Top Ten Least Favorite Things About My Trip To Peru

Even though the 12 days in Peru was one of the best vacations, there were moments that can't be classified as favorites.

1. The mosquitos and giant bugs on night 3 on the trek flying around while we were waiting for dinner.
2. The watered down lemonade and hot chocolate on the trek
3. Saying goodbye to new friends on the trek
4. Not being able to pee outside of the tent at night and walking to the bathroom.  There were no rules against it but when there are 5 tents lined up and possibly 12 people that could wander up, it's best to use the facilities.
5. The young, obnoxious college students in other groups (our group was awesome) being loud, drinking at stops and smoking at the top of Saltankay.
6. The high school student on the plane from Puerto Maldonado to Lima.  They were LOUD, talked the entire time and gave me a such a bad headache and I was about in tears by time I got off the plane. 
7. Thinking we were short on time at Wayna Picchu and rushing back when we had plenty of time.
8. Driving around Lima without headlights on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. 
9. Not seeing any parrots at the parrot clay lick. 
10. Trash along the trail and John says it was women's toilet paper (of course boys wouldn't leave their TP). As we closer to Aqua Caliente the amount of garbage and the number of trash bags John filled up increased.

Top Ten Favorite Things About My Trip To Peru

My vacation to Peru was absolutely wonderful and I would go back in a heart beat.  There are so many great moments but here are some of my favorites.

1. Connecting with the people on the trek and the guides.
2. Seeing the children smile when I handed them candy.
3. The sunset on the way to the lodge in the jungle.
4. Wearing rubber boots in the jungle and hearing them pull against the thick mud.
5. Hearing the animals in the jungle come to life at night.
6. The wonderful, flavorful soups on the trek and the lodge.
7. Walking the small, brick laid streets of Cusco.

8. Having the cook make me a birthday cake and surprising me.

9. Looking back over the pictures and remembering the vacation

10. Kayaking in the jungle and seeing the birds and the anaconda.

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

In my post about the parrots that weren't there, I talked about my new friend Rafaella from Lima, Peru. On our departure day we would have a 6 hour layover at the Lima airport and thought it would be a great opportunity to see a little bit of Lima and get dinner.  Rafaella's mom, Jessica, told us a restaurant to go to and arranged a driver for us because taxi's at the airport were expensive.  We were so thankful for her arranging this for us.

We arrived in Lima after our short plane flight from Puerto Maldonado and saw this gentleman holding a sign. He was so sweet.  He was dressed very nice and had made the sign by hand, making little scribbles to create the sign.  In the states, someone would have an iPad with the name typed in, a little white board or something printed.  Rarely are signs in the states made with such care as this sign.

I believe in Peru anyone with a vehicle, any type of vehicle whether it be motorcycle, lawnmower on wheels or a true car, can get a taxi license.  There are no requirements for size, condition or safety. Vehicle = source of income so it must be very competitive.

I really wish I remembered this gentleman's name because he was incredible sweet and accommodating.  His driving, however, is what now makes this story quite funny. I'll refer to our driver as Mr. Toad.

Have you ever been on the ride at Disneyland called Mr. Toads Wild Ride?  That is what this felt like.  Michele, who sat in the middle, had to be blindfolded so she couldn't see.  Actually she wasn't blindfolded but we should have to help keep her calm.  In Mr. Toad's defense, I think everyone in Peru drives crazy and he was just weaving and driving in the middle of the road to get to point A.  Weaving aside, there were no headlights on the car and it was night.  Not dusk, but dark.

We stopped to take a quick picture and I checked there were indeed no headlights and when I got back in the car I noted nicely how the headlights didn't appear to be on.  He turned on his high beams and his hazard lights and this is how we drove around until somehow they turned off and Michele's heart rate would increase and someone asked to turn the lights on again.  Again the hazards and high beams went on and we'd weave through traffic.  We did drive many miles though in complete darkness and sometimes crossing the road and pulling into traffic.

Mr. Toad was a Peruvian fold dance teach for the university and his english was very good.  If I remember right he had 9 children, or was that grandchildren.  You could tell he didn't have much money and his school income wasn't substantial, hence the driving job. We paid him the amount agreed on plus some.  He could use the money to repair his headlights (we hope!)

Militant Childs Parade in Puerto Maldonado

Afte the 2.5 hour boat ride from the lodge back to Puerto Maldonado we had a couple hours before catching our plane to Lima.  School must have been closed that day for the parade in which every school seemed to participate.  School after school in uniforms marched by in Hitler militant style down the people lined main street in Puerto Maldonado.  There was no rhyme or reason to organization and a school would just jump in the middle of the parade if it was ready to go.  Compare that with the states where it is very organized and everyone is given the specific order they must go in.  The lack of red tape and yet still seeing everything come together was refreshing.

4 year olds?  Maybe 5 years old?

She did not want to participate in the parade.

The Medicinal Trail and Farm

One of the activities that we did during our stay at Refugio Amazonas is the medicinal trail and then across the lake to tour a farm.

Usually a shaman gives the tour of the medicinal trail but he was on a house call in another area.  Our guide, Jose Luis, was very knowledgable of the plants, their uses and what they cured and had considered becoming a shaman but  that would require living off the land, deep in the forest and not talking to anyone for 2 years.  We nibbled on a leaf that was used as Novocain for dental work, we drank cats claw which does miraculous things probably due to the alcoholic content and making the person relaxed and happy. 

 After the trail we took the boat across to the other side to the farm.  On the farm the gentleman raised many fruits to sell at the market. The farm grew a large variety of items including star fruit, papaya, sugar cane, banana's and fruits I had never heard of, like breadfruit.

star fruit

Jose Luis pounded on the sugar cane and it produced liquid

Don't remember what this is

The seeds are used for dye

Banana's

Papaya's

The tour was very interesting and we weren't asked for to tip the farm owner for the tour (which I kind of expected).  I'm sure he is paid by the tour group or receives a monthly stipend from the lodge for allowing groups to tromp through his farm.  Instead of payment we gave him a round of applause for a thank you.

Peruvian El Gato's

I love cats and search them out wherever I go.  In Aqua Caliente there were a couple sets of kittens too but I didn't get pictures of them.   In Lima there were many stray cats in a park across the restaurant we had dinner but otherwise I didn't see many stray cats.  Stray dogs were a different story in the surrounding villages and in one village a dog had just died and lay in the mud in the road.

ALong the trek on the last day by the railroad tracks

Aqua Caliente kitty playing with a beetle

At the farm in the jungle

My favorite picture, a house along the trek trail

A Tree Top Sunset

100 feet up of stairs lead to the top of the tree canopy in the jungle where we watched the macaws and parrots fly above the tree tops while we waited for the sunset.  The sunset was absolutely gorgeous with the clouds and the tree horizon with the brazilian nut tree rising above the tree tops.

The Peruvian Amazon

Johann at the Run Tall, Walk Tall blog, asked if I was actually on the Amazon River.  Besides knowing that I wasn't on the actual river, I didn't know on a map where I was in comparison to the Amazon.

I was on the Tambopata River, a tributary of the Amazon River. Of course it's not specifically on this map but it is off the Madre de Dios in southern Peru.

We were down river from Puerto Maldonado, which is where we flew into.  You can see on this map the location of Cuzco (close to Machu Picchu), Puerto Maldonado and the Brazilian border

Rainforest Expeditions has three lodges and we stayed at Refugio Amazonas. 

The trail map at Refugio Amazonas. I certainly hope this isn't to scale because it seemed like the canopy tower was very close and the non-parrot clay lick was much further away.

Blogathon Haiku Day

Ugh. Haiku Day.   Michelle Rafter, Queen Blogathon (she's so wonderfully and graciously arranged the blogathon) says Haiku Day is the most popular.  I'm sure for all the writers out there THEY like Haiku's.  THEY like poems and the arranging of words. Me, not so much.  Like a child learning to count, I sit here and count on my fingers the number of syllables each sentence has.  Can I add very, very, very to a sentence to hit the word and syllable count?

Here goes nothing

Macaws fly freely
Hoatzins groan in chorus song
Peru's nature sets me free


(there, did it.  Done)

Tree Climbing in the Jungle

Climbing the tree was the most physically challenging thing I did in Peru.

I let the guys go first so they would have more time at the top rather than at the bottom waiting for me to pull myself up.  Our guide gave us a lesson in how you pull yourself up.  You lift your knees which releases tension in a rope, slide the ascender (or maybe it was the descender) up and then stand/pull yourself up. I think I only went 4 inches at a time but I eventually made it up to the top in 11 minutes.

I was hoping to see some birds up there but I didn't see any.  I did have a beautiful view of the river.

Come down the ropes was much easier than going up.  If you've ever seen Medicine Man, there is one scene where they are going down ropes over the water and the rope stops.  Dr. Rae Crane (Lorraine Bracco) kicks and yells at Dr. Campbell (Sean Connery) 'You call this a rescue?' One of my favorite scenes.

Brazilian Nuts in Peru

Jose Luis, our guide in the jungle, said the brazilian nut trees exist because squirrels are forgetful.  To understand how this is possible, you need to first know about a brazilian nut.  You've probably all see unshelled brazilian nuts.

But did you know they look like a coconut with about 20 individual nuts inside the coconut casing?  It also takes 14 months to grow one nut from pollination to maturity.  John is standing at the nut cracking table and you can see the large brazilian nut casing with the remnants of the shells from the actual nuts.

To watch people trying to get to the nuts was incredibly amusing.  First, generally a man would take the machete and try to lodge the blade into the nut.  It would take numerous tries before the blade would actually stick.  Next, they would bring the nut stuck in the blade to a hard surface, like a tree stump and continue to pound away at it.  Almost always the nut would come unlodged from the blade, roll away and the nut cracker would start again.  Finally, after repeated attempts, the nut would burst open like a piñata and the nuts inside would scatter across the ground. 

For squirrels that lacked machetes and opposable thumbs,  there is a small opening in the capsule where the squirrels can gnaw open the casing and get the nuts inside.  After eating a nut or two, the squirrel needs to save the rest for another meal and buries the nuts but it forgets where he buried it and it grows into a tree.

The trees are gigantic and grow to be 160 ft tall.  We climbed stairs 100 feet up to a canopy stand and gazed out across all the tree tops and the brazilian tree stood tall and much higher than the tops of all the trees below it.

Nuts are gathered by hand in South America with more of the exports coming from Bolivia and not Brazil.  It is illegal to cut down a brazilian nut tree which is why you may see them in odd locations.  With the age of the trees living to be 500-1000 years old, it is hard to image there is a concern with ongoing tree population.  Where the nuts are heavily harvested for export, new, young trees aren't sprouting to replace older, dying trees.

So while it's great that the trees aren't logged and the South America countries can produce income from just the nuts, major harvesting of the nuts is still a detriment to the environment and the continuation of the brazilan nut tree.

The Hoatzin's and Other Birds in Peruvian Jungle

According to Wikipedia there are 1879 species of birds in Peru.  We certainly didn't see that many, especially since the parrot lick was parrotless. We did see quite a few birds and the guide was able to identify the birds as they were overhead.  I don't just mean he would say that's a macaw but he named it from the birds call- it is a scarlet macaw.

The river is where we saw the most birds, like this blue billed bird (don't know the real name)

and this hawk

but my favorite are the hoatzin's. Before  the hoatzin's came into view I heard them first. A low groan and then I saw one.  The hoatzin's remind me of Beaker from the Muppets with big eyes and crazy,wild hair.

When we came up to the next bunch of birds I was excited because there were four birds all together.  One flew up into the trees and the nest was still full.  And another flew away and yet another.  15 birds must have been in that one area and they just kept flying up into the trees.

Of all the birds I saw, these were definitely a favorite.

The Parrots That Weren't There

This blog post is in honor of my new friend Rafaella. Rafaella is a young lady from Lima and I met her at the parrot lick in Peru.  To get to the parrot lick we hiked from the lodge 10 minutes to the river and took a 20 minute boat ride upstream and hiked another 45 minutes to see all the birds in the poster John is pointing to.

What we saw was this.  What's that you can't see all the birds?  That's because there were no birds.  We waited and waited for the birds to arrive.

Rafaella (who I didn't get a picture of while in Peru) was waiting patiently with her mom hoping to see birds.  Needing to do something after I took pictures of the blank wall and this curleyq on the plant,

I showed Rafaella the on camera picture I took of the macaws the day before

and I offered for Rafaella to look through the binoculars and she spotted a lone parrot in a tree.  Nothing terribly exciting for our time at the salt like with the non-existent parrots.

To communicate with Rafaella I did the caveman grunts and pointed to things because I know zero spanish and since I had only heard her mom speak english I assumed Rafaella didn't speak english.  Imagine my surprise an hour later when I learned she spoke english and spoke it VERY WELL.

From that point forward I spoke to her in english and asked her questions and learned she's about the same age as my neighbor and niece.  I got my first penpal when I was 10 years old and thought the three of them could also be penpals and got Rafaella's address in Peru.

I wrote Rafaella when I got back to Arizona and today I received her reply.  I suppose I should rename the title of this post to 'The parrots that weren't there but my new friend was.'

R.O.U.S's Rodents of Unusual Size in Peruvian Amazon

The Princess Bride is one of my favorite movies.  It's a classic, one that everyone should be able to quote at anytime.  If you too are a fan of The Princess Bride, you'll know all about the R.O.U.S's.   Outside of a snake slithering in the grass (it looked quite huge too), the first animal I saw in the Peruvian jungle was a rodent of unusual size aka R.O.U.S.   At first I thought it was a wild pig but hairy.  Our guide explained it was a capybara...a giant rodent.  Luckily it didn't have a giant rat tail and wasn't chasing me wearing my princess buttercup dress.

The next animal was the caiman.  Like an alligator but a lot smaller.  Now maybe this was a young one but all the ones I saw weren't that big.  Regardless, I wouldn't want to go swimming with one.

Speaking of swimming, people can swim in different areas but need to watch out for the anaconda's.  Our guide said he'd only seen one 2 or 3 times in his life and we were fortunate enough to see one on our kayak trip.  Our guides were wonderful looking for animals and spotted this little guy warming up in the tree and singing trust in me while his eyes dilated and made crazy designs.

People used to swim in Lago Condenado, also known as Oxbo Lake, but when it became a protected area people no longer swam in it.  I personally think it's because of the piraña's we saw in the water eating the crackers we were feeding them.

Around the lodge we saw monkeys jumping from tree branches and I saw a red howler monkey too.  It was sleeping in a tree by where we were eating lunch and the lodge brought out their telescope. It was amazing seeing the monkey just sleeping there.  We also saw another rodent running around the lodge grounds. It looks like a size of a squirrel here but it was the size of a small cat.  I wouldn't be surprised if these came into the room which is open to the jungle.  They are probably the reason we were told to lock our food up in the lockers.

I didn't see any animals in the room but our friends Scott and Michele were in the next room and Michele said she heard something eating in her room.  It should have been eating the termites that were building a nest in their bathroom which crashed down all on their bathroom counter leaving termites and yummy looking larva all over the counter and floor.  The termites can build a gigantic nest in a couple hours.

At Oxbo late while Jose Luis our guide was paddling us around, we also saw these little bats hanging out on a log.

One evening we took a night hike and saw creepy crawlies like the pink toed tarantula

And these very gross whipless scorpians.  Or maybe they were tail-less.  Regardless, I didn't see the appeal in them and wouldn't want them for pets.

One of my favorite things on the night hike and I don't have a picture of it the leaf cutter ants.  Just like in A Bug's Life, these 4 little ants were carrying pieces of leaves larger than them walking on a branch. I'm easy to please and these 4 little ants with 4 leafs walking with the leaves was a highlight of the jungle for me.

Tomorrow I'll share the birds I saw in the jungle.