Christmas in the jungle

Since Ace last wrote, we´ve finally managed to get ourselves to leave Ecuador.

From Cuenca we made the 7 hour bus ride south to our lovely little Vilcabamba. We stayed there for two nights, stocking up on good books at the excellent book exchange and getting in a brief visit with Norie and Richard at Garden of Paradise. From there, we took an 8 hour bus ride south to the little-known border crossing at La Balsa, Peru. Every hour on the bus brought us into more humidity and higher temperatures. You could tell they don´t get many foreigners in those parts from the flocks of kids following us around and staring during the breaks the bus took! From the southernmost part of Ecuador I knew we would take a camioneta trip (a sort of shuttle bus) over the border. I apparently hadn´t read the info very well, as what I was expecting to be a 5 minute shuttle turned out to be an hour and a half on a wooden bench jolting over an extremely remote, extremely bumpy dirt road! My butt suffered grievously, but we eventually made it to the little bridge that led over the river that formed that section of the border. We found the crossing pretty hilarious- there was absolutely no security, and when we wandered into the little shack before the bridge looking for our stamps, the border guards seemed a little surprised to be disturbed from their dirty magazines and computer games. My first impressions of Peru were that it´s really hot, friendly, cheaper lodging and food, more expensive buses, more burros, more people littering. It´s hard to really compare though, as we didn´t go into the jungle at all in Ecuador, and that´s all that we´ve seen in Peru so far. Just for the kicks, I estimated our bus hours in Ecuador- 73 hours!

It had been a long day, but we still had a ways to go. No buses ran through that area, but we were lucky enough to find a driver that was going home to the next town for the night anyways and therefore didn´t brutally rip us off. Two and a half hours later we arrived in the first decent sized town, where we caught yet another car into Jaen. We got dropped off at a cheap hotel ($8 for the night) and collapsed.

The next day was a very long bus ride east (10 hours), but fortunately the bus was much comfier than any we´d ridden in Ecuador. We stayed in Tarapoto and prepped ourselves for one more long day of travelling by bus (7 hours over a bad dirt road) when we had a glorious surprise. We picked up a rather outdated copy of Lonely Planet at a book exchange, and apparently since the time they printed that nasty dirt road had been paved, cutting our trip down to a windy 2 and a half hours! Probably the first and only time that anything has ever taken less time than expected in Peru.

We arrived in Yurimaguas, quickly bought hammocks, water, and fruit, and rushed down to the dock, hoping to catch a boat bound for Iquitos that day. Unfortunately we discovered that the only boat leaving that day was so full of livestock that there was no room for people. However, a nice large boat was leaving the next day, so we reserved a cabin on the boat and settled into a hostel for the evening. When checking out the boat we got stuck in the first of many torrential downpours and impressive displays of lightning and thunder!

The next morning we went to the boat first thing, even though it wasn´t scheduled to leave until 2 (it actually left about 4). Good thing we did, as pretty much all the good hammock spaces were filled by 10. We staked out a good spot and got settled in with our books and snacks. The next two nights and three days were spent mostly swinging in our hammocks, reading our books, and making trips up to the top deck to watch the sunsets and enjoy the breeze. We met some other travelers on the boat and were very happy to have some friends to play cards with. The trip was much more comfortable than expected- there were showers, the food provided didn´t make us sick, and our little cabin was actually cool enough to sleep in comfortably at night. We were really glad we´d sprung the extra cash for the cabin, as the boat was really packed (absolutely zero personal space in the hammock area) and it would have been quite stressful to try to keep an eye on our stuff 24 hours a day.

We were thrilled that we arrived in Iquitos in the morning on Christmas Eve- the boat was pleasant, but I definitely didn´t want to celebrate Christmas on it. We found a hostel, took a nap, and explored the muggy, noisy jungle city that is Iquitos. We found a nice steak house restaurant and splurged on a nice Christmas Eve dinner with our friend from the boat, Benedict, then met up with the two British girls from the boat for drinks. The central square was absolutely packed with people buying snacks and fireworks, listening to music, and taking rides on the mototaxis rigged up to look like Santa´s sleigh. You couldn´t help but pity the poor Santas sweating through their red coats in the crazy humidity. The main celebration here is Christmas Eve- families hit the streets to party and count down the minutes until midnight, when they light off fireworks, New Year´s Eve- Style. On Christmas Day we booked a budget jungle tour, then took a boat to the nearby Butterfly Farm where we got to see gorgeous butterflies, a jaguar, an ocelot, monkeys, and the world´s most adorable baby sloth.

Sunday was the start of our jungle tour. We got up early and met our guide, Adrian, and our absolutely adorable fellow traveler, Noa. We road towards Nauta for about 2.5 hours, where we caught a boat for another 2.5 up the Amazon and to our remote little camp. We got settled into our room in a traditional little building built on stilts with a thatched roof. There was no electricity, but it had hammocks, mosquito nets over comfy beds, pit toilets and the river to bathe in- all we really need. We went on a short walk just outside of the house and saw birds, monkeys, and leaf-cutter ants in just a few minutes. After lunch and a nap in our hammocks, we hopped into the canoe and Adrian took us to a nearby area where the dolphins like to hang out. Lucky for us, they were there, and we got to watch pink and grey dolphins swim around us. We all hopped in the water for a swim, then headed back for dinner followed by a night walk in the jungle, where we spotted tree mice, tarantulas, snakes, and more. It was a bit spooky, but quite fun. While getting ready for bed, we heard a racket down by the dock, so Noa, Ace and I walked down to check it out. We found a poor little sardine who had jumped INTO the canoe and was flopping around unhappily. Ace put him back in the river and we felt proud of ourselves for saving the dumb little fish, until the next morning when Adrian told us they had filled half a bucket earlier that morning with more fish who had hopped into the boat. Yeah…there´s a lot of fish in that river. We spent Monday morning on a long walk through the jungle, where we spotted sloths, monkeys, iguanas, and lots more. The afternoon and evening were spent piranha fishing (using the unfortunate fish from that morning as bait). It was really fun, as we were getting bites every 30 seconds or so on our little branch-and fishing line fishing poles. We probably caught about 25 piranhas and 5 catfish between the 3 tourists and two guides. Night fell, and we headed back towards the camp to fry up our piranhas for dinner. About halfway back, I heard Noa scream and everyone turned around to see what had happened. By the light of our headlamps we saw a new piranha flopping around in the bottom of the canoe- it had hurled itself into the moving boat! By the time we made it back to camp, Ace had been pegged by another piranha and I by a catfish. I never knew fishing could be so easy!

Our last day, we went on one last jungle walk and saw some porcupines, among other things. On the long trip home the sky opened up and we got another good tropical thunderstorm show. We spent the rest of our day catching up our journals, itching our mosquito bites, and washing our disgustingly sweaty clothes.

Today we´ve been getting ready to head out to the Amazon Rainbow community. We´ll head out tomorrow and stay for two weeks. It should be exciting, as we don´t really have any idea what we´ll be doing. All I know is it´s a hippy community in the middle of the jungle where everyone cooks, gardens, and works together and lives off the land. We also found time today to visit a manatee rescue center, where I got to fulfill my lifelong dream of getting to hang out with manatees! I got to feed them and scratch their bristly little noses. Amazing. After that, we headed a little further up the highway to Cuistococha, a nature reserve where you can check out the zoo and swim in the lake. It was a lot of fun.

That´s it for now- stay tuned for what it´s like to live on a commune in the middle of the Amazon jungle! Lots of love!