| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Most of what we are seeing (maybe all) are caimans, of which there are seven species; they are closer to alligators than to crocodiles.
We got back to the boat about 4:30 and hit the showers (one temperature only--river temperature). When everyone was back, the captain made us pisco sours (pisco and lime juice--he didn't have the bitters--and I think he put an egg white in). Not bad. I had mine and Mark's; Mark had limeade from the rest of the lime juice. Dinner was chicken in a spicy sauce, rice, mashed potatoes, and a cauliflower dish seasoned with some orange herb that most people didn't like. Dessert was a fruit cocktail of banana, pineapple, and papaya (topped with rum if you wanted it). Then to bed about 7:30.
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Up at 6. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, bacon, and juice made from the leftover fruit cocktail from last night. At 8 we went out to pick up dinner-- piranha. We went back upstream for about an hour, then fished for an hour and a half using raw beef as bait. The rods were branches with a length of fishing line attached. I hooked a piranha fairly easily, but it got away, as did one later on. That's okay, though, because I landed six piranha in the meantime, better than any of the other tourists (I think some of the guides got more). Mark got one piranha and one something else that he claims is much better than a piranha, but I call a 'wimpy-fish.'
Eventually our bait ran out and we returned to the Margarita. Most of the bait was nibbled off the hooks be piranha too smart to bite directly onto the hook. We were the last ones back (at about 11AM). Lunch at noon was a peppery steak, rice, avocado shell with a salad in it, and tomatoes. It started to rain while we were eating, then stopped.
After lunch we hit a real squall. Most people went into their cabins,; I stayed in the hammock astern. They put down tarpaulins on the sides of the boat to keep the water from blowing in. There was thunder and lightning and we could see a lot of flotsam (or is it jetsam?) floating in the water. Then the storm passed, but it remained cloudy and cool (about 80 degrees Fahrenheit with a brisk breeze).
We turned up the Ampiyacu River (I think) and docked at Pevas, the provincial capital. We walked around a little, but there isn't much to see in a jungle outpost besides pigs and chickens wandering the streets. It did have street lights, surprisingly enough, and a well-built school. There were some old political posters up of someone promising to 'provide jobs and lower the cost of living.' Some things are the same everywhere. Then further upriver to Pocaurquillo, an Indian village shared by the Bora Indians and the Huitoto Indians. When we anchored, the children came running down to the boat, and the captain threw them candy and cheap plastic toys. Then we walked up to the village where the captain negotiated for them to dance for us. We walked around for a while. Even though the two tribes live in separate halves of the village, they go to the same school. Soccer is very popular.
Dinner was fried fish (though not the fish we had caught earlier), yucca, rice, and hearts of palm. Dessert was pineapple. We also had Atacama red wine in honor of New Year's Eve. At 8PM we went back up to the village (it's on a high embankment overlooking the river) and went to the main meeting hut (maloka). This was about 50' on a side and had a roof that sloped down almost to the ground. We went inside, along with most of the village, and sat on split logs. The 'natives' did about five dances, which seemed very similar. For the last two they pulled in most of us gringos also. This is more on the level of the folk dances in Cuzco than anything else, but it was still a most unusual way to spend New Year's Eve.
Mark had quite a following of children who kept calling him 'Marco' and 'Aldo'; I don't know where the latter came from.
We returned to the ship at 9 and somehow it didn't seem worth it to stay up until midnight, so we didn't.
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: Happy New Year! To celebrate, the Indians started dancing and singing about 5AM, so I got up then. Breakfast was at 7--fried eggs, salt pork, fried potato, and orange juice. At eight some people from the village came to sell some handicrafts. I got a couple of necklaces and Mark got a designer rattle (with the maker's name on it). Total expenditure--40,000 soles or about $2.50.
At 9 we left for another canoe ride. We stopped at a small village of Ocaino Indians. The villages are in general cleaner than the towns like Pevas. We then proceeded up the Ampiyacu for another 2 hours. The ride was not as interesting as on the Apayacu River because there was less animal life. The river sides were eroded (and you could see the boat's wake eroding them even more), and you could see alternating layers of leaves and dirt, dozens of them, like a piece of mica. After about an hour the river started getting shallower and more obstructed by branches. Navigating through all this slowed us down considerably. By the time we got to Villa Nuevo we were all tired of sitting in the boat. Not to mention that the river basically ended there--since the water was so low, there was a long stretch of dry river bed with only a trickle about a foot wide through it. We beached the canoes (intentionally this time) and disembarked.
As soon as we got to the maloka, I asked about the W.C. It turns out that even though all the books say that 'W.C.' should be used instead of 'bano,' people use 'bano' anyway among themselves. In any case, it was a small hut with half-height and logs over a pit. All things considered, I've seen worse in campgrounds in the U.S.
Lunch was the Peruvian national dish, ham and cheese sandwiches. After lunch we walked through the village (over some shaky bridges) to the sawmill, a small gasoline engine and a blade. Forget the picturesque waterwheel--this is the Amazon! We passed a house that was being built (rather foolishly, I thought) with full wooden walls and windows instead of open-air style.
We then had another jungle walk, this one 45 minutes through urma or 'cultivated' jungle instead of the virgin jungle of two days earlier. This walk was on a well-used trail leading to some fields. (It must be used; I saw scraps of paper with Spanish on them at a couple of points.) We saw more plants--birds of paradise, pineapple, etc. We rested a bit after we got back to the maloka and then loaded ourselves back into the boat for the long ride back.
Now things get rather complicated. Boat A had John and Allison; boat B had Don, Goody, and Eric; boat C has Lynn and us; boat D had the Kimuras. We left in the order A, B, C, and D. By the time we had all cleared the shallows, we started to hear strange noises from the motor, sort of like it was running out of gas. We (C) caught up with B and flagged down D. Guess what? We were all really low on gas except B. Since we (C) were the lowest, B gave C some gasoline (in a picnic cooler!). Then we started up again: B, C, D. A was still ahead somewhere. D pulled ahead of us but basically stayed in sight. We (C) ran out of gas, so we paddled a bit, the D towed us while the guide fiddled with the engine so it would take the little we had left. When it finally caught we untied and D went on. Meanwhile Mark, Lynn, and I were lying in the bottom of the boat to lower our wind resistance. Also meanwhile, storm clouds were gathering. Mark put it best: 'It's times like this, when I'm stranded on the Ampiyacu River in the middle of the Amazon jungle, with no gasoline, in the rain, that I ask myself, 'How came I to be in this position?'' We (C) caught up with A drifting and towed A until we ran out. Then we both paddled while we tried to guess how far from the Margarita we were, if any of the boats had made it back, and just what it would be like in a small canoe in a big storm. It had, in fact, started to rain, but so far it was just a light sprinkle. After being there about 10-15 minutes, we saw another canoe. Saved! It was someone from the boat with more gasoline. When we got started, it was ten minutes full speed to get back to the boat, so figure we were only three to five miles upstream when we finally ran dry. What a way to start the new year!
Dinner was beef stew, rice, chicken salad, and green beans. Dessert was pineapple. After dinner a woman from the village came with purses to sell. After she had sold her stock, she and the captain had a long conversation, mostly consisting of her asking for things (more candy for the children, tobacco, medicine) and the captain telling her how much he had given already. He did give her some of what she asked for and promised to have some antibiotics sent down from Pevas. To the villagers, he and all of us must seem incredibly wealthy, and I suppose we are. But the solution isn't just handing her tobacco and toys. I'm not sure what it is.
My mosquito bites were really getting to me, so I was up late enough to hear the dolphins around the boat, though it was too dark to see them. Fresh-water dolphins are apparently shyer than saltwater ones.
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Around 4AM, a real storm hit us--pouring rain and all. I got back to sleep a little but the rain made it difficult. I finally got up about 6. The village was quieter this morning than the day before.
Breakfast was scrambled eggs, etc. We were under way before we finished, heading back down the Ampiyacu to rejoin the Amazon. We stopped at Pevas to buy sugar and continued back upriver. We had one final jungle walk, through a banana plantation and then through the sort of jungle people picture when you say 'jungle'--lots of rotting vegetation on the ground, vines to trip over, someone in front hacking out a path with a machete. We were going to see a lupula tree. It was about 70' tall and the base would fill a goodsized living room. The wood is soft and is used for plywood. The ants were less of a problem on this walk because I had my pant legs tucked into my socks.
Lunch was pork lo mein (!), peppers stuffed with a meat salad, rice, and cucumbers. The pork is all very salty--probably to preserve it. Dessert was bananas.
The afternoon was uneventful, more chugging upriver until dark. Nothing here seems to have changed in the last hundred, or even the last thousand, years. Oh, the few people we see are wearing Tshirts and shorts, but their canoes are still dugout canoes. All the things the Amazon has are too scattered to make exploitation possible. We saw a rubber tree on one walk, but only one. For all its lushness, the jungle can only provide subsistence living for those in it. At some point pollution of the river may become a problem, though at present there aren't enough people here to make a dent. Whether man should exploit the Amazon or not is one of the important questions in this area. Partly it's the question 'Is man part of nature?' If he is, then what he does is also 'natural' and the ecologists' protestations of man destroying nature are meaningless. Of course, man must also accept the results of what he does. |
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