HOME FROM PERU

SUNRISE OVER PUCALLPA

This trip to Peru was life-changing. I deeply appreciate little things: toilet paper in public rest rooms, hot running water, clean drinking water, mattresses, chairs, and having more than two outfits. We in the United States are extremely rich in stuff. We are impoverished in time. My days have been filled with things that need doing. I vow to spend some time every day, just being, enjoying the trees in the back yard, watching the sun rise or set, visiting with my family and friends.The trick with vacation revelations is to bring them home, and integrate them into your life. A month after my trip, I look back and find that some of these resolutions are hard. I try to take them in little steps. Tomorrow, I will start reading my E-mail only once a day.

CUZCO

We decide to give up on the boat trip that never happened (did I mention we were supposed to be going on a boat trip through the jungle?) and see some other part of Peru. Figuring in all the travel, we don’t have enough time for Machu Picchu, but we can visit Cuzco.

In Cuzco, we stay in a hostel where we enjoy many luxuries. Like hot and cold running water. A mattress. Laundry service. Bottled purified drinking water (sin gas). It is eleven thousand feet here, so one of the luxuries we are not enjoying is oxygen. It is clear what to do about this. Chew coca leaves, drink coca mate, and walk slowly.
Our Spanish works a lot better here because everyone speaks a little English, so we can compromise...a few words of Spanish here, a few words of English there. Our favorite waitress coaches us when we say silly things.
We eat lots of salty food. Guinea Pig. Alpaca. An exquisite fish soup. Chile Rellenos made with small hot peppers and salty, salty cheese. We eat salads and vegetables. And about this time, I get travellers digestive problems for the first time.
We visit ruins. Cuzco is the city of the Incas, and Inca stonework abounds. Not far from the city is Saqsaywoman (spelled various ways), where we see classic Inca stonework. (Husband in picture for scale.)

VAMOS A COMPRAR UNA MANTA

Friday 8/28
The markets here are full of cheap souvenirs. Many of the venders have the same stuff, machine-woven cloth, neon-bright patterns and made into stuff like bags and purses. To buy una manta mas fina y grande is very difficult. We go up and down the stalls looking for the hand-woven designs like the ones Maggie brought home. No one has anything that nice or that big. We tried the market in Pisaq and found nothing. Went to the artisans’ market and found some fine but not large, large but not fine. Bought a machine-made manta pretty and cheap, and a table runner, small and fine. Finally in a store, we find a blanket that is a joy to look at.--

JUNGLE TOWN

We head back down river to Pucallpa, which is a city of some 200 thousand, sprawled across the cleared banks of the Ucayali river. In the dry season, it is dirty and dusty. Very few people have cars, so the roads, both paved and dirt, are filled with motocabs. I’m not sure that is what the locals call them, but they are like a motorcycle attached to a rickshaw.
It is a wild ride, I’m guessing 30 plus miles per hour with the wind blowing dust in our faces. Many of the roads are about two lanes wide, but these drivers don’t know about lanes. They drive three across, weave in and out, make left turns from the right side of the road, honk and toot and flick their hands in half-hearted signals. They cut the corners so close that I am certain they will clip the curbs. On the rutted dirt roads, the ride is nightmarish, jostling and bumping, and jarring my spine. Please, stay on the paved roads!
It’s easy to find a motocab. The roads are full of them. Step to the curb, and 3 motos will compete for your business. The ride is pretty cheap, as long as you negotiate the fare up front and have some idea of where you’re going and how much it should cost. And have the right change!
There is so much to see. Streets are lined with houses, with yards boarded up with miscellaneous lumber. Stores have flat fronts, with garish printed signs in their doorways. The downtown area looks much like any small town, except that the storefronts are narrow with minimal signage. My favorite area is the market. Produce is displayed in huge arrays, right along the street. Melons. Plantain. Many, many fruits and vegetables and goods of all kinds. I want to jump out and wander through the stores. But we are whipped around the corner and down another street.

LIANA

INSECT STORIES

Every other day or so, our Shipibo friends rake the clearing and burn all the dried leaves. This is a curious tidiness to me. Aren’t the leaves beneficial to the soil? Maybe they’re protecting us from lurking jaguars... snakes... well, probably insects.

In the city we see signs of this same tidiness. Yard care is a matter of heading out with your machete and hacking down everything that grows. One can only imagine what happens to this bare dirt in the rainy season. Not speaking Spanish well enough, I cannot ask the reason for this curious yard care, but can only speculate. Maybe a lush green lawn means something different here. I can’t help remembering the morning I sat in the grass by the river bank washing laundry in a bucket, and returned to camp with my legs covered in chigger-like bites.

Signs of insect life abound in our jungle clearing. Here is an ant tunnel, plastered over by the ants for use when the jungle is several feet deep in water so they can go back and forth between the ground and their tree.

Decomposition happens fast in the jungle. Ever curious to know what dung beetles do? (Excrement 5 minutes old.)

A spider has been hiding in my stuff. Somehow he got inside my mosquito netting and here he is, facing me down, three inches from my pillow. I am frozen in indecision. In my growing reverence for all life, I don’t want to kill him. But every spider I’ve pointed out to our Shipibo friends has been pronounced “venomoso”. Is this one poisonous too? There is no one around to ask. And I can read his mind. He is about to make a break for cover and hide in my stuff again. He’s too quick, and I won’t be able to catch him. And I can’t read his mind and find out if he would bite me. He had all night and didn’t bite me, but would he bite me later out of fear? I act out of fear, and swat him down, feeling sad and guilty for a couple of hours.

Rick takes me for a short walk along a path where he has found a surprise. “Watch out for snakes,” he says, so I keep my eyes glued on the path. So of course, I miss the surprise, which is a tree covered in butterflies. I have scared them away, so we wait until they come back. There must be something special in the sap of this tree. There is a butterfly every few inches. The lovely aquamarine butterflies are here, along with some zebra-striped ones. I took photos, but they aren’t much good.

SPEAKING SPANISH

We decide to go to Peru, but neither Rick nor I can speak Spanish. We have two months. Because this is a budget trip to Peru, I check out every Spanish program I can find at the library. We listen every free moment. At first I try to understand everything on the tape. It is futile. After “Hola!” and the ABC’s, I am lost. I thought Spanish was supposed to be an easy language. As soon as I hit the verbs, I know this is not true. Then I relax and let my brain work on it as it wishes. Still, as I leave for Peru two days ahead of Rick, I am not particularly well equipped.
For the first two days in Pucallpa, I have no daughter to help translate for me. I am SO GLAD that I studied Spanish. I can at least make some basic needs known. For a long time, I can understand nothing that anyone is saying. Then they slow down and talk baby talk to me. Present tense only, clear enunciation. V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y.
The brain is miraculous. After nonsense sentences for hours and hours, it somehow kicks into gear. First a few words start to make sense. Then, here and there, whole sentences.
I plunge into speaking Spanish. I use every bit of vocabulary I have learned. I stumble through verb forms, self-correcting when I see glazed looks. When my vocabulary fails, I make up words out of English with vaguely Spanish endings. Sometimes they work, sometimes not. From somewhere in my foreign language storage cabinet, come bits of foreign language. Ooops. Some of them are French.
I say totally ridiculous things. Sometimes I don’t know what I’ve said until days later. Instead of refreshing, I think I called the shower a soft drink. And I meant to tell someone that she should talk to me like a child, but I’m told that what I really said, was, “talk to me like a guy.”
Now that we are back in a land where everyone speaks English, my Spanish ability is fading. But we go to a café for an open mic and, hey, the people are from Peru! I pull out the Spanish (It’s just as wobbly as before) and have fun trying to decipher the sounds flying by. I can see that I need to keep studying this very important language.

UCAYALI SKIES

FISH
Every day we swim in the river. To get in, you slap the water a lot, then once in, keep swimming vigorously. This is to discourage the little fish that bite. (They say they aren’t piranhas, but we can’t see them in the muddy water.) I’m not talking about the lippy nibbles that our local fish sometimes give. These are toothy bites, quite sharp and startling. You don’t dare stay still (and it’s not a bad idea to swim in your shirt.)

I wonder what all the teeth are to do with. Probably they’re about eating other fish with bones. The fish here are the boniest ever. You lift a fillet off the rib cage, and it still has three layers of branched bones in it, as if to say “you may bite me, but it won’t do you any good.”

We are served a fish with lots of bones, somehow getting most of them out. There are pockets of boneless muscle in the cheek near the head. Rick points out the fish’s teeth... large, with two fangs almost 3/8 inch long, and sharper than sharks’ teeth. I pull my fish’s jaw open to see if it has the same teeth. It does. The jaw springs shut and it bites me.

Nature, red in tooth and claw. The jungle is far from benign.

JUNGLE FLOOR

MOSQUITOS AND BATS Thurs 8/20/09

Mosquitos are here all the time. Despite this being the dry season, I have bite marks all over my legs from mosquitos, bites on my thighs from little hard things something like fleas, and big welts from biting flies. I sat down in the grass to do some laundry, and now I have bites at my ankles like chiggers. And more mosquitos.

There are many kinds of mosquitos, some that you hear as a whine in the back of your head, some stealth fliers. There is even a large one with wide black stabilizers like x-wing fighters, decorated with white tips, which makes it especially easy to spot. What’s up with that adaptation?

The occasional mosquito in the day is tolerable, but at dusk they become a horde. At around 5 when the sun is low in the sky and about to set, we construct our nests and climb into our mosquito nets where we read or rest or journal, for at least two hours.

In our huts, bats live, hanging from the palm fronds during the day. At night, they fly around the room after mosquitos, fanning us with their wings. I feel safe inside my net, and enjoy knowing that they are out on patrol.

PROP ROOTS

FOOD IN THE JUNGLE Weds 8/19/09

Our Shipibo folks come by boat every day bringing us food. We have one big meal a day which they cook over the fire. Then they leave us with a few things to eat later, so it’s like a two-meal day.

Fish, fish and more fish. And plantain. Here are ways we have eaten plantain, times two depending on whether it is young plaintain (platano) or ripe (maduro). Grilled on the fire in its peel, grilled on the fire without peel, boiled in peel, boiled out of peel, sliced and fried, whole and fried, boiled and mashed, boiled in much water and mashed into a sort of juice with sediment (chappo).

Fish is of many types, mostly small. On my first day, they cut the head off for me and told Maggie to show me how to eat it. They no longer bother cutting off the heads. Much of the time, the fish is grilled whole over the fire. One day they made a great fish meal of fillets, stuffed with tomato, peppers, and onions and cilantro, wrapped in a banana leaf and tied with palm-like strips. The result was exquisite.

Rice comes with most meals. Sometimes beans. It hasn’t been too much of a problem, but occasionally they feed me fish fried in flour. (I'm allergic to wheat.)

Fruits have been really varied. I’ve had at least 5 fruits that I’ve never seen before. My favorite looks superficially like a fig, but it has more sour notes, chambers inside, and large black seeds. There are tiny red apples that come from a desert area of Peru. And bananas of many colors. Another day they show up with oranges. How boring!

CANOPY

JUNGLE SOUNDS Tues 8/18/09

The rainforest at night is alive with sound. We are close enough to people that we hear people-related sounds, motorboats on the river, music blaring insistent rhythms, dogs barking, and the ever-vigilant roosters. But those sounds are distant and minor. All around our jungle clearing, the animals of the jungle call to one another. There’s a constant buzz of cricket-locust-cicada-like sound, with a variety of trills in it. There are songs that I take to be birds, one with a tong-like bell ringing, others that sound more like North-American birds, though none that I recognize. (That makes sense, this being summer in North America and the birds at their summer home.)

The bird calls change through the night, with the bulk of the chorus during mosquito time. Besides the animal sounds, there is constant dripping from the trees of I don’t know what. The big umbrella-like leaves of the tallest trees dry out through the weeks, turn brown, hang down, and eventually fall. They crash against things as they come down during the night, making it sound as if big-foot has taken 3 or 4 steps in our back yard. And something snuffles through camp several times in the night. It might be the local dogs, but if it isn’t, I’d rather not know. About 2 or 3 in the morning, it sprinkles.

JUNGLE PATH

THE DAY Tues 8/17/09

My husband and I have come to Amazonia to visit with our daughter and some Shipibo people. We are living in leaf-thatched huts on stilts in a small clearing in the jungle, a 10-minute walk from the Ucayali, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon, about an hour by boat from Pucallpa. Our day is very short. It begins at dawn (around 5-6) when we finally decide we’ve had enough rest and crawl out of our hut. We do our things, mostly eating, healing ceremonies, meditation, and sitting around talking. Then as it gets close to sunset, around 5 or 6, we clean up camp, retire into our huts and into our mosquito nets.

You want to be in your net when the mosquitos come. You can hear them come, an insistent whining from the jungle around us, a voracious presence rising from the damp forest floor. During the day there are mosquitos, but at night there are MOSQUITOS. After 2 or 3 hours, the mosquitos settle down a bit and you can climb out of bed if you don’t put on a light to attract them. If not, and you stay in your bed, you have 12 hours to read, sleep, journal, or meditate. It is an enforced retreat, and nothing like it for recovery from busy-ness.