Peru - The Amazon Rain Forest

Yeah, so I've been in an airplane for the last two days - with a long delay in Lima before taking off for Puerto Maldonado. Arriving here really didn't look like a whole lot, but this is where we were meeting our pal, Brian. We'll talk more about him later...he's a herpatologist studying this area and we came to see what he's doing.

This is our friend, Jorges, unloading the bus for us. He must've seen me snapping this picture of him and wanted me to remember his sunny smile.


I don't like airports, but I'll tell you now, I like canoe trips down an Amazon tributary. This is the Madre de Dios, the Mother of All Rivers. Well, that's what I'm going to say, because it sounds better than 'Mother of God'. And since this river ate my sunglasses, I suppose we could say that I gave a sacrifice to God's Mom, as I said something similar to "Mother of God!" when I heard the splash.

We're heading into the Tambopata Refuge, which is a large track of jungle on the Peruvian and Brazilian borders. All this land drains into the Amazon and if this river isn't big enough to be the Amazon itself, I would be pretty amazed to see the main river: the Madre de Dios is wide, fast-moving and clearly a center of commerce for this region, since the roads look like this.


Our guide for the next few days, Uriel, got us all positioned for the best balance and ballast. We weren't going to sacrifice ourselves, and since this is a V hull canoe, it's pretty tippy - put on the lifejacket and stay seated, People!




This is Reuben. He navigated us for four hours (into the dark of night) on New Year's Eve. I'm thinking Reuben probably had better things to do, but he didn't run us aground and he certainly didn't feed us to the caiman. He didn't drink any of those cases of warm beer there, either...Thanks Reuben, nice job.


I have some cloud shots of the lightening storm that paralleled our journey into the Tambopata Refuge. As a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, it was truly a magical evening with the clouds and lightening on one side of the sky, the stars above, the Blue moon on the other side with a flask of Glenlivet happily passed around... (good call on that, Mike!) So we bust into the Scotch in celebration of being here, Brian's work, New Year's Eve and the lovely lightening storm in the distance of the dying year.

We awake the next morning (okay I'm getting up even if Sleepy here wants to stay in the netting) to find that Amazon Refugio has all the many comforts of home!I stepped on this guy in the middle of the night...with bare feet. That's what you get for leaving the flashnight on the nightstand.

Oh, hello Mr. Cucharacha!

















Tree Frog hanging out by the dripping faucet (my bad, I didn't turn it off, but it made him happy).


We climbed up into a canopy tower for a bird's eye view of the jungle (you can see the tower shadow on the trees - Yup, that was a lot of stairs to climb to 30 meters). The tallest of the trees is the Brazil Nut. This is where you see parrots, macahs, harpie eagles and troops of monkeys (if you're lucky). They all live up here. We saw a russet saddled tamarin on our way down the trail here. Their little whistles and curious faces made stopping in the humidity and heat something we didn't mind.
As you might guess, harvesting the Brazil nut could be dangerous business, since those trees are in the 80-120 feet tall range and they drop something the size of a large grapefruit that weights about a half pound. I'm thinking you'd be done if you got beaned by one of those babies. Apparently, the harvesting only takes place after the nuts have fallen. No wonder.


The towering Brazil Nut tree.
We were taken on a visit to a neighboring farm that practiced polyculture and ethno-medicinal farming. (Maybe for the tourist, but it was a nice display of native medicinal and food plants)
Uriel cutting us some sugar cane.

Let's talk about Brian for a second...

This is a pretty tall guy. He's been here for about six months, logging GPS coordinants of reptiles as he nabs them in the jungle(and I'm sure more species, but this is a project to help record and therefore preserve the natural assets that reside in this section of the rain forest). I'm thinking he walks trails a lot, but there are times, I'm certain, where he's got to go crashing after stuff that wants to get away from him.

So I'm walking behind him on the trail and he's eyeing the undergrowth for stuff hiding, when suddenly, he darts off to the left and seemingly has wiped out into the bushes...but no. He stands back up and has a Whip Snake. Frankly, I don't think our guide(s) really knew quite what to do about his speed and his skill at catching snakes...so I started giving him a hard time about his continual tripping on the trail, as though he were just clumsy. Of course, this is untrue. Brian added a high level of expertise to our experience and, I'm sure, gave the guides some more specific information, as well.

This is not to say that our guides were not very well versed in their environments at all. Their's was not the deeper information of a scientist.