Touring South America with dad

OK, so it was´t actually the Amzon river, but a major river that joins with the Amazon further down the line in Brazil. Still, there is no denying that is was jungle. The name of the river was the Madre de Dios, as in Mother of God who knew there could be some many stinging biting insects all at the same place and time. We eventually ended up in the Manu biopreserve. I thought summer Texas was inhospitable (what with the heat and mosquitoes and fire ants and all), but the bar has now been raised. I have been out of the jungle for four days now and I still itch. My paranoid fear is that I am host to some parasite and that in a month flies will burst from my arms. We will see. Agressive insects aside trip was great.

To get there we had to take a 10 hour bus ride and a 6 hour boat trip to this little town called Boca Manu. It has about 400 residents and the areas only airstrip. I also only has electricity from 6pm to 9pm and is not accessible by road. Villagers there still regularly go into the jungle and hunt for wild pigs, monkeys, and just about anything else they can get in their sights. By the time the trip was over Boca Manu seemed like comfortable civilization.

The first day in we went to a Macaw clay lick. This was nothing short of spectacular. Really. Hundreds of parrots and dozens of red macaws descend on this one short strip of clay bank to eat the minerals in the clay. It was a teeming collage of flying color. Brilliant reds, emerald greens, and bright blues in the trees and on the banks. I found the most interesting part to be the system of lookouts and the order of eating that the macaws used. They live up to 40 years in the wild and since there are probably only 4 or 5 dozen in the area they all probably know each other and are in some way related. They set up a whole rotating picket line to look for predators while their friends cling to the side of the bank and eat clay. They also mate for life so they almost always move in pairs. You rarely see just one macaw. It was a really neat experience. I have great pictures, but it will be a while before I get around to posting those.

The next day we went further into the preserve. It rained that morning and the caimans (they look like little alligators) were all out on the banks sunning themselves. We stayed in little screened in huts, ate breakfast by 5:30, and spent probably 8 hours a day walking through the jungle looking at plants and animals. It was exhausting, but so worth it. We say many kinds of monkeys, caimans, river otters, more kinds of birds than I can name and, of course, insects and spiders. LOTS of spiders and mosquitos. Luckily I got my yellow fever vaccine before I left. As you can imagine the plant life was abundant and varied. The two most interesting plants I saw were the holli tree and the walking tree. The holli tree grows with a hollow trunk and periodic holes in its side specifically for the purpose of playing host to a kind of ant they call fire ants. Only there fire ants are much worse. Four or five bites will give you fever and make you bed ridden; a dozen is likely fatal. Our guide said the natives used to (may still) use the tree as (capital) punishment. What a way to go.  The walking tree extends its roots a good four feet from the ground and can over time move its position a couple meters to get better sunlight by growing new roots in the direction it wants to move and letting the older roots rot away. Neat.

 At the end of the trip everyone in the group put together their memory cards and we burned all the pictures to dvd for everyone. THEY got some great pictures which I will share later. I got some so so pictures I will post today. Cheers everyone.

First of all, as I write this post I am deep within the Amazon basin, drinking a cold 1 liter of beer and sitting next to a teenager playing some online Japanese game. The internet connection is slow, but what can you expect when you have to stop the bus to wait for pigs to get off the road.   It has been a fun and productive couple days. We saw the inside on one of the main cathedrals in town. OK, I knew alot of gold came out of here when the Spanish rolled over the Incans, but Holy Cow. The everything inside of this church (actually a bishopric) is coated in gold. The craftmanship of the carvings was remarkable and the gaudiness came close to Rome. There is a cool adapation of the Last Supper, but in this one Jesus and the apostles are about to dig into some guinea pig…more on that subject later. We also got a great last minute deal on an 8 day trip to the Manu biopreserve (Amazon basin).

With only a day left in Cusco before we set off we got up early and headed to a vaguely indicated spot in my Footprints guide to catch a bus to Pisac, a place with amazing Incan ruins. Instead of the bus though we found collectivos; private cars that wait to fill up and go from town to town. It was alot faster than the bus. We walked around the ruins for about 4 hours. They were really well preserved for being hundreds of years old. I guess there wasn´t much gold there. They were by far the best ruins yet…although Machu Picchu is still to come.  

The bus picked us up at 6am this morning and we set out for the Manu preserve. It takes 10 hours by car and another 7 by boat to get there….so this will be my last post for a while. Today we did the 10 hours in the bus and, unlike driving from Texas to my grandparents in Kansas, this was interesting. We saw some pre Incan graves out in the high desert, that was neat. But the most interesting part was watching the geography change. We started on the dry side of the mountain (and drove about 5 hours on that side), but as soon as we crossed the range and headed down everything was green and lush. It is really beautiful here. More to come on my Amazon adventure and some pictures (promise). Cheers.

It was a long day of travel complete with the obligitory delays, bad food and screaming children but we eventually made it into Lima. All I saw of the city was from the windows of two taxis as after an insufficient 6 hours of sleep we got up and went back to the airport to catch a flight to Cuzco…the city of the Incas (there will be no apostrophes in this post as I have yet to master the Spanish keyboard and I keep getting ç instead); the ancient capital of a sprawling empire; a modern day tourist Mecca complete with Irish pubs, Italian restaurants, and hostel signs in Hebrew. It is a neat blend of old Spanish influence built upon older Incan architechture. Some of the dogs here even have collars. Cuzco is really high. There are cultral shamanic tours you can take where the local descendants of the Incans will whip up a hallucinagenic brew for you and take you on a spiritual trip, but that is not what I mean. It is at 11000 feet and I flew in froom sea level. The altitude is killing me. Last night I got a terrible headache and I have been tired all day. I know….poor me. Luckily there are drugs for this sort of thing. Better living through chemistry I say. The cocao leaf tea helps too 🙂

 So, today as dad and I were walking around the town tour guides kept asking me if I had seen sexy woman. “Well, yes, many times thank you, but what is it to you” is what I was thinking, but what I said was “No.” Finally I stopped to listen. I mean, hold on dad, lets see where he is going with this. Could be an interesting cultural phenomenon. Could be. And let me tell you folks……it was. Today I went on a tour to sexy woman with a bus load of people. Only, they spell it Saqsayhuaman and it is the remains of a huge Incan temple. We saw lots of Incan stuff today. Walls mostly; they were pretty neat in there own right, but with a little imagination you could see how they were spectacular. Turns out saqsayhuaman in the local tongue means satisfied stomach. See, the Spaniards killed so many local warriors at this site that the buzzards ate until they had satisfied stomachs…and like so many unfortunate nicknames it stuck. The temple, or what remains of it after it was razed and looted, is architechurally amazing. The way they carved each stone to fit into the stones around it boggles the mind…especially given what they had to work with. Oh, and I bought a hat. Good times. Tomorrow we are going to book a tour to the Amazon and check out the many cathedrals around town. With any luck, guinea pig will be on the menu. Oh yeah.

and all through the house last minute preparations were being made for six weeks of travel in the developing world; Peru and Ecuador to be specific. Tomorrow Dad and I set out for a South American adventure. It all starts with a 14 hour transit to Lima. We have hotel reservations for our first night and a flight to Cusco booked for the very next day. It will be alot of travel, but I am excited to get there. Let the good times begin……………..