Day 50 - oxbow lakes.

Day four in the jungle brings resignation. I’m resigned to being less than clean, perpetually damp, sticky with insect repellent and itchy with a myriad mosquito bites for the rest of my time in the jungle.


Nicolás gets us up at five for a torchlit walk through the jungle back to Cocha Salvador. He pauses to show us a brightly-coloured poison arrow frog on a leaf; it’s only poisonous if you get the poison in your bloodstream. The frogs eat poisonous insects and then secrete the poison through their skin.

There’s a strange smell during one stretch of the walk. “The peccaries are near,” Nicolás whispers. One time, a whole herd pf peccaries threatened him and his tour group; they had to shout and wave their rain ponchos to get the wild pigs to back off.

Our catama-raft has barely departed from the dock when we see a family of giant otters appear from their cave dwelling by the water. They clean their whiskers on the tree leaves, and dive into the water, emerging from time to time to exhale noisily, showing their sharp front teeth, shake the water out of their fur and then dive again. They head determinately across the lake and we follow them at a distance. Soon they are popping up with white fish in their front paws. They float on their backs and take bites out of the fish in between diving down; I’m not sure why they won’t just stay above the surface to eat the fish. Every now and then, the baby of the family emits a loud, high-pitched whistling noise: “Mum, I’m hungry! Give me fish!” It reminds me of my sister when she was little.

On the other side of the lake, a caiman glides sedately through the water. Carlitos makes monkey calls to bring the brown capuchin monkeys closer to us.

On the way back, Nicolás taps on a little tree and ants come out of its pores. “This is the fire ant tree; it’s the only tree to have a symbiotic relationship with the ants. They live in the hollow trunk and in exchange they protect the tree.” Fire ants are quite non-descript looking; I imagined them to be bright red.

We pass a tree entwined around another. “This is the strangle fig; it grows on the host and kills it; it doesn’t like the competition for the nutrients.” There’s a massive strangle fig just off the path; it’s completely hollow inside, where it had clearly killed a mighty tree. I stand in the centre, fascinated and horrified by the casual savagery of jungle life.

Just up the river is the Matsiguenka lodge, run by two indigenous families from up the river. We admire the native crafts – necklaces made of seeds and animal teeth, bags woven from tree fibres, and expertly carved bows and arrows, which look just like the ones in the Amazon room of the Recoleta museum in Arequipa, and which they still use to hunt with. I buy a bow and arrow bundle for 30 soles. Each handicraft has the name of its maker attached. My bow was made by Gabriel.

Encouraged to try out a larger bow in the forest clearing, I completely disgrace myself. My arrow flies only a few feet. There’s no notch on the bow or at the ends of arrows; they’re used to it as it is. There’s another group of gringos staying there, and an attractive scientist shoots the bow pretty well. Tim’s arrow first flops to the ground, but then he managed to shoot the next one pretty far. Now to get it home somehow…

Nicolás gets involved in an impromptu game of football with Carlitos, Victor the boatman and the local guys. Mud flies everywhere. There are two women there with small children dressed in dirty, sacklike clothing made of the same material as the bags. The women are young but they’ve got teeth missing and they don’t speak Spanish; when I try to ask them what the bags are made of, they don’t understand.

Tim keeps his distance from the locals, while Ernest, Cristina, Sarah and Roger fuss over thee children. Tim’s right in pointing out that due to their limited exposure to outsiders, the locals may be really susceptible to diseases which we may be carrying. When the Fransiscan missionaries came, they managed to help decimate the local population and they didn’t even manage to convert the natives. “They don’t have a god,” Nicolás explains. “They believe in spirits of the forest.”

During the afternoon walk on the other side of the river, we come to the biggest tree I’ve ever seen – a ceiba tree, easily five hundred years old, with mighty roots that extend very far. When we all stand next to it, we are dwarfed by it. It does not have glowing purple lights around it, but it really reminds me of the Spirit Tree in “Avatar”. When Nicolás tells us that the natives consider this tree to be sacred, and that your spirit passes to the afterworld through it, I can imagine them using the tree to communicate telepathically with the rest of the forest. “In two years, the river will come, and the tree will be gone,” Nicolás predicts and the thought saddens me, even though the changeable nature of the Amazon is what allows it to thrive.

It’s not hot; we’re here during a ‘friaje’ period, and it’s a blessing; otherwise we’d have to add ‘sweltering heat’ to our list of little jungle unpleasantries. The mosquitoes are really chewing us up during our walk to Cocho Otorongo. There’s a twenty-metre observation tower there – the closest you get in Manu to a canopy walk – and there’s a group of red howler monkeys in the tree right next to us. They’re not too disturbed by us; curling up on the branches, the pick at their fur and ignore us. But if you look at them through binoculars, you find their brown eyes staring right back. Dusk falls early here and we're getting used to 9pm bedtimes.