Amazon Rainforest Part II

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So after being picked up by the tour guide and the tour operator they showed me around the main plaza, the Plaza de Armas for a little bit. It is not a particularly beautiful city, per se, there are some nicer buildings remaining from the time of the rubber barons but not much else other than that.

Something that I find really interesting here is that every time I try to change dollars I have to be completely sure that they are not wrinkled, and there are absolutely no tears or frays in it. Kinda weird and really annoying. I got to 20's from one ATM and then tried to exchange them only to find that I couldn' because they have very slight tears in them in the corners. I really don't understand this. In the US I know that it doesnt matter if you only have half of the bill. Anyway, meanwhile I am stuck with dollars that I can neither use nor exchange anywhere.

So back to the rainforest... After meeting up with the two other guys that would be going on my trip with me, Drew and Taylor, from South Dakota, a place that oddly enough I've never met anybody from. Both ended up being great travel companions and together we truly had an amazing time exploring the rainforest. Originally I was just going to have my own tour guide and travel by myself but I definitley think it was much better having two people to going with me to talk with and discuss everything with. We also had a translator on our trip for one of the other guys since he didn't understand any Spanish. His name is Luis, and he is truly one of the funniest people I have ever met. Luis was born in the city of Iquitos, whereas Huilder, our fearless guide, was born in a little pueblo, or village, in the hear of the jungle, on the Amazon. At the age of 30 or 32 or 29, nobody is really sure, everyone had different versions of his age for some reason, he has spent his entire life exploring this swathe of rainforest that we would be visiting. Up until 5 years ago he was a farmer and made way less money than he does now, which is still very little money. Technically all of the people we were dealing with live in poverty.

We started our trip by taking a speed boat from the port in Iquitos along the Amazon for about 3 hours or so outside of Iquitos. This is pretty much the farthest out from Iquitos that any of the tour companies go. Ideally, you want to be as far out as possible as the farther out you are, the more likely you are to see more animals and less people, exactly what we wanted. The port of Iquitos is huge and bustling. This is how almos of the goods come into Iquitos. It is waaay to expensive to bring things in by plane. Peru also has its largest Naval center there in order to patrol the borders. Additionally, as I previously mentioned, with the booming natural gas industry in Iquitos the port only grows more and more every day. Hopefully some of the wealth generated from the natural gas fields with be transferred to the people who live there because they desperately need it. I will try to attach a picture later of the vast towns of shacks that litter the exterior of the city.

The Amazon is a truly huge river. Bigger than I could have ever imagined. Really the only river I have to compare it to is the Ohio that i can clearly remember, and it is definitely way bigger than that. Also, because it rains nearly every day in varying amounts, and because the bottom is made up of a very strong mud and sand it is a very dangerous river to traverse and is constantly changing directions of currents. Additionally, it used to be that many of the villages were situated right up alongside the Amazon. These days, however, it appears as if the river is becoming wider every year and the banks are being eroded. Due to this many of the villages have moved a 10 to 15 minute walk from the riverside in order to anticipate further erosion. Along the river, though, life is bustling with many fisherman, which seems to be the staple food in the diet of all that live in this area, along with farms, boat builders, timber industry, and other things. Overall, it was quite an amazing sight.

As we traversed the river and delved deeper and deeper into the rainforest we left the Amazon and attempted to make our way to our encampment, which is a rustic complex built on stilts of timbers and palms along with mosquito nets. The camp sits on stilts on the edge of the Yanayacu River, a blackwater tributary to the Amazon. The water level fluctuates as much as 15 feet between the rainy and dry seasons. If you are interested in seeing some better pictures of it here is the website, http://efexp.com/index.html.

We had to make our way through several other rivers as well as lagoons which seem to pop up everywhere. Most of the rainforest we explored was actually in a boat as there is water almost everywhere. Only one day did we really explore on foot. It is also much easier to spot things in trees from boats, which is where pretty much all of the wildlife lives. There is a massive amount of foliage and vegetation that grows on top of all of these lagoons though, and it is constantly popping up in places where there previously wasn't any. In order for many of the boats to get through they have to spend time with machetes and paddles trying to cut up the foliage in order to pass.

Once we arrived at camp we put our stuff down and ate lunch. The food was actually fairly good considering we were over 3 hours into the heart of the rainforest. We did however end up eating the same 3 meals every single day which did get a litle bit old. For lunch we always ate a salad of palm fronds with avocado and fresh tomatoes with some sort of lemon or limes. This was absolutely delicious and tasted far better than any salad I had actually had before. At first I was actually afraid of eating the palm fronds. We also ate a special catfish that is found all over the amazon and is a staple diet of all who live there, along with rice. For dinner we would eat a little bit of chicken with rice and then for breakfast eggs with tomatoes and onions. None of it had a particularly dynamic taste but was nevertheless pretty decent. Our sleeping arrangements consisted of a bed with a foam mattress with a heavy duty mosquito net covering, which is HIGHLY NECESSARY. There were more mosquitos than I had ever encountered before. There were probably a lot more than in southeast asia where I got bitten to death and thought there were a lot.

We headed out for several hours into the rainforest on the first day to see birds and whatever else we could find. All of the birds there are extremely colorful and beautiful. They certainly more beautiful than any I had seen before and there are certainly more of them and more species of them than any of us had previously seen. Unfortunately a lot of them were pretty difficult to get pictures of since they were always high up or flying. I would have needed a nice digital SLR to get decent shots of a lot of them. Sadly this isn't something I have invested in yet. All of our travel on the river took place in canoes dug out from tree trunks. Huilder, our tour guide, knew every species, about every animal, and could spot things so far away and in really obscure places when nobody else could see anything. The first day we saw monkey troops, the most deadly snake in the rainforest, the fer-de-lance snake, and plenty of other stuff. There are apparently still millions of undiscovered and unnamed species of insects, birds, and plants still in the Amazon. Our specific lodge that we stay in is used by the plant biology department, and biology department of Cornell University every year for a month or two.