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…