Drench me in bug spray and show me monkeys

On Tuesday, giddy with excitement at the prospect of going to our jungle lodge, we walked to the Muyuna office to meet our guide and drive to the port. The first thing we saw upon stepping into the office was a couple in their 70s sitting across from us, bags packed, our giddy expressions mirrored on their faces. As we made awkward small talk, we were joined by 2 Austrian guys, both also in their 70s and both very, very deaf. WTF? Up until this moment I had been feeling like an intrepid explorer, ready to face the boundaries of human existence and come out the other side unscathed, laughing in the face of dangerous animals and excruciating humidity alike. Seeing wrinkly, barely mobile retirees about to do the same thing quickly forced that fantasy out the window. My mind started to race with very age-ist thoughts: Perhaps we were in the wrong office? Maybe we had accidentally signed up for the senior citizen resort package and would spend our next 4 days eating Jello by a pool? Oh god, what have we done? I WANT MY MONEY BACK.

Fortunately, we were soon joined by 4 British 20-somethings, and order was somewhat restored in the universe. Before we knew it, we'd been speeding down the Amazon in a motorboat for 3 hours and were almost there. For the last leg of the trip, normally the boat would turn off from the Amazon into a smaller river to get to the lodge, but this was low season, and the river was even lower than usual for low season, so the boat couldn't get through. This meant that we had to hike for about 45 minutes in the sweltering heat to get to the lodge. This proved somewhat more than the elderly couples had bargained for. We had to walk across a log to get across some water at one point, and that taxed one of the poor men so much that he later slipped and fell. His wife quietly informed me that he was 78, and had arthritis in his knees, which made it hard to walk. At that point I wasn't entirely sure that they would make it back out of this expedition alive. Wasn't hiking meant to be a big part of the point of this trip? They were obviously quite brave, but I still didn't want to be grouped with them for our hikes.

When we got to the lodge, however, all these thoughts disappeared. It turned out to be a huge step up from what I was expecting. It was fully screened, with running water, hammocks on the porch, and a cafeteria with boardgames, fooseball, and delicious food. We were greeted with ice cold passionfruit juice and wet towels (to wipe our already conspicuously dripping sweat). Unlike Sean's experience, we didn't have to poo directly into the river! Success. The only downside was the lack of electricity, which meant that at night we had to use 2 kerosene lamps, which had a tendency to keep going off in the middle of anything important. This made nights in the lodge really creepy. 2 of the walls were basically just screens, which was great, except that you could hear every insect, frog, and bird with deafening clarity. You could hear bugs fluttering and scratching against the screens, and it sounded like they'd somehow gotten through the screen and were closing in on our faces. Thank god for headlamps!

(We later found out that our cabin was right next to the 2 deaf Austrian guys, who we could hear shouting at each other quite clearly thanks to the screens. And who, perplexingly, played panpipes poorly while we tried to nap.)

Our first day, we took it easy with 2 short boat rides: one in the afternoon, to bird watch, and the second in the night, to look for nocturnal creatures. Bird watching was way more fun for me than I thought it would be. You just sit there (love it) and watch things (awesome!) while the guide tells you interesting things about cute animals (what could be better?). Our guide, Julio, had this supernatural ability to be able to spot any animal from like a mile away -- "There!" he'd point, "A kingfisher!" or "A wattled jacana!" And we'd squint and squint and finally see a blurry blob way over in Chile or something. (Fortunately we brought our monoculars, which helped, even though it made Julio make fun of us for looking like pirates.) 


The night ride to look for nocturnal wildlife was also quite fun. For a long time all we saw was snakes and frogs, but then suddenly he moved the boat very slowly towards a clearing on the river. Of course, we saw nothing and just sat there in silent anticipation. Then he jumped out of the boat (something I would NOT do with all those snakes out there) and came back in holding a baby caiman! We all got to hold and pet him (he was quite helpless if held by the neck and the tail) and I instantly fell in love. If only they didn't grow to be 7 feet long and deadly, I'd totally want one! So cute!

Our guide, Julio:

Little did we know, they were just letting us rest up in order to save our energy for the next day, for which they had planned an EIGHT. HOUR. HIKE. I've never done an 8 hour hike in Vancouver, much less in the jungle. (The group of older people were going on a separate, 3 hour hike. Suddenly I was jealous that we weren't going to be hiking with them. Instead it was us and the 4 Brits.) We donned our gumboots and long sleeves and were out the door by 8am, dripping in sweat by 8:02. Although the first part of the hike was pretty interesting (we saw millipedes, leaf cutter ants, a rare poisonous dart frog, and a tree rat. Plus, Ross ate larvae! "Tastes like coconut," he said), we soon found ourselves trekking along for several hours without seeing anything at all. Julio kept hurrying along, desperately trying to find monkeys to show us, and the 6 of us scurried behind him in single file. This wasn't the best system - Julio would put his hand up when he heard something, indicating that we should stop and shut up, but by the time this message traveled to the last person in line, even the sloths had had time to run away. He was clearly getting quite frustrated - he said normally we would've seen tons of monkeys by now, but he didn't even hear any this time. Perhaps there had been a monkey exodus, as Ross suggested, or perhaps 7 loud people tearing through the jungle just isn't a good way to attract shy creatures.

Meanwhile, we kept walking and walking and walking (and walking), swatting mosquitoes away from our faces and getting more and more cranky. Insect repellent does nothing when you're sweating too much to keep it on your skin. By the time we stopped for lunch, we didn't even care about seeing monkeys anymore. We just wanted to go back to the lodge and have a cold shower. But there was still a 2.5 hour hike back, during which Julio kept stopping to make a last-ditch effort to listen for monkeys. I wanted to scream at him to let it go, but somehow kept my mouth shut. His persistence finally paid off. In the very last hour of the hike, we got to see 2 pygmy marmosets - the smallest monkey in the world! They were cute and all, but by that point I was just too grumpy to care. Later, we found out that the older group had seen tons of monkeys and sloths on their 3 hour jaunt. Sonofabitch.

Pygmy marmoset:

Me being too tired and disgusting to care:

Because we had barely seen anything on this hike, Julio suggested that we leave at 5:45 the next morning to look for nocturnal monkeys. Ah, 5:45am, awesome! Just what I wanted to experience after a day like that. The hike turned out to be short, yet mesmerizing - within about half an hour, we had seen 3 different species of monkeys and a sloth! This time the monkeys were jumping all around the trees, in every direction -- you didn't know where to look first! I couldn't believe we had seen practically NONE the day before! We followed this with a boat ride to the Amazon to look for pink dolphins. They are quite shy and they don't jump like grey dolphins do. It's like they know they're extra interesting so they're purposely elusive and stubborn. Bastard dolphins. (I still love you though, dolphins.) However, we then got to swim in the Amazon river, which was slightly terrifying after finding out there are piranhas and whatnot in there, but it was super warm and nice, so I stopped caring pretty quickly. Finally, we went to a swamp filled with 2 meter wide lily pads on which a baby could sleep without drowning. By this point it wasn't even 10 o' clock and already we'd had the craziest day of our lives. I forgave Julio for forcing us on our death hike.

Later, we went canoeing with Julio. By this point the 4 British people had left, and we had our guide to ourselves. I'm not sure if you know this, but canoeing is fucking hard. Not 2 minutes in, my shoulders were already hurting, followed quickly by the rest of my body. After what seemed like 4 hours, I asked him, "We must be nearly there?" And he laughed and said we were only about halfway. OMG. So we took the opportunity to chat to him about his life, and he told us that he's never been anywhere outside of Peru. But if he were to travel, he said he'd want to go to Canada first. "Why Canada, of all places?" we asked in astonishment. He told us he'd had a couple who'd stayed at the lodge, who had invited him to Edmonton to show him around, so he really wanted to go to Edmonton! I told him not to expect much (according to my friend Jenny, who is from Edmonton), but then felt somewhat bad for stepping all over his dreams like that. Seeing snow and a city outside of Peru would probably be so new that it would still be great fun, even if it was in Edmonton.

That evening, we went on a night hike, nervously stepping through the brush with flashlights. We saw tons of huge spiders and tarantulas, scorpions of all sizes, and even a scorpion without a tail that looked like a spider! The worst of both worlds! This probably wasn't the best choice of activities for me to do right before trying to sleep. I was thoroughly creeped out and, after that, pretty much ready to be done with the jungle.

Our last day, I almost didn't go on our final morning hike. Putting on my disgusting gumboots, and my clothes that were by this point completely drenched in sweat, sunscreen, and bug spray, and going out there to deal with the mosquitoes again - it was almost too much to handle. But I sucked it up because I didn't want my last impression of the jungle to be the spider scorpion. And on that hike, the onslaught of monkeys that we saw turned out to be like nothing else we'd ever seen. It was absolutely stunning. Monkeys were jumping from tree to tree, picking fruit, scratching themselves, staring right at us with curious little eyes, peeing from a tree... It was like being in a Planet Earth documentary, and Julio was like David Attenborough with a machete and better hair.

3 monkeys (looking down from the tree):

I was pretty happy when we were finally on the motorboat heading back to Iquitos. 4 days in the jungle was more than enough for me. I'm glad I experienced it, and I genuinely had an amazing time, but it was pretty intense. It's good to be back in a place where you have motorcycles attacking you instead of insects. It's hard to believe people live in the jungle their entire lives - they are clearly made of much tougher stuff than me. Most of the villagers get their food using canoes, and probably have never experienced running water, much less hot water (while we canoed, we passed a family washing themselves in the river, with grandma sitting topless just like in National Geographic, boobs down to her thighs). Julio didn't sweat once, didn't put on insect repellent, nothing. In fact, as soon as we got back from our 8 hour hike, he asked us, "So, who wants to go fishing before dinner?" as we all nearly died of exhaustion. I've never felt so sheltered in my life.

3 children canoeing down the river on their own:

Tomorrow we're flying back to Lima, where I might finally stop sweating and maybe even be slightly cold for a while. I'm excited.

Click here for way more pictures of the jungle, and see our previous post for more pictures of Iquitos.