It is a bit of a wonder that there is even an airport in Puerto
Maldonado. There really isn’t any “there” there. But there is an airport there and
that is where we landed after our flight from Cusco. I suppose it is possible
that the airport is simply far away from the main town, and we simply never
drove to the main town. We did take a bus to our tour office and after a brief orientation
and a bug juice bath, we reboarded the bus and headed out of “town”. The drive
was long and bumpy and we were surrounded on either side by papaya tree orchards
and then denser and denser bush. You got the feeling there wasn’t really any “there”
at our destination either. And the feeling was right on. We finally got dropped
off at a building that wasn’t much more than a few poles and a thatch roof. There
were some not so healthy looking dogs and one or two locals sitting around playing
cards but it would’ve felt like we had gone the wrong way if it weren’t for the
couple of dozen other tourists all waiting around looking anxious. Then we were
led down some rickety steps into the jungle only to find the river waiting for us,
complete with caimans and sand flies that would bite your legs off if the caimans
didn’t get there first. But there were multiple boats capable of handling about
twenty peeps at a time, and we all piled in and starting scooting upstream into
the great unknown.
The river was pretty wide. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to have
to swim across, but I probably could have in a pinch. It reminded me of the River
Kwai in Thailand because the same type of vegetation was growing on either bank
and the heavy air was weighing us down with the same anticipation. In reality, we
did see a few caiman right off the bat, but they were far away on the other side
of the river and not really all that exciting as movement did not seem to be on
their agenda. But the sand flies and the mosquitos were quite real. Even covered
in DEET, all of us would finish our few days in the Amazon with more bug bites than
freckles, and for some of us, no names or anything, JOSH, that is saying a lot.
About 45 minutes of boat ride later and we pulled up to another
rickety staircase on the opposite bank as equally unassuming as the one we had gone
down. A few hundred steps up the bank later and another quarter mile hike in, and
we had arrived at our destination. And there was a “there” there. It was a raised
platform lodge of sorts with maybe twenty rooms and a bar and a dining area and a behammocked meeting area.
Lots of raised wooden floors and lots of bamboo walls. It was all quite charming.
Of course there was no air conditioning, and it would remain around 100 degrees
for the entire duration of our stay, but it wouldn’t have been an authentic Amazon
experience if there were AC, right? We needed to embrace the humidity and the bugs
and the incessant noise coming from the multiple bickering howler monkeys. So that’s
what we did. Really, they ought to call them “growler” monkeys, as the sound they
produced was much more akin to that generated by my peckish stomach than it was to a wolf communicating with
the full moon. Only with the monkeys the volume was cranked “to eleven” at all times, whereas occasionally my tummy takes a hiatus.
Each time I have been asked if I enjoyed my time in the Amazon,
the answer has been an unwavering “yes”. But I can’t really put a finger on what
it was that made the visit so enjoyable. We didn’t really see anything in the rainforest
that we hadn’t already seen in Costa Rica or Southeast Asia. We didn’t really do
anything more special than hike and play in the river and hang around in hammocks trying
in vain to cool off. So why was it worth the trip? How can I make the Amazon sound
appealing enough to recommend it to friends? Good questions, both. I will attempt
to answer, but I can’t promise anything.
First off, we were assigned a guide, named Gilbert, who led us on hikes and adventures
and even ate meals with just the thirteen of us for the duration of our stay. He was a really cool guy who understood
our needs and molded the agenda to fit our desires. Without that, I think I might
have called the last four days of our vacation a waste of time and money. But with
that, with our new friend Gilbert, we really did get the most out of our time. The
thirteen of us each got to pick and choose the hikes we would go on, some staying back
to nap, others to partake in a massage. And Gilbert even gauged our level of energy
well enough to know that some hikes just weren’t gonna fly at all. Had Gilbert been
our guide in Machu Picchu, I probably would have loved the tour there as well. And
if we had been given options to do different activities while in the Amazon, but
each with its own guide and together with lots of other patrons, I probably would
have enjoyed that less too. So I suppose we were lucky. We hadn't expected the VIP treatment, but we were very much glad to have it.
In any case, I do need to document exactly what it was we did,
or I’ll quickly lose my readers, if I haven’t already. So here goes. We didn’t arrive
at the “inn” until late in the afternoon, so all we had time for was a short hike.
But we made it count. They had erected a vertical, rectangular open-air metal tower that was
nothing more than a 168 step spiraling staircase to a fifty square foot platform 140 feet above the
ground. All fourteen of us, including Gilbert, barely fit on the precarious platform
at the top and we watched the sun set over the trees from just high enough above
the canopy that we felt as if we were flying with the birds. You couldn’t see
the ground at all, other than far off near the river, as the trees were too densely
packed. It was a different vantage point than I’d ever been privy to in the
past, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We watched vultures and parrots and only Gilbert
knows what else soaring along, but the highlight was when the scarlet macaws did
a fly-by that definitely buzzed the tower. I could have hung out up there for hours,
but it was getting dark quickly and the hike back to the dining hall begged for
our immediate attention.
Seems taller from up here. |
The otters were doing a little fishing themselves. |
The hike back was without incident; unless you call being targets
for the little spider monkeys an incident. We did get a little swimming in on the
river before heading back to camp. It was a much more pleasant wet than the ever-present
layer of sweat that I bathed in as I hiked, especially when mixed with one part
sunscreen and two parts bug-juice. But the dip in the river had its issues too,
because even though the mosquitos were mostly uninterested in us due to the DEET,
the sand flies were having a smorgasbord. Most of us came back with a few dozen
bites each after just 15 minutes or so in the river.
The afternoon activity was a trip to a local farm, but I opted
out choosing a massage instead. That was fun. The woman spoke no English. She instructed
me to strip naked and stood there with her hands on her hips staring at me, with
this look on her face like I was keeping her from some other important appointment.
I did as she asked for fear of physical repercussion and mounted the table face
down. The table had no headrest, so I spent the whole massage turning my head back
and forth from one side to the other managing an ever-growing crick in my neck as
she worked my back and legs. No towel, just my bare bug-bitten butt, naked as the
day I was born. Not the most relaxing massage I’ve ever had, but at least I found
out that I hadn’t missed much on the farm visit.
Dinner was excellent. In fact, the food was pretty darned good
at this place. It was buffet style, with few choices, but I tried everything and
liked it all. It was nice not to have to deal with decisions about where and what
to eat. We got what we got, and for the most part, we loved it. Really, how can
you go wrong when your food is wrapped in banana leaves, anyhow?
The next day was all about a project that Gilbert dreamed up
to keep the kids happy. We cruised across the river to where he had found some balsa
wood logs that had been left over from a construction project. We stripped the bark
off of them, and then used the strips to tie the logs together until we had a pretty
serviceable makeshift raft. I think the plan was to have the kids help do the building,
but they were having too much fun getting muddy in the river, so in the end Dan
and I did most of the building. But the kids all boarded the raft and rowed themselves
down river. It was pretty cute seeing them floating along, but poor Gilbert earned
his pay that day. The “oar” they were using was really just a pole. And they weren’t
getting much of anywhere along the river. Gilbert swam along with them, encouraging
and instructing, but in the end, mostly pushing. The kids were getting hot in the
sun, and most of them abandoned ship and starting swimming too. We adults were all
scooting alongside in the engine-powered boat, letting Gilbert herd the cats. It
was pretty amusing for us all except for Gilbert who was feeling responsible for
the safety of all of our children and yet getting very little cooperation from any
of them. I am sure that if there were really any danger we would have helped him
out, but the absurdity of it all just had us laughing and cheering rather than being
helpful. We did eventually make it to our destination and Gilbert sold the raft
to another local for a tidy profit, or not.
Gathering the logs to build the raft. |
Chloe was into the project for awhile. |
How to tie balsa logs together with the bark from the same logs. |
What to do when you are avoiding building a raft. |
The raft worked great, the pole as an oar, not so much. |
Gilbert is the only one left of the raft, but he is cheating, as that is an actual oar from the boat. |
The afternoon hike was to the largest tree on the preserve. I
think it was a Kapok, but I could totally be making that up. I did pace around the
base of the trunk and found that it was about 55 meters just to get around. That’s
a big tree. From there, Gilbert pointed out the sounds of some white-lipped
peccaries crunching on tree nuts in the distance, and we spent almost an hour stealthily
approaching the sounds, only to eventually scare the animals away and never see
anything but trampled vegetation. I think Gilbert was more excited about trying to see them than the rest of us were. But what are you going to do when your guide insists upon
silence and then does the follow me hand signal deeper and deeper into the bush?
You follow, that’s what you do.
There was a night hike designed mostly to scare the crap out
of the kids. But the spiders were apparently out in force and were larger than an
adult male’s hands, so really, I think the adult males were just as scared as the
kids. But the nighttime was really about a different experience all together. The
walls of the “inn” were made of two rows of parallel stalks of bamboo with a mesh
screen in between. In places you could see through the walls, but everywhere you
could hear through them. The wall rose up eight or ten feet, but the shared ceiling
was at least fifteen above us. Which means, for much of the space, there was nothing
at all in between rooms. We got to be neighbors with some twenty-something women
on the first couple of nights, which wasn’t bad at all. They were pretty quiet.
But on the last night, there was a gaggle of un-chaperoned American teenagers in
the room next to ours. They were loud, they were obnoxious, they were vulgar and
they were driving me crazy as I tried to sleep.
Finally, I lost patience and put on my teacher voice and under
my breath I read them the riot act. I think the fact that they could all hear me,
though I was speaking at barely above a whisper, really freaked them out. This faceless
stranger reprimanding them probably scared them more than any jungle spider could.
It was quiet for the rest of the night. Good to know all my years as a teacher were
good for something. At breakfast you could see them all searching the faces in the
dining room trying to surmise whom it was that told them off. Not sure if they settled
on me or not. I couldn’t have been that hard to spot, considering the smirk on my
face was wider than the river.
Before breakfast we went to a bird watch spot that they had
set up, where you could watch scores of parrots licking the clay on the riverbank
presumably to supplement their diet with minerals. Any time there was an unaccounted for sound, the flock would all dart off in different directions in
a chaotic fever-pitched “run for your lives” kind of way. But then they would
all come back to the wall and starting licking again when they realized the
panic button had been touched by one of their own who thought that the best way
to get to a tastier spot on the wall. We were only close enough to see detail
using binoculars, but still it was pretty cool to see exotic birds somewhere
other than in a zoo or a sanctuary.
They were way cooler in mid-flight, but hard to capture on film. |
Then it was back to travel-issues-central. There was no avoiding
it any longer. The return half of our defective round-trip tickets to South America
was about to be tested. I am sure you recall the story of our miserable start
to this vacation. Well, we handed them our passports at the gate and awaited the
inevitable. Yup, troubles with our tickets. We arrived at the airport just before
5:00 a.m. for a 7:10 flight. The line was long. We got to the counter at 5:45 or
so. We were the very last ones to be helped. The half-dozen or so groups behind
us in line all went through other agents quickly, and our guy was still typing away
on his terminal trying to get our boarding passes. Panic started to build, but before
full-blown hysteria set in, he did eventually issue us boarding passes for the flight
to Mexico City, but informed us that the flight from Mexico City to SFO was over-booked
and we could only go “stand-by”. We had a five-hour layover in Mexico City and
so we hoped we could take care of things then, so we boarded the original flight
and made it out of Peru.
Once in Mexico City, Carol went immediately to find help with
our tickets and was told that she could only get help an hour ahead of flight time
when the gate opened for business. So we waited it out. We had a leisurely lunch
of really bad Mexican food (we were in Mexico City!) and prepared ourselves for
the worst. Good thing too, because the worst happened. We got to the gate; they
told us the flight was full. We waited to see if there were any no-shows or volunteers
to take another flight. There were not. We got bumped. There is nothing like
spending a whole day in an airport only to find you aren’t going to fly anyway.
But this story ends well. Josh was really feeling quite sick
at this point, and so a flight would have been rough for him in any case. AeroMexico
was kind enough to book us on the early morning flight the next day in Business
Class! They booked our hotel for the evening and gave us compensation tickets for
dinner and breakfast. They even threw in a set of four round-trip tickets pretty
much anywhere AeroMexico flies. Now that is how you treat a customer when you screw
things up for them. Expedia needs to take some notes!
Other than a fiasco with getting our bags back in Mexico City
so we could change clothes for the overnight stay, the whole getting bumped thing
went well. I had to bust some heads to get those bags back, but eventually we
did get them. Poor Carol had to work on Monday and now we weren’t getting home until
Sunday late afternoon. But you really couldn’t ask the airline to do anything more
than they did. I do find it odd though, that we were the last people to check-in
for that flight, and therefore the first ones bumped. We checked in before 6:00
a.m. in Lima, and the flight was after 6:00 p.m. in Mexico City. Something was amiss.
I think the guy in Lima never did get us checked in correctly and so we didn’t officially
check-in until the hour before the flight in Mexico. But oh well, all is water
under the metaphoric bridge. We made it home, luggage in tow, and our sick-boy a
bit more rested than he would have been had we flown coach the night before.
Final thoughts? Well, we spent an awful lot of time in
airports and on airplanes on this trip. We got up before 6:00 a.m. on more
mornings than anyone should ever have to on a vacation. Mark lost an ATM card.
I had multiple eye infections (never even mentioned that a recurrence happened
on the trip home). Josh got sick. Expedia screwed us out of a day of vacation
and a few hundred bucks at least. But even with all of that, it was a blast. I
am still bouncing-off-the-walls-ecstatic when I think about finally getting to
experience Machu Picchu. Buenos Aires is a beautiful city and Rio de Janeiro is
in a gorgeous part of the world. Iguazu Falls was simply mind-blowing. We got
to spend tons of quality time with our friends. And every time you can gain a
little more perspective from the world, it makes everything seem that much more
a reason to celebrate the life you have. Would I do that trip again? No. There
are so many other places to see. Though I’d love to see the Salt Flats of
Bolivia or the peaks of Patagonia, or the blue-footed boobies in the Galapagos,
I may never make it back to South America. But I’m awfully glad I made it once.
Thanks for reading! Adios!
Esteban.