Last Days in the Amazon Basin
We spent 5 days in the Amazon Basin. Prior to the trip, Brazil is what would come to mind when the word Amazon was mentioned. Now I know that the Amazon Basin is a vast area encompassing parts of Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. The basin collects and funnels its waters to the Amazon River. It takes quite a bit of water to drive the world's largest and longest river. The jungles in the basin are amazing. The trees can be enormous. The ficus trees are orders of magnitude larger than the house plants that many care for in their homes. The vegetation can be very dense. A machete is needed if no trail exists. We weren't wielding machetes; we had Paul, our guide.
The flora and fauna was familiar in the sense that I have experienced in books; yet, it was very foreign when seen up close. The howler monkeys delivered an eerie noise sounding like a howling wind at 5 AM each morning. On occasion, they might be heard during the day, but one could rely on the early morning greeting. The smell of a group of surprised peccary is one that I won't soon forget. It is pungent enough to keep many other animals away as well.
Since our lodge was on the banks of the Heath River, we accomplished much of our travel via boat. We spent mornings, afternoons, and evenings in boats. Some were motorized and some were paddled. Paul did the paddling. Boats are the vehicles of commerce as well. Moving wood, Brazil nuts, and supplies for lodges and villages was all done by boat.
We did have the chance to visit a village on the Peru side of the Heath River. There are no roads connecting the village with a city or other villages. Making human connections outside of the village is accomplished by boat. The boats are simple canoe like craft that use paddles or a 2 cycle outboard motor. the propeller is on a long shaft that is angled into the water. The river depth can fluctuate greatly; having the propulsion system on a variable shaft is a must.
The building materials are pretty simple. There are no big box, do-it-yourself stores offering exotic building materials. Corrugated metal is about as exotic as it gets. There were about 15 houses, a school, and an medical building of some sort. It looked to be about 12 feet by 15 feet. We were told that a nurse of doctor comes to the village on some vague schedule. There were some small garden plots near some of the houses. There were some "free-range" chickens and some pigs. The river yields fish. Many of the women in the village make jewelry and woven goods that they sell to visiting tourists, like us. No running water, no electricity, and no television keeps life in the village at a very simple level.
On the last day of our trip, the day before our departure, we arose before the howler monkeys. We left our cabin at 4 AM and hiked to the pampa at the edge of the jungle. I always called this grassy plain, pampas, but our guide said pampa. This 2 1/2 hour pre-breakfast hike took us to the end of the jungle and the start of a pampa the stretches from Bolivia through part of Brazil and ends in Argentina. It was amazing to exit the jungle and enter another unique landscape, a gigantic new landscape. We lingered for about an hour and then began a slower return to the lodge. We saw a night monkey on our outbound trip and a few white-fronted capuchin and brown capuchin monkeys on our return. Paul our guide even heard the loud breathing of a jaguar in the underbrush near our trail. I heard the noise as well, but I am no expert on jaguar breathing patterns. We took a last hike to some clay licks frequented by mammals; we did see a large white caiman, no mammals.
Howler monkeys were our wake-up call on our final morning in the jungle. We were aboard our boat and moving toward Puerto Maldonado by 6 AM. The sun had yet to rise; the early morning light was diminished by clouds and ground fog. The river was rather low which suggested slow going. We did run some mild rapids and scraped bottom a few times, but otherwise, the trip had few delays. The four hour trip went fairly fast. We had become somewhat accustomed to the look of the jungle, but it still held a strange amount of mystery. As we moved closer to civilization, the river traffic increased and we could see more of the vestiges of the modern world, baseball caps and logo T-shirts. Our jungle adventure was drawing to a close.
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