Day 59 - Posada Amazonas and around.

I do believe that 4am is the earliest I’ve had to get up thus far. It’s a dawn boat ride to Cocha Tres Chimbadas, the oxbow lake a little way up the river. Oxbow lakes are a curious phenomena; during every rainy season, the river alters its course. It winds its way through the rainforest; the strong current carries sediment from upstream, which blocks off a loop, and forges a different course. The loop becomes a lake, a valuable habitat for giant river otters, caimans, piranhas, and eventually becomes overgrown with vegetation and ceases to exist.

From our catama-raft, we see a whole flock of hoazins (stinkbirds) on a tree, kingfishers, a gliding caiman in the distance, caracara perched on a dead tree stump…No otters, though – a section of the lake is out of bounds, set aside for research into the behaviour of giant otters, and it’s also where their lair is located.

Our catama-raft moored in the middle of the lake, we’re handed primitive fishing rods – sticks with a bit of line attached, and given bits of meat with which to entice the piranhas. My piranhas are crafty; they nibble on the meat, but not strongly enough to get hooked, and each time I feel a tug and lift the rod from the water, I discover that they’ve eaten all my meat. A couple of people almost catch one, but they get away at the last second. William, one of the guides, manages to hook one with just a fishing line, and he holds it firmly in his hand for us to see – a vicious-looking yellow-bellied fish the size of his palm. He puts a large leaf to its mouth and demonstrates the perfect semicircle that it bites out of it before throwing it back in. Locals do eat it, but we won’t get that opportunity.

On the way back, three intrepid swimmers (including Ciara and Ronan) jump in the Tambopata River and float down the last section to the lodge. Ciara then promptly falls through knee-deep mud as she tries to scramble onto the bank.

Vico leads us on a short ramble through the jungle behind the lodge. We can hear the harsh loud cawing of macaws and he leads us to the spot where we can see a pair of scarlet macaws high up on a tree branch where they’re nesting. They’re amazing birds – 70cm tall, can live up to 50 years, and beautiful in flight. The more I think about it, the more I am against zoos and other means of keeping animals in captivity; unless the animal is in serious danger of extinction, it’s cruel to keep them just for show when they could be roaming or flying free in their natural habitat. Yes, they might live less longer in the wild, but what a quality of life!

We walk down some wooden steps to a small blind (a thatched hut with window holes for spying on the clay lick by the river). There are no macaws, though; unless you have the patience to spend hours there, it’s easy to miss them. There’s movement above, though; we’ve stumbled on a group of dusky titi monkeys – quite small, with thick red fur and a complete lack of interest in us. They let us come very close as they proceed to graze on the flowers of the trees above. This is the closest I’ve been able to get to monkeys in the jungle.

Lunch is excellent – pork in orange sauce, fried yucca in garlic sauce, fresh salad with brazil nut and lemon dressing…The homemade brazil nut and chocolate ice cream’s not half bad either.

We’re let loose for a siesta, gratefully spent swinging in my hammock, reading “Northern Lights”, before heading off to the medicinal plant garden, maintained by the local native community.

The shaman greets us and we get a tour of the gardens – medicinal plants growing in clearings in the jungle. We’re accompanied by a small ginger cat with golden eyes; it seems to like human company. Among the array of plants that we’re shown there are natural dyes (leaves which turn our fingers purple when we squeeze them), anaesthetics (leaves which numb our tongues and make them tingle when chewed), natural Viagra, called para-para, the effects of which are supposed to last for three months; the follow-me follow-me vine, whose leaves are used to brew a love potion which allegedly makes the other party crazy for you after three months, and ayahuasca, the medicinal vine, which takes you on a journey out of your head. “Don’t you have to go on a diet before you take ayahuasca?” “Yes, otherwise you may not get visions. You must abstain from sex, red meat, alcohol, citrus fruit and spices for three days before and three days after.” No worries.

During the night walk after dinner, we see more wandering spiders (shudder!) and I discover my new favourite insect: the leafcutter ant. I’m fascinated by the organisation structure of the massive nests – how each ant’s role is so clearly defined: the larger ones are workers, who chew off bits of leaves bigger than themselves and carry them down underground; the smaller ants clear the ‘highway’ of any debris, the tiny ones watch out for parasitic flies which lay eggs in the necks of workers, so they ride on top of the leaves, partly to balance them, and partly for protection, while the larger soldiers protect the queen. It’s kind of like Japan – the whole regimental order of things. I am becoming more and more appreciative of the weird and wonderful things in the jungle - the 'walking palm', with its many roots, which moves one metre per year, the wild garlic tree which stinks of garlic and though it can't be used for cooking, it's home to some bats with no sense of smell (or so I assume), the interdependence of trees and biting ants which protect them.