Table of Contents
Part I Into the rain forest of Tambopata National Reserve
Part I of our Peru travel blog series: from Cusco to Puerto Maldonado, a jungle night walk in the Tambopata National Reserve, and a silent morning rowing across Lake Sandoval, in the heart of the Peru jungle. Alice in Wonderjungle is a literary piece about a walk through the jungle.
1.Travel planning based on psychometrics?
Don’t rush into anything when it comes to life. Don’t rush anything that matters.
And what is more central to becoming than discovering our life partner? Most of us know our better half as engaged in the mundane life, but new environments offer us the chance to discover previously unknown sides of ourselves and of our partners.
About Peru, we dreamed together, we planned together, but Andrei was the true architect of our trip. Who would have thought that 4 points in Conscientiousness would make such a difference?
Jokes aside, we had similar profiles: both of us scored very high on Openness and high on Conscientiousness and Extraversion. The main difference that the psychometrics showed was that I scored significantly higher on Agreeableness and Andrei on Neuroticism.
But what has all this psychological profiling to do with travelling? Well, we found studies saying that travelling and travel planning can be improved by psychometric data. And then we have asked: what if certain regions on the map can be correlated with certain psychological traits? Then a destination can be chosen accordingly. We know that our features can be modelled and enhanced, and we proposed a travelling paradigm in which a suitable journey makes one thrive, flourish, enjoy, and personally develop in meaningful directions. Our profiles were a way to know ourselves better, a starting point in our planning, in our reveries; the rest was just lived experience.
2. Travel as a couple: what sides will we discover of each other?
What sides will I discover of him, and what sides will he discover of me?
When we left, I had a bad cold and the reminiscent effects of being too tied to my work. With the occasion, I discovered that he is very organised, neatly planning every step, so that our experiences flowed from one point to another, smoothly, coherently and in good understanding. He took care of me, helped me with packing and other small tasks, taking them upon himself, adjusting to the current conditions, to my state, to what I was and wasn’t able to do.
Our flight to Madrid was in the evening, so we arrived late and woke up very early. Soon we were again in the Adolfo Suárez airport.
The wavy ceiling of parametric architecture covered us, and, supposedly, according to its design, we were at the bottom of the ocean, shades of green and blue changing in dégradé as we strolled through the terminals.
We stopped for breakfast in one of those typical Spanish pubs, where normally workers stop for a slice of tortilla and a cortado. The airport transplant was a replica of those you can find on the street corner. We ate, and Andrei started to play with the camera. We were planning to start filming a vlog. On our first attempt, we were camera-shy. Andrei got a hold of his emotions and started to explain the logistical part of our trip.
The flight was 12 hours long and during the day. We killed the time watching some tutorials about filming and storytelling. We arrived in the afternoon in Lima, which actually meant very late at night for us. From there we changed to Cusco, the gateway to the Sacred Valley; we stayed overnight in an old but elegant hotel in the city center, with wooden balconies overlooking Plazoleta Espinar.
Pachacútec in Plaza de Armas, Cusco
We were jet-lagged, so we woke up at 4 am. At 5, we decided to drink coca tea and head out. The city was just waking up; street cleaners and policemen were already out, and few other people were rushing in all directions. The light of the just-about-to-break dawn, the eeriness of almost empty cobblestone streets. Under one of the columns of the covered sidewalk, facing the long and broad Av. El Sol, which opened the perspective to the mountains, an Andean lady sat, with her tall hat, and took out what looked like a vegetable grater and a wooden stick and started making music with it. Trrr Trr Trrrrr. Rhythmic sound, no inflection. The street was given life. Drunken party boys were returning home.
–Let’s not walk outside of the city center just yet. We don’t know how safe the streets are.
Indeed, Latin America has a reputation for high criminality, and Andrei had already been exposed to it in other countries; thus he was hypervigilant.
3. From Cusco to Puerto Maldonado, over the Andes into the Amazon rainforest of Peru
Next, that same morning, we were taking the flight to Puerto Maldonado. Mixed feelings were blooming inside me. I was eager and afraid at the same time. No other environment on this earth produced inside me such intricate feelings. The complexity of the unknown of the jungle scared me, more than the desert, more than the sea or the mountains.
The sky was perfectly clear when we flew over the Andes. The ridges were high and steep and contained glaciers. To our right we saw the famous Ausangate. Then, abruptly, the mountain chains stopped and the rainforest continued. At the border between the two realms, the clouds started to cover the rainforest, and soon we pierced through them into wet, warm moisture.
The airport was small, and we exited immediately. A driver was waiting for us and a couple of other tourists: an anxious German boy, a Dutch family, a couple of friends from the UK.
–Good, they don’t seem like people that would do foolish things, said Andrei after observing the others.
I agreed.
The border between the Andes and the rainforest
4. Puerto Maldonado, Peru: first impressions
I was like a child in a lush green world. Water drops were glimmering on grand silky leaves. I wished we had taken a motorcycle or a tuk-tuk imported from Asia. Instead, we climbed into a plain minibus. I was involuntarily searching for aspects of reality found in Bangladesh, maybe because it was the only tropical environment I had visited before. In a roundabout at the entrance to the city, we passed by a big statue of a puma and a jaguar balancing a half-moon. Garbage was in plain sight. Unfinished brick buildings. The chaos of small businesses.
Plaza de Armas de Puerto Maldonado
Too much freedom: everyone does as they please, only many don’t know what would be good for them. Many children are left to fend for themselves, growing up as best they can in the streets of their neighbourhoods. The town has a small theatre, unused and of interest to no one. An orthodontist earns six times as much as a worker on an average wage. We were told that immigrants from Venezuela have driven up crime. A wild society? A traditionalist one? Definitely not the latter. Small traders, sadness, dissatisfaction at work. Grocery shops that also sell plane tickets. From the perspective of a big city, a narrower life: there is no cultural centre, and after 9 pm the town becomes unsafe.
I turned from the window and locked my gaze with Andrei. The jungle is frightening and wonderful at the same time. I was looking for love, and it seems I have found it. Now I can live. I think that is all, and nothing more. Today I am, and it is fantastic to be. I am learning to enjoy life. Today we will be in the jungle.
But for the moment, we took a stroll in the city center, a square plaza with a clock tower in the center and pergolas with plants and flowers on the sides. We stopped for a coffee at the same coffee place where the policeman took his. I wondered what his life was about, what criminality was like in the area, what the challenges were.
“We are not going to interact with the officials,” said Andrei when he saw that my eyes lit up. So the questions in my mind felt like raindrops on heated asphalt and vanished.
The agency was on the banks of the Madre de Dios River, where we met Rolando, our tour guide. He was robust, well dressed for adventure, and spoke clear English.
We walked down the street along the Malecón de la Marina de Guerra del Perú, where Rolando gave us some information about the town and how gold miners had founded it little more than a century ago.
I mistook a bunch of workers, with their gray overalls and yellow helmets, for miners. They were just constructing the bridge over the Madre de Dios, a not so small infrastructure asset that connected Peru with Brazil and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. No wonder the locals were so proud of it.
5. Alice in Wonderjungle: a jungle night walk in Tambopata
And the tarantula leapt with its thick fangs and seized the stick in its pincers. It was as big as both palms cupped together. And it was not the only one. On the other side of the banana tree, among the flaking cuticles of withered leaves, two more lay in wait. It was night, as if there had never been a day. The jungle did not keep its own rules. The water-soaked sky had drained away, giving way to a clear night sprinkled with stars.
Among the explorers, worried whispers were whispered in hushed voices. Perhaps the whispers, whispered so, squeezed their hearts down to the size of a flea, and their bodies, with nowhere else to go, shrank as well. The burdock leaves grew until they covered the starry sky. Nature was bursting at every joint. Veins as thick as a fist braided fractally out of one another. The lush green in full force raised Romanesque vaults, with windows opening onto the black sky, freckled with stars.
With Roland in front, the small expedition disappeared into the banana forest. Only he knew the jungle; the rest were children who, willing or not, fell under its spell and turned now brave, now fearful, depending on what they drank with their eyes. Around them, even the darkness was alive. The pale beams of the torches uncovered all sorts of goings-on and mythical creatures. What seemed to be was not necessarily so. Little eyes glinted in the thick darkness. Arachnids of every size and colour wove oracular dilemmas.
A whispered thought voiced a riddle:
You are old but young
Young but old
Loved at last.
A green stalk seemed to be only a stalk of green, yet the life inside it was more than it let show. A small creature, long, thin and green, wished to be just another blade of grass among other blades of grass. Only the initiated could see it. An owl announced the coming of another hour of the night. One of the more fearful explorers kept asking about banana spiders, which in fact did not exist in this part of the jungle.
A plump golden spider, as long as a finger, caught the oracle’s words in its web:
“Did you think you would see a boa? What will you do if the boa coils around you and strangles your truth before you speak it? What will you do if your answers are left without action? What will you do if you get stuck in my web?”
A creature of action, it made to leap and sink its fangs into its prey. Only the prey had been rubbed with oil pressed from the great Brazil nuts, and it slipped through the meshes of the arachnid’s palace of two-dimensional nacre. And why study architecture anywhere but in this place, teeming with life?
The tiny explorers fled. And not from the web of wet nacre, woven endlessly by the Lord of the Flies, but from a nest of wild wasps shaped like a jug with a slender neck and a round belly, from which little fighter planes emerged, one after another. And perhaps because their hearts began to pound, their hearts grew again, and, no longer fitting in their chests, they had to grow again too. The giant ferns that had towered over their heads were left at ground level, and their heads rose above the understory. On a large leaf that tried to gather every photon sent by the stars sat a small brown frog, the size of a spearhead. Was it one of those coated in neurotoxic poison?
A camouflaged phasmid
They walked beneath the canopy until they were bored, until they were tired, until they feared they would never arrive. They walked until the rich sound of the jungle gave way to the chords of cumbia, and they reached a few little houses raised above the ground on wooden stilts, through which you could see from one side to the other, through the wide frames of the mosquito nets. The vibrant rhythms of the cumbia chased away their night terror.
Tired as they were, large portions of ají de gallina with rice and yuca were set before them. The cumbia carried them further and further into a jungle of sounds. Roland told them stories about the outlaws hiding in the jungle and about gold mining in Peru, much of it illegal, here in Madre de Dios.
“Past the Tambopata National Reserve, the miners float their dredges on the rivers and suck the gold out of the riverbed,” Roland said, pushing his plate aside. “These days the army tries to limit illegal mining due to the environmental effects. They found a lot of mercury in the waters due to the extraction of gold. Yet they too come in by helicopter and burn everything, the rafts, the motors, the diesel, thirty camps in one raid. And the miners have radios; they talk in Quechua, and they know where the soldiers are before the soldiers land. A month later there are new rafts. The jungle grows back slower than they do.”
After eating heartily, they fell asleep beneath the little Chinese clouds of the jellyfish canopy, from which the folds of the mosquito net spilled down. There, the two lovers managed to find a feeling that, for One Hundred Years of Solitude, had eluded the inhabitants of the humble village of Macondo.
–And you still want to be a doctor in villages like these? Asked Andrei.
–It would be a way of understanding the communities and life here more deeply. I would have liked to be a travelling doctor. Would you move with me to a place like this?
–I’d like to open paths for travellers. To visit and describe places to stay like this one, so that I’d have something to recommend afterwards. And yes, I would come and live in a place like this for a while, but I wouldn’t move for good.
6. The jungle at sunrise and Lake Sandoval
The next sunrise coloured the jungle sky fuchsia. Through the large mesh of the window, we could see a tree full of oropendola nests, each oropendola nest a long woven pouch. The elongated pouches hung from the high branches of a tree that rose distinctly above the canopy. At sunrise, most of the birds and animals were active. You could hardly surrender to sleep because of the enveloping sound. So many melodic lines overlapped in the immense space of the river. Perhaps, if the green did not make you aware enough of the abundance of life around you, then the richness of sounds had to give it back to you. Many dialogues of birds crossed each other in completely different languages. The jungle is a dangerous place because life relentlessly replaces life, and in its music you can hear it.
Oropendola colony
With the sunrise, shapes regained clear contours, and we began to feel like ourselves again, in our old skin; the jungle was no longer playing tricks on our senses. In the same formation, we set off towards Lake Sandoval, an oxbow lake, a former meander of the great Madre de Dios River, now cut off by silt. The way was a path raised on wooden boardwalks. In electric sounds and the croaking of frogs, the lakeland nature of the place began to take shape. There was so much life around! Plants drawing their sap from other plants, bromeliads, orchids growing in the shoulders of trees, thick, living lianas you could lean your weight on without hesitation. A few wild monkeys began to follow us through the canopy. A baby clung to the belly of one of them. Blue butterflies with wings as big as a palm danced around us. Others, yellow and white, had found a mating place around a muddy puddle.
We reached a jetty, where we all climbed into a long, slender boat. We kept silent, listening to the lapping of the oars in the water. A fish leapt to catch a fly. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and the temperature at that hour of the morning was very pleasant. We advanced through narrow, shallow channels said to be the habitat of electric eels. The network of forest channels opened into the lake. On the far side of the lake, a new line of forest took shape, from which ceiba and castaña trees rose majestically above the canopy. We set off slowly, with our wooden oars, along the lake. Nature was generous with its faces and showed us many birds and animals: caimans, capybaras, monkeys, sloths, even a very rare boa constrictor.
After about two hours of rowing, we stopped at the edge of the lake, in a small settlement of only two or three houses. The ground was slightly raised, and we could see the whole lake.
7. Up into the rainforest canopy
In the afternoon, it seems we drank yet another magic potion, because we woke up right in the rainforest canopy, in the homeland of macaws and monkeys. We walked on suspended bridges, passing from one tree to another, this time looking at the jungle from above. Large ants walked alongside us on the bark of the trees. We sat cross-legged, closed our eyes and, for as long as we felt the need, listened to the jungle. The space of sound was immense: against a background of crickets, cicadas and other insects, we heard all sorts of chirps, croaks and cries. Again, there was so much life around…
We stayed one more morning and then left to explore the little town of Puerto Maldonado.
Travel yourselves as a couple
If our journey has inspired you to plan your own, we would be glad to help. Together we can design a trip that suits both of you, your rhythm, your curiosities and the way you like to travel, so that you come home with memories you will share for years. Take a look at our travel planning services and get in touch: we will help the two of you plan your next journey.
Up into the rainforest canopy
TLDR
TL;DR A couples trip into the Peru jungle. Andrei and I flew from Cusco to Puerto Maldonado, over the Andes and the glaciers of Ausangate, down into the Amazon rainforest of Peru, to find out what sides of each other travel would reveal. What travelling as a couple taught us. Our personality profiles were similar, but the trip showed the difference: his careful planning and caution, my curiosity and wonder. Puerto Maldonado, Peru. A frontier town on the Madre de Dios River, built on gold, and rough around the edges. A jungle night walk in the Tambopata National Reserve. Tarantulas, golden spiders and stick insects turned the forest into an Alice-in-Wonderland world. Gold mining in Peru. Over dinner, our guide told us how illegal mining is eating into the forest. Lake Sandoval at sunrise. We rowed in silence among caimans, capybaras, monkeys and a rare boa. Up into the rainforest canopy. We ended high on suspended bridges, listening to the jungle from above.