Kinderdijk

As a day trip from Amsterdam, we went to see the Kinderdijk windmills, a recommendation from my Dutch roommate on my Tibet tour. I expected the windmills to be a huge tourist draw but was pleasantly surprised by the small crowds, mostly just locals and Asian tourists (Kinderdijk was not in our guide books, but I suspect it made it into the Chinese ones). We took a bit of a scenic route to get there, taking a bus from Utrecht to Rotterdam (Kinderdijk is on the Rotterdam side of the route), which was actually awesome because we had a chance to see where most of the Dutch population lives. The area felt extremely pastoral, with many canals and green pastures and thatch-roofed houses, yet the population density was high. It’s not quite rural but definitely not suburban; I can’t think of a comparable area in the States.

The Kinderdijk windmills themselves were seriously one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Built in the 1500s, both the concept and the engineering was more advanced than I expected. First, there is the sheer size of the system: Kinderdijk is made up of 19 windmills (eight round stone windmills, eight octagonal thatched windmills and three specialized windmills) that move water between a series of canals to regulate water levels and maintain proper irrigation for the area’s fields. Each windmill is huge, and then seeing 19 along a few canals is quite the sight. And just think about the coordination that must have been necessary to get the mills to work together and move water to the right places at the right times—yippie for early systems engineers!

Octagonal thatched mills

Round stone mills (on the right)

Second, there is the mechanics of how each mill works: A big ship steering wheel at the base of the mill spins the whole top of the mill to point the blades in the right direction to catch the wind. The blades were half shingled and half cloth, so the cloth could be tightened to catch more wind when the water needed to be moved faster. The wind spins the blades which turn an axle attached to a wooden cog that turns another wooden cog with an axle all the way down to the ground where another cog set spins the water scoop to move water from one canal to the other. There’s also a gigantic brake pad controlled by a rope near the steering wheel for when enough water has been moved. I think it’s a bit easier to see than describe.

Windmill Mechanics

The mill is huge, so naturally the parts of the mill are huge and the precision of the engineering is impressive, especially considering they were made by hand before the time of the water lathe. 

Each of the 19 windmills housed a mill master and his family who were in charge of maintaining the mill and turning it on and off at the right time. And the crazy part—PEOPLE STILL LIVE IN THE MILLS!!

This one has a museum in it. But others had families!

Such a great day trip on all accounts, with three closing thoughts to share:

1. Jay and I have slightly different sightseeing preferences (i.e., I don’t care for churches and have a low tolerance for art museums whereas he appreciates both) but we were both captivated by the inside of the windmill. Thus, these “feats of engineering” (as Jay calls them) are sure to feature prominently in future European adventures.
2. When visiting religious ruins in Peru, Cole and I talked a bit about the interesting transition over time from man worshiping and living at the mercy of nature and man trying to control and rule over nature (ancient cultures the former, Conquistadors the latter). The Kinderdijk windmills struck me as a near perfect balance of these two sides. Instead of trying to control nature or getting complacent about their lack of control over nature, the 16th century Dutch learned how to live in harmony with it, moving the water around where they needed it but fundamentally understanding that they lived in a place with near constant flood risk.
3. Standing in Kinderdijk, you can see construction in all directions, sometimes within about 500 meters. Since the start of my trip, I’ve poked fun at the concept of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, mostly because it seems to encompass everything of interest in the places I’ve been (sometimes whole towns) and is emphasized inconsistently—some places are very proud of it, some places don’t mention it (Mesa Verde, for example, is a UNESCO site. I've been there many times, including right before leaving the country last year and I had never heard of UNESCO before Nepal.). But watching an old man show his granddaughter around the windmills with construction cranes looming in the background made me understand why UNESCO protection is such a valuable thing—even if the whole surrounding area becomes skyscrapers and subdivisions, the windmills and the canals should stay exactly as they are today for future generations to enjoy.

Bikes and Boats

Amsterdam is an extremely loud and chaotic city, full of energy and people all over the place—in trams, on foot, on bicycle and in boats. The full range of things that may hit you at any given moment makes it a bit difficult to appreciate the cool things around you, so Jay and I decided to go on a three-hour walking tour with the New Europe company as a mindless way to get oriented. The idea is simple but cool—they provide free tours in major European cities with freelance guides working just for tips (the guides pay the company a fixed rate to pick up a shift and then pocket 100% of what they make). About 150 people showed up for the tour we went on, they broke us up by language and then into smaller more manageable groups of around 20 for the tour. The guides do not have canned language, but instead audition to be a guide and are told the route, then are on their own to come up with historical content and fun anecdotes. Our tour guide was outstanding (an out of work Irish actor who followed a Dutch girl to Amsterdam) and it was a great way to see the city and learn a TON. I think I might know more about Amsterdam now than Denver. Amsterdam is a really walkable city because it is pretty small and very densely populated. The tour took us all over the place, from the famous historical buildings (Royal Palace, various churches, the Dutch East Indian Company headquarters) to the most relevant culture areas (Squatters district, Red Light district, coffeeshops). Of course I could only absorb a fraction of the information the guide threw our way, but here are some of my favorite tidbits:

• Amsterdam really should not be where it is. The city is reclaimed land on a flood plan below sea level (the highest point is 2.3 m above sea level) and if it wasn’t for the amazing Dutch canal system winding through the city, the whole area would be under water. 

Cool mural at the hostel showing the altitude of various things in Amsterdam

• The city was first and foremost a merchant town, and many parts are designed with that in mind. The clearest example is the architecture of the houses along the canals. They are the narrowest houses ever because they were taxed by the width of the water facing side since canal access was so valuable. (The merchant vessels came all the way into the city canals.) Most merchant houses doubled as their warehouses and because of the flood risk, the products had to be stored in the attic. But since no one wanted to carry goods up and down the stairs (especially the steep stairs resulting from such narrow houses), the houses have hooks from the roof for pulleys to haul goods from the sidewalk to the attic storage area. To prevent the wind from catching the load and blowing it right through the bedroom window, all the houses are built intentionally tipping forward into the water, giving the pulley system some more swinging space. How cool is that!

Pulley hooks

It's hard to photograph building lean

Narrowest house in Amsterdam: 1 meter wide

• The city is full of incongruities that actually make good practical sense upon closer inspection. For example, the Old Church is smack dab in the middle of the red light district because the priests wanted to keep their mistresses close. This served the port city well because sailors had their sins and their confessional right next door. Pretty quickly confessing after sins turned into paying per-indulgences, alms to make up for sins you were about to commit, which seems like a very strange concept to me. It works for the church though--it made good money off the sailors for many years, and allowed the building to grow into one of the biggest structures in Amsterdam.
• Contrary to popular believe, marijuana is not legal in Amsterdam, it’s just decriminalized and accepted. This and legalized prostitution are good examples of the city’s long history of economically-driven tolerance policies. In the Dutch mind frame, anything goes as long as it’s kept quite, it’s not hurting anyone, and it’s good for business. One of the really nice stories the guide told was about World War Two and how the economically-based tolerance policy morphed into moral tolerance  too: Amsterdam was the first place in Europe where non-Jewish citizens (non-military) stood up for the Jews at their own expense.

I learned lots of other things too and we enjoyed the tour so much that we also did a special tour of the Red Light District with the same tour company later in the visit. In addition to the two walking tours, we went on a canal tour. It wasn’t as good as the free walking tour, information wise, but it was still awesome to get a different vantage point of the city. There are so many canals and so many boats trying to navigate the waters its a bit of a madhouse—there are four way intersections, stop lights, and many traffic jams. I can’t imagine driving a boat around Amsterdam is much fun, yet there were lots of people out for a Saturday afternoon joyride.

Boat crossing

Amsterdam canal: cleaner than Venice because they actually drain the water (what a concept)

The two museums we checked out were the Van Gogh Museum and the Anne Frank House. I liked the Van Gogh Museum because you get the unique opportunity to see one artist from the early stages of development all the way to the end of his life. It’s a pretty crazy 10 year story: Van Gogh just decided to become an artist one day, rejected traditional art training and instead just painted a ton until he honed his talent. During that period, he moved from a grey, melancholy Dutch style to the optimistic French style he’s more known for, tried (and failed) to create a rural artists community and created amazing influential Impressionist works. Then, he got too sick to keep painting and shot himself in the chest. That’s a lot for one man in a decade. The Anne Frank Museum was outstanding but I don’t feel ready to write about it yet. Maybe after I finish rereading the diary and we visit a few more Holocaust remembrance sites.  

All in all, Amsterdam is an awesome city. It’s a bit exhausting because of all the noise and people but there is lots of cool stuff to see and do, and the whole place just has a great vibe. Plus, how can you not love a city with an indisputably bike-centric infrastructure and a multi-story bike parking lot?

Train station bike parking

Norway Redeems Itself

I’ve had to keep reminding myself that during the winter, Scandinavia only has a few hours of sunlight a day, because the Norwegian coast is so beautiful it’s tempting to runway here. After my day in the hospital (toe is improving nicely now, by the way!), Jay and I spent another two and a half days in Bergen, exploring the nearby fjords, the hills around town and the must-see attractions in the town itself. (I say “town” because it feels small, but Bergen is the second biggest city in Norway with 265,000 residents.)

To see the fjords, Jay and I did the “Norway in a Nutshell” tour. It’s pretty cleaver: instead of piling a bunch of tourists into a guided group, Norway just uses the existing transportation systems and does the leg work for you to do the trip “independently:” All the different transports (three train rides, a boat ride, and a bus ride) are compiled into one ticket, you are handed the time table you are to follow if you wish to do the whole loop in one day, and given an info book describing the sights throughout the trip. There is no “guide” per say, but on the Flåm train and the boat there are recordings (on the boat, you get to hear about the fjords in nine languages!).

From Bergen, we took a train inland to Myrdal, where the Flåm railway starts. Norway seems very proud of this railway, which is the steepest normal gauge railway line in Northern Europe with 20 hand-built tunnels, including one that houses a 180-degree switchback. Honestly the train didn’t seem that impressive to me—I’m pretty sure I’ve been on steeper railways (Jay says narrow gauge trains can go much steeper) and I didn’t even notice the 180-degree turn because it was inside the dark tunnel. Flåm itself is a little itty bitty town with a prime location at the end of the Aurlandsfjord, an arm of the Sognefjord, one of the big famous ones. When we visited, Flåm looked ridiculous because there was a cruise boat in the port that was several times larger than the town itself. 

Big cruise ship, tiny town

From Flåm, we boarded a boat that took us up Aurlandsfjord to Sognefjord and down Nærøyfjord to another tiny town, Gudvangen, where we took a bus then a train to get back to Bergen. I still don’t quite understand the process, but to the best of my understanding, fjord creation goes like this: when the Ice Age was on its way out, glaciers created cracks in the mountains, then those cracks were gouged out by ice and water until they were deep enough to connect with the ocean. Then throughout time, the glacial waters/avalanches/rock slides brought deposits to the bottom of the walls and created fan-shaped land masses on which small villages were eventually built. So that’s why fjords have the unique features of the straight up and down walls that go down beneath the surface of the water (versus rivers that tend to round out under the water), a direct connection to the ocean, and the variable depth of the water (the same fjord can go from 1,300 meters to 12 meters deep), even though there are sill villages on their edges. I also still don’t quite understand what makes one fjord more remarkable than another. Sogneford is famous because it’s really really big. And Nærøyfjord is narrow and shallow and thus (evidently) considered by UNESCO to be a World Heritage site. To me, the fjords all pretty much looked the same (beautiful, but the same). I guess I lack a connoisseur’s eye for geology. 

Mouth of the fjord

Fjord walls

The next day, we did a very relaxed exploration of Bergen and the surrounding hills. We started off checking out Torget, the (unexciting) fish market, and Bryggen, the historic waterfront buildings that mainly housed craft workshops and bars for Hanseatic Germans. Bryggen’s story is kind of funny—it’s another World Heritage site, but the original buildings from the 1400s burnt to the ground in 1702. Apparently the 1702 residents had the foresight to rebuild them following exactly the same line, and thus the area is still considered a historic remnant of the 1400s.

Bryggen

Wood warp: hazard of wooden buildings

From Bryggen, we took the Fløibanen railway up to Mount Fløyen, one of the six hills bordering the non-water facing sides of Bergen, from which you have a panoramic view of the city. From the top of the hill, I could finally see how 265,000 people live in Bergen—the tourist map only covers the pretty part by the water, but the city extends quite far inland and then out on a few other peninsulas farther away from the historic areas. From the top of the railway there are a ton of hiking/walking/running trails, reminiscent of Jefferson County Open Space. We walked a short distance to a lake, then the 45 minutes back down to the city center. 

Bergen from above

That alone would have been just a lovely day, but the cherry on top was when I headed back out in the early evening to hang out with the penguins at the Aquarium. I think I will have to be a penguin for Halloween this year because they are so funny to watch and imitate. (If you don’t believe me, check out the Penguin cam, the best procrastination device ever invented.) The Bergen Aquarium has a whole bunch of penguins and I happened to be there during feeding time and got to learn some about them. I like their mating process: a male penguin picks a rock and presents it to a female. If she likes it, she accepts, that rock makes the first rock in their nest, they collect many more together and are mated for life. If she does not like it, she squawks and shoos him away, game over Mr. Penguin. Talk about high pressure rock selection!!

Can you see why I love this picture?

A final cool thing about our time in Bergen was that we were there just before the start of their two annual festivals, a Jazz festival and some kind of international drama/art festival. For one of the two festivals, a whole bunch of different teams were building all these intricate geometric sculptures around town and we were able to watch them from start to (almost) finish. Here are some of my favorites: 

Built the structure, then built the scaffolding to burn the structure from

Oslo Sightseeing

In attempt to leave Norway with an overall positive feeling towards the country, I have segregated the rocky parts of the first few days to a separate blog post. Here I will only talk about all the cool things we saw in Oslo!

Sightseeing in Oslo proper:

• The day we arrived in Oslo was Constitution Day and tons of people were out in traditional clothing and/or three-piece suits. Imagine landing in New York City on the 4^th of July, but formalize it a ton. It was kind of like that. It was really cool to see, though I didn’t fully appreciate it because of the overwhelming jetlag.
• In 2008, Oslo built a new opera house right on the water, the largest cultural construction in Norway since 1300!! The building was beautiful and we had fun climbing all over the roof.

Opera House

• Vigeland Sculpture Park is this really cool 80 acre park completely designed by one artist, Gustav Vigeland, from the layout to the lake placement to all 212 granite and bronze statues. The majority of the statutes were human figures displaying the whole range of human emotions.

Vigeland Sculpture Park (or one small part of it!)

• One of the last things we checked out was the Akershus Fortress and Castle. I think we’ll probably see more impressive castles elsewhere in Europe, though this was a good introduction. The funniest part was how proud the audio tour seemed of the fact that it is still a functioning castle, used for important state events. I have to admit it was pretty funny to see a modern mechanical coat check in the middle of a historic castle.

Across the bay on the Bygdoy Peninsula are a whole bunch of museums dedicated to Norway history and culture. It seemed like a bad idea to get museum-ed out during our first week in Europe, so we just checked out three:

• The Viking Ship Museum had three Viking boats, all found as burial boats on the Norwegian coast. It’s weird to think that these boats were built roughly the same time as Chan Chan in Peru (800s AD), I wonder what would happen if a Viking met a Chimú… The boats weren’t too exciting, though I love that the Viking ships were built without plans—they just started from the bottom and built up by look and feel!

The Oseberg Ship

• The Norwegian Folk Museum was my favorite of the three museums, though there was definitely too much information to process in one visit. Instead of having designated historical buildings out and about the country as we do in the States, Norway uproots the historical buildings and puts them all together in a 35-acre open air park. Many buildings are refurbished to the appropriate time period on the inside too, and you can wander around for hours jumping from the 1700s to the 1970s. My favorite houses were the ones from rural Norway in the 1800s which were on stilts to avoid rotting in the melting snow every spring.

Built to be above snow, with food storage below

• The Fram Museum was built around just one boat—the Polar Explorer (“Fram”) boat used by Norwegian crews to explore the north and south poles. The boat was unique because it was designed to freeze into the arctic sheet and float over the pole instead of attempting to prevent freezing like past polar boats. Now, why anyone would want to sign up for six years in the Arctic Circle is beyond me, but the pure volume of scientific data they collected makes the MIT grad in me very grateful for the crew. 

Polar ship Fram

Overall, Oslo was a really pleasant city to explore (if you ignore the prices). It’s a manageable size, well laid out for wandering, clean, friendly, and right now there are only about 3 hours of darkness each day!

Culture Shock

Who knew there would come a time when Western culture was a shock to my system? After four days in Norway, I am having an extremely hard time adjusting to it all. First, I am generally travel fatigued and although I’m pretty travel hardened for developing countries, it’s not translating well here. Second, the prices are so far off the high end of my scale that I’m not dealing with them terribly well. And third, I’m in the middle of my first travel medical emergency.

I think I turned into a thrifty grad student overnight when I quit my job. And then of course six months in Peru and Nepal did nothing to prepare me for Norwegian prices. Over Christmas I nearly had a breakdown in City Market over whether to buy a $4 jar of pesto for dinner, and when I decided to “splurge” for it, I told Cole that meant we couldn’t afford eggs for breakfast. Maybe that should have been a sign that I’d fallen off the deep end of cheapness. Instead, I went off to Peru, a fertile feeding ground for my inter cost consciousness, and I got even more thrifty.

Enter Oslo, the most expensive city in the world. Hotels six times more expensive than Peru and a complete dearth of cheap (or even reasonably priced) food has not mixed well with my inner cheapskate. The sticker shock has been rough. And of course my reaction to this sticker shock has been the logical and calm reaction you have all come to expect from me: don’t eat, because it costs too much.

I started out this trip travel fatigued from Peru and not eating probably made my body weaker, so somewhere between Denver and our second morning here, I developed a nasty infection in my toe (left leg, why do you continue to let me down?). I probably should have taken a day to get it taken care of in Oslo, but because the country is so expensive, I decided we should continue on to Bergen en route out of Norway and get it taken care of later. This plan backfired completely because it did not occur to me that we wouldn’t be able to find a room in Bergen at 11 pm at night. The Peru logic goes: hey, it’s still light out, so not too unsafe to walk around, and the hotels want our business so someone will for sure let us in. Not so. Eventually we ended up biting the bullet and staying in the one hotel we could find with a receptionist still on site (tip: find one attached to a bar!), at a price that would have paid for a good four days of travel in Peru. (This is starting to look like a trend: later we tried to book a hotel two days in advance and the town was already full. In Peru I was foiled by planning to much in advance; here it's by not planning enough. Hopefully there is a happy medium to be found.) At that point, my toe was looking worse than the worst pictures I could find online, so Jay and my mother were able to run a successful intervention to get me to rest for a day, eat and find a doctor. I’m still not sure if I can get over the sticker shock of Norway in time to really enjoy our days here but I’m going to try. Whether my toe will get better with this first round of treatment is also TBD. But on the plus side, we unintentionally discovered the one reasonably priced thing in Norway: the hospital!! Thank goodness for nationalized health care and $50 ER visits.

Trujillo

The last place Cole and I visited was Trujillo, a medium-sized city on the north coast. It’s kind of like the wealthy older sibling of Chiclayo, one of our first Peru destinations. The town itself has many historical pastel-colored Colonial mansions, though we mostly spent our time exploring the surrounding sites.

Huanchaco

We stayed just outside Trujillo in a surfing town called Huanchaco. The town is famous for the caballitos we saw in Pimentel, old fishing boats designed to get over the waves efficiently. Given the towns’ similar background, it’s amazing the differences between them now. Pimentel is still primarily a fishing town whereas Huanchaco is a hot spot for tourists wanting to learn to surf. Maybe I got swept up in the surfer culture or the nostalgia of my last weekend in Peru or maybe the sun made me crazy, but I decided to take a surfing lesson!! Extremely hard to believe I know, but I have a witness! Cole and I took an hour and a half long lesson and I lasted about 50 minutes. I tried to stand up twice and had fun just lying on the board as the wave pushed me in twice, spent most of the time trying to paddle the super sized board back into the ocean, and then got out when I had enough of the water beating me up. I’m calling it a win.

Post surfing: still alive!

Temple of the Sun and Moon

The Temple of the Sun and Moon are these two gigantic structures built on either end of the former capital of the Moche culture. We only got to see the Temple of the Moon, but that’s ok because it’s supposed to be the more impressive of the two, with all these amazing painted murals which were very well preserved.

Inside murals

Outside murals

It took a very long time for archeologists to find anything interesting at the site because the Moches rebuilt the temple six times using the old one as an outline (like nesting dolls), so all the cool stuff was well buried under the newer structures. Unlike most Peruvian cultures, the Moches did not sacrifice small girls, but instead warriors fought every time there was too much/too little rain and the loser was sacrificed. Also, the Moches were the last ancient culture ruled by priests—when the community realized the priests were powerless over El Nino, they were booted from power. One of my favorite things about the site is that it is very much an educational tool—the guides are tourism students who need practical hours for their degree and the folks working on the ongoing excavations are local archeology students.

Chan Chan

Chan Chan is the most famous ruin around Trujillo, the largest adobe city in the world built by the Chimú, the civilization right after the Moches. It also has a ton of cool designs on the inside (though carved rather than the Moches' paintings) all honoring the ocean. The reason the city is so huge is that each new king built an entirely new palace because it was thought that the old king’s ghost would come back to reside in his palace during the afterlife. The palace was not the only thing that turned over with the new monarch—when a king died, his whole court was killed with him! Basically, the sons born of the king and his primary wife are all raised to take over power, then the best is chosen and everyone else is killed. Apparently this was a coup prevention method. First, there is no one surviving from the rejected brother’s courts to take over power and second, all the people in your court have a vested interest in keeping you alive. Clever. The village is also a cleaver design with all 70,000 residents living around the palace as a kind of human wall. Yet like the Chachapoyas, the Chimú fell when the Incas cut off their water supply. Ha, so much for Incas the great warriors--they were just sneaky. Other than the stories, my favorite thing about Chan Chan was that the designs on the inside were done without a model and are all just a little bit different. 

Big fishes, little fishes...

Rooms of the palace, the triangle things represent fishing nets!

And now, Jay and I are off to Europe!

Chachapoyas

Chachapoyas was a last minute addition to our travel itinerary when Choquequirau fell through and opened up some days. Originally, it was just a cool place to see on the route out of the rainforest, but even once we flew from Iquitos to Lima, out-of-the-way Chachapoyas seemed worth a visit. I’m definitely glad we made the detour—Chachapoyas is the perfect level of touristy: enough sights to keep you busy and amenities to keep you comfortable without being overrun by gringos and artificially done up for visitors.

Our first full day in Chachapoyas, we took a guided tour of the Kuélap ruins. Kuélap was a fortress/city/religious site/cemetery for the Chachapoyas people (“cloud people”) right before the Incas took control of the region. The archeological highlights are the huge fortress walls (6-12m tall with only a few entrances that force enemies into single file lines while being shot at from above) and the 400 circular houses inside. Interestingly, the Incas were never able to penetrate the fortress walls but instead waited until the dry season and cut off the Chachapoyas’ access to their water source in the valley below. Ha, that, I suppose, is the major design flaw of a ridge-top fortress.

Fortress walls

Cole Kauffman: Inca Intruder

Ridge top houses

I really enjoyed Kuélap because it’s just/still a step away from being a major tourist destination. We had no trouble finding an English speaking guide, there is a well done path leading the last 2 km to the ruins, and enough preservation work has been done to really see the ruins. Yet the ruins were not so well preserved that there were workers picking moss from between the stones (as we saw at Machu Picchu) and we only saw two other tour groups, both Peruvian.

Our second day we took a little hike outside Chachapoyas to see the Gocta Waterfall. Gocta is the third tallest waterfall in the world at 771 meters. It’s actually two waterfalls, one on top of the other, but I guess because the same water goes down both of them it counts as one big one. Predictably, the waterfall was much more impressive from a far—at the base it mostly just felt like we were in a rainstorm. The cool part of the base was how little of a lake there was. I guess since the water is falling from so far its all just mist by the time it hits the ground.

Gocta

Rainstorm

On our final day, we went to check out Karajia, an archeological site famous for six straw and mud tomb markers shaped into people and placed midway up a sheer cliff face. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world but is a very cool example of community tourism. The site is not sponsored by any big historical preservation foundation like many other ruins in the country, but the town closest to Karajia has started charging tourists (about $2) to enter and they have built a small museum (i.e., an unlit hut) to house the “artifacts” locals have recovered from below the tombs. I’m sure the artifacts are not going to do well in the long run, nor am I sure how authentic they are, but I’d much rather pay 75 cents straight to the community than 6 dollars to subsidize a fancy new building.

Karajia

Karajia "museum"

I spent a lot of time in Chachapoyas thinking about the passage of time and the rise and fall of cultural eras. It’s amazing that all these forgotten societies existed right under the nose of modern villages. For years, a culture thrived in these sites, then one day, it was just gone—and life moved on around it. One dominant culture is replaced by another and another with little memory of the people that preceded them. I’ve never been much of a history buff, but it does make me wonder what the next big culture overturn will be and how soon it will happen. And then on a micro-scale, huge traumatic events and "era shifts" happen everyday to people everywhere—and life moves on. People figure out a way to live on despite physical illness, financial ruin, lose of loved ones and prolonged mental health challenges. It’s nice to have some time this year to sit back, admire the resiliency of the human race, and feel grateful for the relatively minor trauma level of my own life.

Welcome to the Jungle

Since more than 50% of Peru’s landmass is jungle, a trip to the Amazon seemed necessary to round out any claim of having “seen Peru.” That said, I was more than just a little hesitant to visit the rainforest after my last experience in the jungle. Luckily, Iquitos proved to be a more structured, less wild, Elena-friendly jungle experience. In four days, we hung out on various-sized boats, saw tons of (formerly) wild animals, adorable monkeys, birds, jungle fauna and native culture. And the only jungle-specific annoyance I had to endure was Cole singing “Welcome to the jungle, baby” over and over again because he couldn’t remember any of the other lyrics.

Iquitos is the world’s largest city (over 400,000 residents) not connected to the rest of the country by land. We had intended to fly in and boat out, but due to an unanticipated Peruvian holiday we ended up flying both directions and missed out on three days in a hammock en route to Yurimagas (the closest road to Peru is three days by boat, insane). We spent a total of four days in the Iquitos area, two in the city and two in a jungle lodge about 30km north of Iquitos.

The first morning we woke up and went to see the floating slums of Belén. During the rainy season, the Amazon River rises eight meters (!), doubling the width of the river and drowning everything on the shore lines. I can’t even mentally conceptualize what eight extra meters of water looks like; it was pretty cool to see how the residents have worked around this annual inconvenience by putting their houses on stilts or rafts. (Apparently during the dry season, half the houses are eight meters in the air and the other half are sitting in a mud pit. I think I need to see it to believe it.) Belén’s just like any other slum: houses have addresses, there are street lights, electrical wires, sporadic trees, and markets, but you have to get everywhere by boat (or in the case of small children, bucket). This year they have the added challenge of record water levels, so there was standing water inside many houses and the schools were closed due to flooding. I couldn’t help but think that residents must look at something like Katrina and think, “What’s the big deal? We do this every year.”

Belen

Floating house!

Next stop was the Pilpintuwasi Butterfly Farm. The farm was originally started to research which caterpillars eat which leaves and turn into which butterflies, and as an educational tool for natives who kill butterflies and caterpillars thinking that all bugs are dangerous. It quickly also became an animal rescue center, taking in animals confiscated by police while they were being sold at the Belén market or smuggled out at the airport. The animals really steal the spotlight from the butterflies, and each has its own story. My favorite two were the monkey who young boys in Belén raised to be a pickpocket (and who continued to pickpocket visitors if not kept in a cage) and the jaguar that had been sold as a pet after his mother had been killed for her pelt (it turns out jaguar’s don’t make great pets and he was quickly turned into authorities).

Adorable pickpocket

Not a pet

I love that the Butterfly Farm was doing what small things it could to help without trying to change the status quo of inadequate regulation of black market animals. Our guide explained that increasing tourism is a much better advocate than they could ever be—if enough tourists complain about the endangered animals being sold as pets/food at the market, the police will start to see the economic damage of inadequate animal protection and crack down—so they are better off protecting what animals they can. Smart logic, good distribution of resources, and a great example of avoiding nonprofit mission creep.

The next day we headed off to the jungle lodge. From the get go, they were very upfront about the fact that the rainforest we would see was secondary not primary jungle, the native communities were only in native dress for us, and the animals were no longer truly wild. I liked how open they were about that, and the lack of “authentic” rainforest did nothing to diminish my enjoyment of the activities.

The native community we visited taught us how to use the blow guns and showed us a “traditional” dance (which I think could have just as easily been made up on the spot. “Ok guys, today we are going to walk in a circle around the drummers, then randomly walk backwards three steps when we feel like it.”). 

Target practice

Then we went to see a traditional sugar cane farm and learned how to extract the sugar cane juice (basically just smashing the cane between big rocks). Last stop on the native community tour was a traditional medicine man who talked to us about some of the herbal drinks they made, let us sample some of them, and demonstrated a traditional healing on Cole. At the end of the first day the jungle guide took us out to watch the sunset over the Amazon.

 
The next day we took a boat over to an animal reserve that was completely flooded, so instead of walking around to see the animals, various monkeys would drop from trees into the boat to check us out. The reserve also had a big anaconda (actually, it was still a baby, but it seemed pretty darn big) they brought around for photos. 

Thrilled about the monkey´s visit...

...Not as thrilled about the snake

Our last jungle lodge activity was traditional piranha fishing using bits of beef hung from a stick. I didn’t feel much pressure to catch a fish, since one had already jumped in the boat into my lap, but Cole caught two little tiny catfishes.

man.

 The last day back in Iquitos we went to check out this place the tourist office told us about. The info guy wrote down a list of Spanish words we could see there, the only one of which we knew was “piranhas” so we thought it was another animal reserve. It turned out to be a really cool find—definitely far far off the tourist track, just a family’s backyard that is full of all the animals not cute enough to be featured at a reserve. When we asked our “guide” (i.e., the owner’s grand daughter) why all the animals were here, she shrugged her shoulders and said that her grandfather liked caimans, it just developed from there, and at some point they figured they could make a little money from it. Two dollars for a bag of meat to feed to a dozen adult caimans, a dozen baby caimans, a pool of piranhas and some terrifying-looking meat-eating fish (paiche), sign me up! I particularly liked bouncing meat of the caimans’ heads since they can’t see anything during the day.

Pet alligators...?

 Since our boat adventure fell through, we took the other way around, via a plane back to Lima, then a 22-hour bus to Chachapoyas, our next destination…