I've now recovered from a few days trekking and managed to find another hotel with free internet (and a pool!) so I'll do my best to get you all up to date on my adventures whilst I'm here.
So time for my Amazonian tales - as you already know I got a very early flight from Cuzco to a small town near the Southern basin of the Amazon called Puerto Maldonada. The humidity hit us like a brick wall as soon as we stepped off the plane, and after 5 minutes we were incredibly grateful to be shown to our transport - a motorised tuk-tuk, which is the way most people get around as the air rushes past cools you down at least slightly. We went to the local market, trying local fruits and learning about the different jungle medicines the locals use - the most noticeable thing was that in a couple of hours we didn't see a single other tourist. After we met up with the rest of our group - as only Hannah and I were the only ones taking the excursion from our group - who were a friendly bunch of Brits and Canadians, all a bit older than us (30s through to 50s). Our transport to the jungle lodge was via a long, narrow wooden boat that wobbled precariously with the weight of 15 or so people in it, along a tributary of the Amazon river. Along the boat ride we saw a lot of macaws, and most amazingly of all a (three-toed; I think it's either Dad or Em that that means something to but I can't remember which, sorry!) sloth who'd just swum across the river, and was slowly recovering on the opposite shore. Paddington also got more than his fair share of attention - I pulled him out for an 'Amazon river' photo and the tour guide who's adopted us for a couple of days, Angela, got incredibly excited; apparently she'd been told about 'this Peruvian bear' countless times but he was the first one she'd ever seen; cue much cuddling of and posing for photos with him (don't worry - he was loving all the attention).
We arrived late afternoon drenched in sweat, and for those of us with curly hair (namely me and Hannah) something of a frizz problem, to discover that we weren't sleeping in main lodge but in a separate one down a few minutes down the river. Getting back in the boat to drop our stuff off there didn't seem too appealing, so instead we had a nice relaxing drink in the jungle bar, and were kept company by a tiny nappy-wearing baby monkey that had been recently orphaned, and subsequently adopted by the lodge owner. When it got dark we were taken on a night walk through the jungle - it was hard to appreciate the vegetation, other than the odd tree trunk the width of a house, but we found a lot of insects. They were mostly spiders and caterpillars, some venomous and some not - incidentally a Canadian girl died about 2 months earlier in the same area by standing on a venomous caterpillar (which I think was supposed to shock/scare/evoke sympathy in me, but really only made me think how stupid you must be to wander out in to the rain forest with no shoes on..?) - and the noises of the all the birds and insects was so loud, like roaring traffic. After an hour or so we returned to the lodge and the baby monkey, and after food were sent to 'the other lodge'.
Firstly this involved a boat ride in the pitch black on the same boat, which was even less stable with only five of us in it - after a terrifying boat ride which involved a lot of dubious rocking whilst able to see very little (but some spectacular views, as contradictory as that sounds - untouched night sky outlined by the silhouette of a the river and giant rain forest on either side) we arrived at a muddy bank, and scrambled our way up to be shown our room, which turned out to be a 15 bed dormitory intended for school groups! It was certainly roomy for two people anyway...
We were woken up early the next morning by bird and insect song - they have these great birds that not only build nests that look like water drops, but also make a noise like huge drops of rain dropping in to water. After a quick shower (there's not much waiting around when you both have 4 showers to choose from) we headed off to breakfast, and then on to a jungle hike which was the highlight of the whole trip. It was really hard to capture in photos and will probably prove be even more difficult in words, but the scale of the rain forest is just breathtaking. The day before we had walked up over 20 flights of steps in a tower which represented the average size of the trees there - this tower looked gigantic and out of place in the town, where no building had more than 3 floors, but in the jungle everything was on that scale. We saw more monkeys, macaws and insects, took a boat trip on the lake - where our boat began to leak and sink halfway through, and ironically had to be bailed out using on old hull sealant tub -ate lunch in a lodge in the middle of the jungle and generally spent the whole time wandering around in awe not saying much! Paddington also made more people happy, as one couple had been travelling in Peru for a while and kept joking on their blog that they were looking for him in darkest Peru - so he had a jungle photoshoot for all their friends back home. For a tiny duffle coat-wearing bear he's entertained an amazing amount of people so far on this trip - it's quite sweet really.
One of the most fascinating parts for me was the jungle medicine - so many of the vines, barks and insects were used as remedies for day to day problems like fever, asthma, joint pains etc. I'm not sure all of them are effective, but then we've now met so many people in the region who are in their 80's or 90's having never used Western medicine, so they must be on to something! Living at altitude for so long now also began to have it's benefits; the jungle is at a much lower altitude, and I basically ran through it for an hour at the end whilst still able to hold a good conversation the whole way through. Ok, so maybe having an excess of red blood cells is cheating a little, but I've never felt so athletic!
The night was spent on another (not quite so terrifying) night boat ride looking for cayman, and then watching traditional Amazonian dances. They were fascinating apart from one involving a puma, where one poor guy was forced to dress up in an adult-sized romper suit partly covered in leopard print material, but mostly made up of what looked like a children's bedspread - I really hope he was well compensated for the humiliation anyway. One of the most interesting things I learnt about that night was about a drink called ayahuasca - it's made from vines only found in the Amazon, and it's used by shamans in religious ceremony. The drinker has visions and hallucinations which are then interpreted by the shaman and used to help you achieve more out of life - one of our guides had done it a number of time, and I also found out that one of the Canadian women (in her 50's, and a bit of a 'mother earth' type) had only visited Peru in order to take it. We'd heard about something similar whilst in Cuzco, but apparently it's a different, weaker compound that's been introduced to provide `hallucinogenic tourism' - very strange!
The next day we headed back to Cuzco, and were met by our tour guide in the airport - on asking how the guys were we found he hadn't seen them in days, but that their behaviour was that renowned that he's been hearing all about what they'd been up to from other tour guides/complete strangers! So much for behaving themselves, anyway - we got back to hotel just after noon to discover that only Nick was awake as he was the only one who'd gotten in before 4. After we'd finally cleaned off all the sweat (the one good thing about the humidity in the Amazon is that I don't have any sweat patches in the pictures. You don't get sweat patches when everything you own in drenched in the stuff) they'd groggily surfaced, and took me to the place where they serve Marmite on toast (yay!) to tell us all about what they'd been up - so as not to tarnish their reputations too much I won't mention any of it, but needless to say what they told us about was bad enough! And the poor lambs still haven't worked out that Hannah and I rapidly uncovered all the stuff they didn't tell us about and didn't want us to know about; bless... The rest of the day was fairly uneventful as the guys weren't up to doing much after 3 days & nights of straight drinking, so we just played a bit of bar Jenga (unsuccessfully - the hangover shakes were too much for certain players!) and headed off for an early night.
The next days purpose was to take us to Ollantaytambo (the starting point for both the Lares trek and Inca trail), by means of a tour of the sacred valley. We were fortunate enough to have the worlds best tour guide - for starters his name was unpronounceable, so he'd christened himself 'speedy gonzalez' - who took us round many of the historic Inca sights just outside of Cuzco. The main thing that struck me is the sheer scale and mathematical and engineering work that must have gone in to all the structures for such an ancient civilisation - terraces for agriculture, temples that create specific shadows of constellations only on specific dates, giant faces sculpted n to mountains, huge slabs of rock transported halfway up mountains and then perfectly moulded together... you really have to see it to believe it! We also dropped in to a few local communities along the way, and saw how the traditional weavings (which are VERY big over here) are done, and tried a few local games and drinks. There's a fermented corn drink that everyone drinks for energy that we tried - on it's own it was pretty awful (it was slightly fizzy, had a stale lager taste to it, and looked suspiciously like cloudy urine), but there was also a bright pink variety that had been fermented with Strawberries and actually tasted pretty good. And then there was a guinea pig farm, which I don't really want to think about too much... just don't google 'peruvian food' if you're an animal lover. And then the rest of day was spent trying to update you all on my adventures, which was exceptionally hard as I was simultaneously being hit on by a creepy Argentinian tour guide who thought 'has anyone ever told you you have a beautiful profile when using the computer' was a chat up line that might actually work!
There is no way on earth I'm going to manage to get you up to date on my adventures today, as it's nearly half 12 at night and I have to be up in 6 hours to go and see some penguins in the wild and go sand boarding, but it's something to read for now! But next time I should be able to fill you in on the Lares trek (exhausting but completely worth it), Macchu Pichu (breathtaking), Arequipa (shopping!) and the Colca Canyon, so there's plenty more to come for anyone who wants distracting from whatever work they're supposed to be doing.
For now look after yourselves - goodnight for the few of you in my kind of time zone who haven't had the sense to go to sleep yet, and good morning to rest of you! Take care,
Lots of Love,
Kat
xxx
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