Day 03: Upriver to Tambopata Nature Reserve and Refugio Amazonas
Well, I thought I had some great news once we got to our stopping place in the jungle tonight. Wi-Fi would be available while the electricity was on for folks to charge electronics. So… was going to try to get this written and uploaded in time to get it online tonight. But, the speed proved to be too slow to get anything uploaded, so I’ll have to write this now to upload later.
Our day started very early in Lima–out ready to get on the taxi at 6:20 AM. We all gathered on time and off we went to the terminal for our flight on Star Peru airlines. The terminal was nice–even had a Starbucks, so I took advantage to get a hot chocolate.
This was one of those airport terminals where you get on a bus to transport you to the aircraft. Once on board, the flight was about an hour to Cusco (in the picture on the plane, our guide Steve is on the right and fellow-traveler Kip on the left) where we were told the outside temp was 58 degrees. Good thing we weren’t getting off yet! I was looking forward to warming up a bit. Did I mention that our hotel in Lima had no heaters in the rooms? Or anywhere? It was a bit chilly. Good thing the covers on the beds were really warm.
Anyway, after a few minutes to unload and reload passengers in Cusco, we were off for Puerto Maldonado–just a half-hour flight.
I got some pictures out the window of some terrain but you know that airplane windows don’t make the best lenses. Nevertheless, you can clearly see a trail or road that winds back and forth, then out the window as we were arriving in Cusco (wing tip in the left of the picture). There’s also a shot of a winding river. Not sure if it’s the one we’re on, but it might be. I also got a shot of the plane once we landed in Puerto Maldonado.
When you see the picture on the bus, our local guide, Delford, is facing us to let us know how the Rainforest Expedition operation works. They picked us up at the airport and transported us to their main staging area. Here we unpacked things we wouldn’t need in the jungle so we could leave them there–and lighten the load that we’d have to take on the boat. We also stocked up on some water, then it was onto the bus again for a 40-minute drive over unpaved and dusty roads to the place where we’d get on the river boat.
The pictures might not be in order, by the way, because I was using two different cameras. The Canon S90 was good for quick point-and-shoots. The Canon Rebel XT was for the more set-up pictures.
Anyway, the staging area at the river was where we met some other folks going in our boat. The picture of what looks like an outhouse was just that, but quite serviceable and a welcome thing, considering we were going to be on the boat for several hours. And there was even toilet paper. This was nice because public bathrooms in Peru don’t necessarily have it.
Once the “porters” loaded our larger luggage on the boat, we boarded. Right after we started out, we were served a nice lunch. It was wrapped in banana leaves and was a rice-egg-mushroom-some-other-stuff mixture. It was delicious–well, except for the mushrooms, which I contributed to the ecosystem by tossing overboard. Actually, we were told that our banana-leaf “plate” and everything in it could go overboard when we were finished. Only the (tiny) fork and the napkins had to be collected for proper disposal elsewhere.
I’m not going to describe most of the pictures on the river because most things will be obvious. I will say that there are some animals in some of them that you might or might not pick out. Think capybara (large, I mean LARGE, rodent-like) and caiman (small alligator- like). Here’s a hint for the caiman–it’s the one that looks half in shadow. Look just below the edge of the shadow and you’ll see his head coming toward us. And notice the picture where everyone does their best to see and take pictures of whatever our guides have identified–we sure didn’t pick much out on our own!
We got our passports stamped with a cool stamp at the edge of the Refuge. The one-story structure and the look-down at our boat on the shore is where that happened. The stamp is a double-wide and is mostly a jaguar, along with the words Madre de Dios, which is the name of the general area where we are.
The picture of the two-story structure coming into view is our lodging for the night: Refugio Amazonas, run by Rainforest Expeditions. Very welcoming, and a nice sight to see at the end of a long travel experience. So far this day we’d done taxi, airplane, bus, bus (again), boat, and hiking trail. Whew!
The lodge is run on a sustainable basis and provides employment for local (native) communities. They’ve made it quite comfortable, even a bit luxurious–especially when you consider where it is. Everything brought in has to come by the same route we did. I didn’t time it exactly, but it was about 2.5 hours on the river today. Tomorrow we’ll do a jungle walk or two, then head further up river to the nature center. That’s another 2.5-3 hours on the river.
This evening we had a half-hour presentation by our guide about the four types of caimen here, then a great dinner (squash soup, lasagna, bread, carrot and cucumber salad). After a discussion of our general plans for the next two days, Delford wished us a good night and we were all on our own. I’m finishing up this entry that I had rushed to finish before dinner. Perhaps, if there is internet access at our lodge tomorrow, it will be a better signal and I’ll be able to do some uploading. If not, I guess it’ll just have to wait until Cusco.
For now, cheers from the rain forest jungle in Peru!
