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RED HOWLER MONKEYS SET UP A RACKET
A Peruvian jungle vacation
By Christine Tibbetts
Mosquito netting around the bed wouldn't stop the jaguar about to charge through my room in Peru's jungle in the middle of August.
Or so I thought just before first light.
Turned out the gigantic sounds belonged to red howler monkeys, and they never left their trees, but at the first hint of morning my first night in a lodge in the dense forest, what did I know about animal sounds?
New sounds and sights filled three nights and four days and most of them moved around a lot.
Seemed like a really good idea not to venture out on any of the 15 jungle trails surrounding the Posada Amazonas Lodge without my guide, even though I've solo hiked for years.
It takes a little doing to get yourself into this jungle close to Peru's southern border with Bolivia. This is not a place to stumble across, but an intentional holiday.
Fly to Lima, then Cusco and then Puerto Maldonado. LAN Peru is a pleasant airline showing hilarious film clips of people doing wacky things so you laugh out loud most of the way.
A sense of humor is helpful on this adventure, along with admiration for the people eking a living out of these dense woods for centuries, and the ones sharing their community with visitors today.
After a half hour dusty-road, open-window van ride past scattered homes, a school and lots of palm and banana trees, I reached the Tambopata River port, a casual place, to climb aboard a 20-foot roofed canoe for the 45-minute trip toward the lodge.
Lunch is served: a rice mixture in a banana leaf. Recycling starts right then because it's OK to toss the leaf plate overboard when you're finished. The boatman kept my empty glass juice bottle for recycling. This Lodge is committed to the Amazon environment.
Two journeys still remain when the boat stops----climb 152 steep steps leading to the lodge (fewer if you go in rainy season when the river is higher) and then take the first hike in the jungle. It's shorter than the ones I tackled day and night the rest of my energetic vacation here.
Plenty of time on arrival for fresh squeezed local juice, a look at your digs and a brief swing in the hammock before heading out for the first of many walks to experience the creatures and the greenery of this incredible beautiful world up close.
Since my room only had three cane walls, taller than I but not reaching the palm frond roof, I never could lock myself in for safety.
Doors are curtains and that fourth wall space is wide open to the jungle, just some vertical slats at the bottom.
Leaving bananas on the little table next to the hammock was a big mistake the second night. Whomever or whatever ate them during the dark night made sounds I didn't want to investigate.
Dark really means something on this jungle vacation because the stars in the Southern Hemisphere sky are the main lights. The Southern Cross and Scorpio were visible during my August visit, and Orion was just beginning to appear.
Staff—all residents of the four little communities in this Peruvian region called Infierno —light kerosene lamps in the hallway outside the 30 rooms from 5:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Best to be under the mosquito net by 8:59 p.m. because dark is instant when the blow those lamps out. Sleep's easy anyway after a day in the jungle admiring the most amazing birds, monkeys, bugs and trees.
Macaws, parrots and parakeets of many colors fly in abundance just as dawn appears to boost their diet in the clay lick, the world's largest according to my jungle guide Joelson Teixeira Toledo, known as Fino on the trails.
Originally a Brazilian cowboy, he's now a modern-day Dr. Doolittle, skilled at making the sounds of hundreds of birds and bigger creatures, attracting their responses and often calling them into sight.
Rainforest Expeditions, which shaped a 20-year contract with these Ese eja people in 1996, built a bird-watching hut with tightly-woven crisneja palm fronds so visitors like me can hide before dawn and peep out of the openings to see the magnificent sunrise arrival: birds with feathers of greens, yellows, red, blues and colors I didn't seem to know.
Easy to grumble at 4:30 a.m. when Fino tapped on the wall to wake us for this walk, and just as easy to be ready to head out again for more views after breakfast because seeing the birds had been so exciting.
Climbing the scaffolding of the 120-foot tower to oversee the canopy of this primary forest required pauses for breathing, and then two hours of hiking the trail that leads to an enormous kapok – also called ceiba – built anticipation for seeing a tree to rival California's redwoods.
This one's different; instead of the tall, straight majesty of those redwoods, the Amazon Basin kapok tree reaches to the sky and extends wide wings like huge billowy curtains all around its base, twice as tall as I and forming spaces to hide, meditate, commune with nature.
Posada Amazonas has enough trails to hike before and after every meal, and after dark without ever retracing your steps or bumping into other little tour groups.
Working with the local communities, the Lodge also extends invitations to visit a family farm to see bananas, star fruit, avocados, yucca, plantains and mangoes growing.
I like growing fruits and vegetables too and I'm newly thankful that my husband and I don't have to prepare the ground with a machete as this farm couple does.
No tillers, mules or oxen in this part of the world.
People here live their lives in the ways they have known for generations, embracing the economic influx of tourism in careful ways.
Nobody measures money as income earned, but rather as cash spent. Steady salaries have never existed in their subsistence experience. $90 a month is the average a family spends each month, according to Rainforest Expeditions headquartered in Lima.
The Lodge where I stayed shares the profits: 60 percent to the community and 40 percent to the company. When the 20-year contract runs out in 2016, the community makes the call what happens next: joint ownership for another time period or sole community ownership?
Decisions are shared too, with a 10-resident council making sure experiences for travelers respect local culture.
I was happy they felt good about visits to the seven medicinal gardens at Centro Nape where Shaman Onorato Mishaja extends healthcare to the 400-person community. He knows his trees, shrubs and flowers, and he knows what ancient tradition teaches about how each one helps heal scores of ailments.
My bird-calling guide Fino and two other guides took turns interpreting for the shaman as we walked the paths and learned how to treat headaches, digestive disorders,
coughs, colds, fever and love life issues.
The shaman shares the recipes so I know helpful tips now like boiling the vine of the una de gato only 15 minutes; longer might cause blindness instead of treating cancer.
I can easily picture him sitting in the folds of the big kapok tree, in touch with wisdom of the ages.
Picture yourself in this jungle. Once you get up those steps from the river, you can pick and choose which experiences to engage in. I'm not very skilled at skipping anything, but it's possible here to choose some extra hammock swinging time watching the Tamarind and Red Howler monkeys in the trees if that suits you better than another hike.
When you go:
Rainforest Expeditions
Posada Amazonas
$295 for three nights, all meals included and transport to and from the airport
www.perunature.com
info@rainforest.com.pe
877-870-0578
A version of this article appeared in the Tifton Georgia Gazette Aug. 31, 2008
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