw Lick and its blind, allowing for viewing of the squawking Scarlet Macaws and the more cheerful, but still loud, chirping of the green feathered Orange-Cheeked Parakeets and the brilliant green Mealy Amazon Parrots, all of them digging their bills into the clay to gather sodium not available in their normal diet. Maggie took many photos and videos capturing the beauty of this activity. The evening involved a trek to a Tapir Lick, which, because of the downpour, dissuaded the tapirs from showing up and left us empty-handed. Fortunately only two of us went, so four of us weren’t disappointed at all. What was seen, though, were bats and the 3-Striped Poison Dart Frog, which Kurt was interested in from a research scientist aspect. The rain continued throughout the night which delayed our start the next morning, a visit to an Oxbow lake.
Entering our trusty canoe around 8 a.m., we motored to a spot downstream, where we exited and hiked a short distance to the lake where an open, wooden raft with pontoons and benches awaited our arrival to be paddled around, looking for the elusive Giant Otter, only 250 left in all of Peru, down from 40,000 60 years ago. No otter, but we did see: the Striated Heron (aka Mangrove Heron), with blue-grey wings, white underbelly & short yellow legs; bats, barely discernible, asleep on dead wood fixtures in the lake, looking like brown spots from afar, flying away as we approached, proving William’s skills at spotting; the Social Flycatcher on perched on dead branches (small and yellow-breasted with vivid white eye stripe on a dark grey head, olive-brown underparts, brown wings and tail); the Yellow & Red billed Toucans, with black & white body, all in a row; the Yellow-Headed vultures & Smooth-Billed Ani.
The highlight of this lake tour was the Piranha fishing, where Maggie caught the first one (5 inches long), all being released after their photo ops! As we walked back to the river, we came across Monkey Ladder vines appearing as braided rope or a bean pod; stingless bees descending into a PVC-like tube they had built on a tree trunk; the Andean Wood Creeper (woodpecker family); the Black-Faced Ant Thrush, a basically brown and unspectacular bird (slight red on tail feathers, white breast); the Golden Tortoise Beetle (hard to describe its beauty). At the end of this day, we followed a trail to a canopy viewing platform, climbing 30 meters up (98 feet) a spiral stair case, next to a 40 meter tall, 250 year old Kapok tree.
The next morning we were awakened by the nearby eerie and startling sounds of the Howler Monkeys, not something you would want to hear on a forest hike in the dark morning hours, alone! Leaving MWC at 5 a.m. for Puerto Maldonado, now motoring on the Madre de Dios River (previously we had been on the ‘Alto Madre’, the upper part of this one) for 2.5 hours in a southeasterly direction, on a biting cold morning, some of us cloaked in blankets. We witnessed: the Sand-Colored Nighthawks lined up on water-logged debris in the river; a Capybara (largest rodent in the world) entering vegetation on the river bank, only seeing his rear end as he darted into the foliage; and Phil hoping for even more rain to up his ‘misery’ index factor!!!! We stopped at Boca Colorado, a mining town, with piles of gravel in pyramid-shaped stacks along the shoreline as we approached. It too was another frontier-looking town with dirt-gravel roads, the Pink Panther theme emanating from somewhere deep in the wooden structures, perhaps from the building with the name ‘Copacabana’?
The last part of this dispatch has us transferring from the Madre at Puerto Carlos to some overland/river transfer points, crossing the Inambari River to Santa Rosa, riding with our driver, Ruben, a local independent contractor with his own car, who wanted me to interpret the English language American pop songs on his tape. Fat chance! Instead, I used my Spanish to engage him in conversation around his life, family, etc. If our gang’s Spanish expert, Marilyn, had been in this car I would have deferred to her on the language piece! Eventually we arrived at Puerto Maldonado, over an hour before our scheduled flight 1 p.m. back to Cusco. What followed would be a 12 hour adventure we would not want to wish on anyone and are just happy to be here to tell the story!!! We will pick up from this point in the 3rd dispatch.
Hasta Luego,
Stan & Maggie