The flight down to Leticia on the border with Brazil was easy enough. Upon arrival I learned that there was in fact a boat going down the Amazon to Manaus the following day, which was exactly what I wanted and had planned for. However, Leticia seemed like a nice enough place, and I didn´t really want to go through it without stopping...and so I decided to stay for a couple of days and do a jungle tour. I´d been thinking about a jungle tour, leaving from Manaus, anyway - seemed to make more sense to do the tour in Colombia where I would have a much easier time understanding the langauge.
Against my better judgment, I strongly considered buying a tour from a guy off the street. He was Peruvian, and I suppose I have a soft spot in my heart for Peruvians, and seemed trustworthy enough. But after some consultation with a couple of English girls I ran into, I decided to go ahead and go with an agency. We decided to do two days and two nights in the jungle nearby, just outside Leticia.
The following morning we got up reasonably early and were sent on a taxi outside of town to meet up with our guides, a native couple. The woman was quite a bit older than the man, so at first I wasn´t quite sure of their relationship until I asked. They turned out to be married with a child, but only recently married, as she´d had 10 other children with other men.
They gave me a pair of nearly knee-high rubber boots to wear. The boots were a couple of sized too big, but nevertheless turned out to be the perfect thing for sloshing around in the jungle. The rubber boots made me thankful I didn´t bring my military issue "jungle boots", which would have been useless in the jungle after they got waterlogged within minutes. The girls I was with insisted on wearing their hiking boots and not paying the $1/day rental for the rubber boots - a decision I am sure they came to regret, as they had to repeatedly take them off and put them back on to get through flooded trails.
Not surprisingly, the native woman was extremely strong and capable. We found a basket along the trail, which caused her to immediately take off the modern-style backpack she´d been using to lug our food and stuff around in, throw the backpack in the basket and then place the basket strap on her forehead to carry the basket...carrying all the weight on that strap with her neck supporting all of it. When I tried it later, I learned it´s not too bad so long as you lean into it...makes it tougher to enjoy the scenery as you´re bound to be looking into the ground with your head pointed at the earth, but the technique works.
Two days in the jungle and we didn´t really get a lot of rain, which I was thankful for, though some of the "leaves" in the jungle are about 10 feet long and would make perfect umbrellas and shelters. Lots of different shades of green exist in the jungle, some of which seemed to almost shine in the absence of light. We didn´t see a lot of animals either, which was very disappointing to the girls, though not so much to me. I figure the animals worth seeing are going to be tough to see, and knowing I am not putting that much effort into getting a glimpse, I´m not disappointed when I don´t get one. At any rate, we did see quite a few tarantulas, some crickets as big as your hand, butterflies big and small, some pretty interesting looking beetles, a few monkeys, frogs of all sizes, and various insects, including one that was so thin as to appear construced by needles.
More impressive than what we saw were the sounds: the woodpecker pounding away, the gentle rustle of a bat as it swoops by you in the night, the different birdcalls, and the constant cacophony of the insects.
The form of wildlife we had the most contact with was undoubtedly the mosquito. Thanks to those little guys, I would say I´ve made my blood donation for the year. They are indeed ever-present in the jungle, though not so bad when you´re moving. I am not sure why I bought insect repellant; I never have found that stuff to be very useful, and this time was no different. The best option was to keep well covered by clothing. It may be a bit hotter that way, but so long as the clothing is somewhat loose fitting, you can still get a little air inside to cool you down, and the mosquitoes have less surface to extract their ration.
We slept two nights out in the jungle - one night in "la selva selva" in the words of our hosts. In other words, really in the jungle, in a little hut we helped construct out of small trees chopped down with the machete, ropes, vines, and plastic sheeting for a roof. Both nights we were in hammocks, which I was a little apprehensive of since as I have gotten older I have gotten more particular with my sleeping environment. I didn´t really have any problems sleeping on either night though, at least not after spent 20 minutes or so killing the mosquitoes that had somehow infiltrated through my net.
The second night we slept in the "maloca" that the native couple and some family members inhabit. The maloca was basically a circular house of radius 10 meters or thereabouts, with a high roof of perhaps 15 meters, shaped more or less like a cone, missing have the roof on once side. The malocas are apparently traditional homes, though the other habitations we saw in the area were like modern buildings with right angles. We shared the maloca with Hermalinda and Galiano, as well as one of Hermalinda´s daughters (14 years old, recently married, and pregnant) and her husband. The maloca was built next to a fast moving stream, but luckily there was a little lagoon where we could get in to escape the heat and mosquitoes without having to worry about being carried downstream. It's amazing how much tougher it is to stay afloat in water that fresh and pure with no salt in it at all.
As for the native couple, Hermalinda and Galiano, they were from two different native tribes in the region. They both spoke their native language as well as Spanish. They did not speak each other`s language, and only one of Hermalinda´s children spoke the traditional language, so one could almost say that Spanish is their first language since it is pretty much all they use. Being able to communicate with native peoples´ in their more or less `native` language was cool, though my ability to understand Galiano was lacking at times, not least of all when his mouth was full of coca leaf powder, which was something he used with regularity. I had to turn down the opportunity to use the coca powder, which was concocted by drying coca leaf, mashing it up, and mixing it with ash to dilute it. It undoubtedly provides a bit of a stimulant, much like what I saw the natives chewing in Peru. I never did get the story on why the men in this region chose to take it in powder form and go through all the effort of preparing it, rather than just chewing the leaves like is down in Peru and Bolivia. I did allow Galiano to use his blowpipe to blow a little tobacco up my nostrils straight into my brain, though I can´t profess to have gotten much out of that other than a few sneezes.
Hermanlinda had chosen to stay living in the jungle, rather than move to the city, and make her living by serving as a tour guide from time to time when the work was available, which did not appear to be often as many of the activities we did seem to have been invented and done on the fly. At any rate, props for staying in the jungles as jungle-living in the jungle is certainly not easy. We had some good moments swimming/bathing in the stream, fishing, and relaxing...but the ever-present humidity and mosquitoes make it much less idyllic than it might otherwise be. It was a great experience though.
