mer 06/07: March 2007

Friday, March 23, 2007

out of the jungle

hi everyone, i am sitting right now in otavalo, a small town in northern ecuador that boasts one of the most exciting saturday markets on the continent. needless to say i am quite stoked because we all know how much i love markets. a lot.
since i last wrote i have travelled quite a ways. from iquitos, kylee and i caught another boat out to a town called yurimaguas. this boat was much nicer than the last one but still it was four days sitting in our hammocks. stir crazy, just a bit. this is how i spent my birthday...i ate bread and jam for breakfast, started a new book about female undercover spies in the second world war, celebrated by adding tomato and avocado to the rice, meat and plantain for lunch, ate some chocolate mint cookes, finished my book and drank half a glass of bad red wine. let´s hope the year is more exciting than the birthday.
from yurimaguas though we embarked on one of the more challenging adventures i have done so far this trip. the road from yurimaguas is six hours to the next town and under construction. it is therefore necessary to ride in the back of a pickup along this road at night...along with all of the other people in the back of pickup trucks who can´t travel during the day either. i swear i thought we were going to die. it was like mountain rally of pickup trucks with probably drunk drivers. we had one flat tire and one blown tire and i was trying to get dust out of my mouth three days later. from tarapoto, we then got on what was meant to be an 18 hour bus trip to the nearest city but ended up being 30 because we got stuck on the highway from midnight to six in the mornign because of a land slide cause be a mine. it was at some point during this oh so pleasant six hours of just sitting there that i think my camera must have been extracted from my backpack and dissappeared (used as a verb as is the tradition in south america) into the night.
from piura, the city we tried so hard to reach, it was just a sweet little three and a half hour bus ride to the coastal party surf town of mancora. we power tanned and funned for a day and a half and then i got antsy to head on and so on we went to quito. where i bought a new camera, visited zoe savage at the jail again and got my fill of tv at the hostel. kylee decided that she wanted to go back to peru and i am here, getting pumped to cross the border into colombia on sunday. ok well i think i thought i had more to say than that, but sin photos i am afraid the blog will be a little bare until i take some more with the new little sexy thing i have now.
i hope everyone is doing well and before i know it i will be seeing some of you!

Sunday, March 11, 2007

this is kind of cool

i saw on a friend´s blog that he had a map of where he had been so i got jealous and wanted one for myself. here they are!

the latest

these are a bunch of photos of Bellen, the floating slum district of Iquitios which we visited by means of a canoa the day after arriving in the city. it was hot. right now it is relatively low water but during high water we were told the whole city of 15000 people basically floats for three or four months about three metres higher than it is right now.

Hi everyone, I hope all are finding themselves well.

I will try to recap a bit of what I have been doing since the last time.

So, the last week at the centre was great. I know i have said it before but i will say again that i really enjoyed my time at the centre and this last week was no exception. while doing the shopping on monday glen saw a boy on the street with a baby coati (related to raccoon i think) on a lead and gloudina was able to convince this boy and his mother that the animal would be better off with us in the jungle where it would have the chance to be released into the wild again. this is not common...most people do not appreciate the intrusion and do not genuinely think that there is anything wrong with keeping wild animals as pets. thus, it was heartening to witness a positive interaction and to know that if the baby survives the next month or so without its mother that it has a very realistic chance of living on its own happily in the jungle. it had been being fed yoghurt almost exclusively though by the family and so trying to make it eat the fruit and protein that it needs was a challenge but a rewarding one once it started to voraciously tuck into an egg.

Kylee and I and another australian, Sophie, left for Tena after saturday feeding and cleaning to see what we could see and because it is on the way to Coca, my and Kylee´s destination finale. From Tena we visited another animal release slash rescue centre called AmaZOOnico which is located on the Rio Arajuno. It was very interesting to see how a different centre was run and to see in a way the next step for the animals as they are released into the wild. They have quite successfull monkey release programs that some of the monkeys from santa martha have been sent to participate in so it was heartening to see that some progress is sometimes actually made. It can feel that what we are doing is quite futile a lot of the time.

From Tena Kylee and I headed to Coca to get on a boat there that would take us to the Peruvian border. We were lucky (for the last time) and hopped on a boat right off the bus that took us to Nueva Rocafuerte, the last town on the ecuadorian side. In Coca, we bumped into Andy, a guy who had worked at the centre with us and was heading int he same direction, so at this point there were three of us travelling somewhat together ish.

After a night in Rocafuerte we got a canoa to Pantoja, the first town on the Peruvian side where we knew the big boats to Iquitos left from. Upon arrival though we were told that the next boat would not arrive until Sunday or Monday or not at all because the river was too low. It was Tuesday. Needless to say this news was greeted with a bit of despair but we had little choice but to just settle down and wait. So wait we did and it wasn´t all bad. We strung our hammocks out on the deck at the back of the actually quite nice hospedaje in town and spent our timing spreading out what activities we had such as reading the few precious books Andy and I had (about 6 accumulatively), doing sudoku puzzles, cooking fresh caught fish and papas over the open fire grill, listening to music and playing cards with a couple of kids that would show up to stare at us. We tried to teach one little girl how to play snap but she really didn´t jive with the whole idea of taking turns to put cards down and wasn´t all that good at actually snapping when there was a double card put down so basically the game ended up being us throwing cards into a chaotic pile in the middle and randomly yelling snap whenever you ran out of cards. Not exactly lasting satisfaction as far as games go.

Finally, the boat did arrive on Sunday night and we watched as hundreds of bottles of cola were unloaded along with a few fruits and vegetables. Monday we finally took off, hammocks in place down river that we were told would take us five days to reach Iquitos. As you can see from the photo, the boat was no honeymooners paradise. Although no real complaints can be made because in the end we reached where we were trying to get to and nothing bad happened along the way, it was an experience. As we slowly made our way downstream, anyone living along the way would flag down the boat with a white shirt or at night a bright light and we would go past and then turn to come back up to the shore upstream. With a bump the boat would hit the sand bank and people, bulls, plantains, chickens, pigs, absolutely anything would get on and we would be on our way again. Person by person, hammock by hammock the boat filled up until by the end my hammock was right over andy´s and kylee and i were basically cuddling and kylee was unfortunate enough to have a quite disagreable woman beside her who seemed to resent the lack of space. Food was served three times a day and was basically unvarying: rice, platano, yuca and a bit of freshly butchered meat. Not bad to be truthful, but lacking in any kind of vitamins and vegetables of any sort. We basically spent our days lying in our hammocks, sitting on the roof or out front with the bulls or wondering how long it was until we ate again.

On the second last day, a small girl got on with a baby monkey which she was taking to iquitos to sell. It had a tie around its waist that was too tight and was cutting its stomach and you could tell that all it wanted was to play and be given the attentiont that it should have been getting from its mother and the other monkeys in its group. however, for the price of 15 soles, about 5 dollars, it was about to start a life that would contain very little playing or comfort. It was sad to see, especially after what we have been doing for the last month or more, and if it had been possible we would have bought it right then and taken it with us. However, travelling across hundreds of miles and a border with a wild animal would be challenging to say the least so one has to face the fact that the world is unjust at times and hope that there is karma. As well as a monkey, there was also a baby tigrillo, like an ocelot we think, a red macaw, a bunch of tortoises and a bagillion chickens. and probably about 50 or 60 people.

Arrival in Iquitos was A Good Thing.

Andy left yesterday morning for Tabatinga, in Brasil, and Kylee and I are preparing ourselves to get on another boat for three days to Yurimagua. The boat, which we went to see this morning at the port, is a world better than the Siempre Adelante III and we are in fact not unhappy about getting on at all as it will be a very different experience for a shorter period of time. It probably means however, that I will be spending my 21st birthday swinging in a hammock as we slowly make our way downstream once again. I did find a three dollar bottle of champagne today though which will have to suffice as far as wild and crazy celebrations go. wooohooo.

As I always say, it is wonderful to hear from those of you who email...I appreciate the full inbox as those of you who travel know and i hope everyone is having a peachy march month.

love mer