Stacey’s 30th Birthday Extravaganza

So when we last left you all, we had finally arrived at our second lodge…Erika Lodge on the Madre de Dios River and had gone on an interesting night walk through the jungle.

Overnight it rained a considerable amount so when we headed to the trail the next morning we found that a large section of it had been completely washed away. No worries though…our intrepid guides just pulled out their machetes and hacked us a new one!  The first activity slated for us on that third morning was a jungle canopy tour via ziplines. For those who don’t know what a zipline is…basically you get harnessed in and attached to a cable then you “fly” from one platform to the next high in the trees. Here we are before our first flight:

And here we are individually arriving at one of the platforms:

We spent the afternoons wandering around the grounds of the lodge, taking naps, taking pictures…and spotting some more critters. Early one morning we saw a spider monkey swinging around outside our rooms…again, I’m cheating a bit on the pictures as the photo would have been too far to see anything and I’ve lifted this photo from a different website. Also…various bugs, flowers and other critters taken by both me and Lindsay. 

Spider Monkey

This crazy bird (A Blue-throated Guan) showed up every afternoon for a snack of popcorn

On the final full day before heading back to Cusco we got up really early again (4 am) to make it to a local parrot clay lick. What is a clay lick, you might ask? Well…it’s just as it sounds…a large cliff made of clay where parrots land and “feed” early every morning. Apparently the clay contains all sorts of nutrients and minerals that are imperative for the parrots’ digestion and general good health. A picture is below (again, stolen).

The parrot clay lick

One of our guides returning from a fishing expedition

All too soon it was time to head back to Cusco so we got up early on Friday morning and boarded a bus for the long journey back.  Things were going well…indeed we were ahead of schedule, when we ran into Calamity #1…this landslide:

Apparently it had happened the night before around 6 pm and as it was now 9 am the next day they had quite a crew working on clearing it.  Estimates were frequently given at “one more hour”….3 hours later the landslide (and a huge tree that came with it) were cleared and we were once again on our way.

Or so we thought.  Forty minutes after finally progressing past the landslide…we achieved Calamity #2…a tire blew on our bus:

No worries…as it was lunch time, our guide got out the lunches that were packed for us back at the lodge.  They were so adorable…and I’ve been slacking so much on food pictures lately…that I took a picture for you guys.  Yep, that’s a banana leaf…the second picture shows what was in it.  It was really, really good.

It seems that our driver was experienced at changing flats so soon we were on our way again.  This time we made it out of the rainforest…out of the cloud forest and back into the Sacred Valley of the Incas before Calamity #3 struck…unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of this one but I think you can all use your imagination for the following scene:  two buses and a mountain road only wide enough for one of them.  After we all disembarked  (just in case he went over the cliff?) the driver was able to back up and eventually maneuver around the other bus ultimately making it back to Cusco in the early evening unscathed.

OK, I’m light on text today but I’m in a hurry as I need to get to my Spanish class, run errands and head out for a night on the town for New Year’s Eve.  Coming soon…how I spent my Christmas and New Year’s Eve, a little about my current location of Arequipa and finally you’ll get to meet the kids I’ve been working with in the orphanage.  Also, I have a few more jungle critter pictures to include and since the next post might be lacking a bit, I’ll include them on the next post later this week.  Happy New Year’s to all!

Sunrise in the jungle

OK, so I thought we’d kick off today’s post with a little pop quiz about my and Lindsay’s trip to the jungle of Peru’s Manu National Park.  Don’t worry…the answers are very simple and it’s multiple choice.

Which of the following things are likely to happen to two girls from Wisconsin traveling in the Amazon River Basin during the rainy season?

1. The vehicle they are riding in on the way to the jungle breaks down and they get stranded for 5 hours without guide or driver.
2. Upon acquiring a new vehicle they drive on some skinny, not-well-maintained roads on the edge of a mountain and even drive through a waterfall.
3. At the end of their time in the jungle, they head back towards Cusco only to discover the road is blocked by a recent landslide which takes 3 hours to clear.
4. Upon getting past the landslide, they drive 45 more minutes at which point one of the tires on their bus blows.
5. The tire is repaired but they are soon obliged to disembark the bus while the driver navigates past an oncoming car on the edge of the mountain.
6. Their brother Dan comes as close to being an only child as he’s ever been at least 6 times.
7. All of the above.

If you’ve selected number 7 then you are a winner.  Indeed, the drive to and from the jungle proved at least as adventurous (and frequently more dangerous) than the jungle itself.  More on all of these happenings later.

Pre-inca tombs

After one day of rest in Cusco after the Machu Picchu trek, Lindsay and I joined 7 other tourists (3 Spaniards, 2 Peruvians, 1 Frenchwoman, 1 Argentinian) early on Monday morning for the trip to the jungle.  Things kicked off great…we got to drive through the beautiful Sacred Valley of the Incas again on our way east towards the jungle.  Our first stop of the day was late morning at the site of some pre-Incan tombs (estimated to be about 1200 years old).  As you can see in the picture above the tombs are almost like little houses and were built for only most important members of thevillage (including their children).  The corpses were buried with many expensive and valuable items including gold, silver, fine cloths and other artifacts so it comes as no surprise that when the Spanish arrived in the 16th century they opened the tombs, stole the valuables and tossed the bodies.  Not surprisingly there are no bodies remaining in any of these tombs.

The hanging things on these trees are birds’ nests

We spent about a half an hour wandering through (and in some cases, climbing in) the tombs before we attempted to set out again towards the jungle.  Unfortunately, that was not to be…there was a problem with the starter on our van and suddenly we were going nowhere.  The guide takes off to the next village in search of a new van and the driver disappears while the rest of us sort of wait around for the next 5 hours wondering what to do.  To make matters worse, the French girl Elise was suffering severely from altitude sickness so it was exceedingly inconvenient that we got stranded at 3,800 meters (about 12,000 feet).  Five hours later our guide returned…stressed out but with a van owned by a local villager and it is with this vehicle that we continue on a 6 hour, nail-biting journey along the edge of the mountain…ultimately descending into the cloud forest and our first night’s lodging at the San Pedro Lodge (pictured below) where we ultimately arrived around 10:30pm.

San Pedro Lodge in the Cloud Forest of Manu National Park

So when our guide roused us at 4:30 the next morning to go view the cloudforest-native-birds the Cock of the Rock…to say that we were exhausted would be a slight understatement.  We were rewarded with lots of sightings of the birds but since they were too far away for photos, I’ve included a picture here that I nicked off a different website so you can see what they look like.  After breakfast we wandered on an hour or so long walk where we took lots of the surrounding pictures of flora and fauna.  Ultimately we ended up near a little village about an hour from our final lodging place where we did a short 40 minute whitewater raft trip that was pretty tame except for the first rapid which was as close as I’ve ever been to flipping a raft.  Included below is a picture of Lindsay prior to embarkation onto the raft.    

 

 

After the rafting we boarded a boat that looked like this:

enroute to our next lodge known as the Erika Lodge. 

Erika Lodge

Our first evening’s activities included a night walk through the jungle canopy where Lindsay got this awesome spider web shot as well as the picture of the bat building a nest in a tree trunk.  The other photo of the weird tree with multiple trunks is actually a tree that moves by growing more trunks like those you see in the photo.  And of course, there is me…always the height of fashion in my jungle rubber boots…a necessity in the rainforest.  More to come from the jungle and the Madre de Dios River so stay tuned…

 

Can you see the bat?

Walking Tree

Runway model

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