Jungle Day 1

Our 5 day too-long journey into Manu Park reserve will also be transcribed from the journal I kept. Here we go:

Jan 24

What one might label as a hostel is not what one would find in our eco'hostel' in Manu park. Already drenched with bug bites from our lunch break in the cloud forest, I'm sitting ensconced in white netting on my bed in the reed hut Kelly and I will share tonight. The netting hangs in a square, and we appear to be frozen in giant blocks of ice that will not melt despite the heat and humidity.

The day started off at 630 am when we met Marco, our guide. He pulled up a half hour late in a pickup truck with our driver and cook. The math did't work. Where would we all sit? After trying 4 in the back of the cab and discovering that 3 Americans made this a big snug, the 2 peruvians squeezed in the front.

We drove for about an hour on the highway, and then that was done. Nice while it lasted. What followed were many hours of gravel and pot-holed single-lane dirt roads edging along Andean cliffs. It was terrifying as we swerved through mud and backed up to avoid oncoming trucks. We passed farming women in colorful traditional woven clothes herding sheep, cos, and pigs out of our way. We stopped in the smallest town imagineable for breakfast, where we sat at a communal picnic table and were ladeled chicken soup. Not able to stomach the chicken so early, we left it and bought some orange cake...then squeezed back in the truck's cab for more bumpy hours of ascent.

Descent was also bumpy. Climate changed rapidly as we switched over to the eastern side of the mountain and entered the cloud forest. After several hous going down, we got out and walked to look for monkeys, which it turns out I am not skilled at spotting. I was looking in all the wrong places - turns out you're supposed to look across the river, way out in the distance. Marco spotted wooley monkeys there, which just looked like black specks to me. Sometimes they moved. I wasn't impressed.

Along the walk we saw plenty of hummingbirds and orchids. Also a cock-on-the-rock, which is a highly endangered bird that I think is only found in this region. So we felt pretty special.

Kelly spotted movement in a tree up ahead - Capuchin monkeys. We slowly approached but didn't get close until Marco ran to the truck and back to get bananas for bait. Capuchins are much less shy than wolly monkeys, so they were very close. There ended up being a whole treefull of them, about 15, some with babies on their backs and one very intimidating male. We fed them bananas on short sticks, getting withing a meter of them. They spread out a bit and I threw a piece of banana at one; it arcehd high and he held out his little monkey palms together, like a beggar, and awaited the fly ball. The other monkeys were jealous so this became a favorite game. That was pretty much as exciting as the drive got.

After dinner, when we looked up at the stars (which were amazingly brilliant), a bat almost took Kelly's head off. Fortunately, the bats were doing a good job, because mosquitos were uncommon. But it was all too noticable as we turned on the light that cockaroaches they were not hunting.

Kelly's eyes darted around the room, counting as many as possible, as mine moved toward the mosquito netting around my bed, which was being invaded inside and out by a colony of ants. Kelly screamed and I jumped, narrowly avoiding a cockaroach scurrying towards my foot.

We collected ourselves using reason: if everyone else can sleep in the presence of these insects, so can we. So I went to the bathroom to wash my face. At this point, I remember the banana peel sealed in a plastic bag I had deposited in the trash earlier. It was now being swarmed by ants, traversing the entire bathroom, even the toilet. Four to six cockaroaches clung to the plastic, and Kelly ran. We could barely sleep.