Last day in the jungle. We had to get up at 5:30 to prepare leaving for the main lodge.

Yesterday night the staff had made a cake for us to thank us for staying here.

We inversed roles and served the staff cake in the kitchen:

An Australian couple arrived at the lodge yesterday, you can see them on the next picture. They were also travelling around the word, only in the other direction. They had just spent 3 months in New Zealand and would use 12 months in total to go around the globe:

At 6:30 we said good bye to the research center and headed for breakfast at the main lodge. Bottle cap games became increasingly elaborate. I believe Inca Cola represents soldiers, Coca Cola are archers, Sprite are horses and the golden beer caps are generals:

My finger was by now pretty much healed, but my finger print is probably ruined forever:

As usual birds were all around us:

At the main lodge there are a couple of trees where beautiful black and yellow birds have nests, They make a lot of noise and move all the time. I had not managed to take good photos of them before. This time I had 20 minutes before breakfast and used that time as a bird paparazzi, finally managing to get some decent shots:

Look at the cool nests they creep into:

Notice the giant wasp nest. These smart birds prefer to build their nests in trees with wasp nests to keep potential egg snatchers away:

After breakfast we headed back to the local village. This time to visit their school. Through Amazonia Expeditions we had bought some school books for the school library. Amazonia recommends this as a way of giving something to the local community without creating unwanted side effects on the local culture.

As a side note, and another sign of the Peruvians preoccupation with the Incas, the box the books came in was an Inca box:

This preoccupation is not too different from the Norwegian people´s preoccupation with the vikings.

Here is the classroom and the pupils:

Here are some of the books, and the teacher.

The children sang for us and in return we sang the Norwegian children´s song “Mikkel Rev”

Afterwards Viktor said good bye to a parrot we had also seen last time we were in the village:

Our Amazon trip was getting close to the end now. We headed back to the main lodge for lunch.  My last photograph of a scary insect (sorry, Gwen) was this little guy who was sitting on a rail at the lodge:

We zipped back to Iquitos on the fast boat and docked close to the offices of Amazonia Expediitons. We picked up our remaining luggage, including the unused metal fishing leaders and headed to the airport. It started to rain while we were in the taxi. Bye bye Iquitos and Amazonia

Our plane to Lima was another Airbus A319:

In Lima we checked in at the airport hotel and looked out of our window:

Viktor commented that just like in Manhatten, and contrary to the jungle, everything we saw out there was man made.

We had had a great time in Amazonia and in Peru. The weather gods were with us again and our guide turned out to be stellar and genuine.

Tomorrow we head for Argentina.

Eirik

—–

I got up at 5:15am to have a shower and prepare for the hike Viktor and I was going to do with Weninger. I let Viktor sleep as long as possible and woke him up at 5:45. He was difficult to get up, but at a few minutes after 6 we were ready and sat at the entrance to the lodge waiting for Wwninger. We had told him that we were used to hiking in Norway and we really wanted to see some wildlife, preferably monkeys and colorful birds.

Full of motivation we trotted into the jungle and the unique grid of paths they have made here. Weninger told us that this had all been planned by a biologist working at the research center. The grid has pathways every 100 meters (110 yards) and is 2km (1 1/4 mile) wide in each direction, giving a total of 84 km (52 miles) of cleared paths. As every computer scientist will know the paths will go from the zeroth to the 20th in each direction of such a grid, making 21×2 pathways.

After a couple of hours with no animals in sight we stopped to have breakfast in the jungle. Weninger har brought fruit, bread and hardboiled eggs.

It was interesting to observe Weninger as he took us through the jungle. After several days together with him it was clear to me that the most important thing to be aware of here are the many dangers in form of poisonous creatures and spines. It reminded me of a discussion I had with my good Australian friend Warwick many years ago. Having grown up in Rockhampton and later living in Brisbane he had more or less grown up being able to walk barefoot year round. When he moved to Norway he was not at all familiar with the concept of making sure you do not get too cold. In Norway, when you are doing long hikes or skiing trips in the woods during winter, there is one single thing you have to be most aware of, and that is the danger of freezing. There are so many small pieces of knowledge you use to make sure you don´t goof up and you never even think about them. It was only when I discussed with him I realized some of the basics. Like the knowledge that snow is dry when it is cold. If it is cold enough you don´t care if your jacket is full of it, you just wipe it off whenver you want to. However, you do not get it into your shoes, because it will melt from your body heat and you will get very cold afterwards. Obvious, it you´ve grown up with it.

Warwick, on the other hand, had grown up with the frying sun and had lots of similar knowledge about how to not overheat during the day. We agreed that there is no zone where people learn both. Actually we theorized that there must be a band in Europe, roughly between the 55th and the 40th parallel (from the middle of Scotland/Denmark/Lithuania to the middle of Portugal/Spain/Italy/Greece) where people don´t know squat about any of them. Here live the ignorant middle Europeans who will die quickly both at the North Pole and in the Sahara.

Aaaanyway, in the jungle the sun is not a big problem, the trees take care of that. Freezing is even less of a problem, Weninger spoke about the really cold winter where it could sometimes go all the way down to just under 20 C (68F). Brrrrr. In the jungle it is all about avoiding the bullet ants, and fire ants, and scorpions, and snakes, and spines, and you get the picture. For example you should never grab around a tree for support unless you are really sure it is safe. Easy to say, difficult to get used to.

Several times we were on the tail of monkeys, but every time they eluded us. All we could see were distant moving shadows. On one occasion we could hear toucans chirping, but they too flew away like stripes on the sky far away before we could reach them. For six whole hours we walked along the pathways of the grid without seeing a single monkey or a single colorful bird. The closest we came, and the only bird or primate we saw, was this chestnut bellied something:

We did, however see some insects and a few dragonhead lizards:

This moth has a wingspan of about 15 cm (6 inches):

Weninger found a type of nut he told us was relatively rare. It is very difficult to find the tree, but sometimes you will find a nut on the ground far from it. He split it open with his machete and we ate it. It had a very good nutty taste.

Viktor found some beautiful flowers on the ground which had fallen off a tree.

Suddenly Weninger stopped and took a few steps back. He had found a type of palm leaf the could be used for making stuff. In about 10 minutes he transformed 2 branches into a basket. Then he reinforced the basket with some very large leaves from a different plant. Finally he stripped some bark off a tape tree and, presto, he had made a jungle backpack for Viktor. It can hold roughly 5 kilos and will last for about two days before the leaves dry up and fall to pieces. He told us that typically you would make one when you needed to transport what you had caught/found, like a large fish. We put our two one liter (one quart) drinking bottles into it and Viktor happily carried them for the rest of the day. Weninger went on to make a jungle crown for Viktor. What an experience to have a guide that has grown up in the jungle!

Here is the starting point:

The leaves are woven together:

The branches are bent 90 degrees two times in the middle, to form the bottom of the backpack:

Then the sides are made by braiding the ends of the leaves:

Finally the top leaves are also woven into the rest of the structure on top of already woven leaves to fasten the leaves and the form the top edge:

The inside was then padded with some very large leaves. Intermediate result, a basket:

Then bark from the tape tree was used to make straps:

Finished backpack:

Jungle prince:

This is the egg of the colorful red and black beetle you saw above:

We saw several small frogs:

We found a plant which does not have flowers, but which forms seeds under the leaves, presumably making clones of the same plant, I suppose?

Weninger was visibly disappointed that he had not been able to show us any wildlife and apologized at the end of the hike. His only explanation was that there might be predatrors in the area, possibly eagle. He said that normally the animals are curious and will come when he calls them, but that something must have scared them today.

During the hike, and also on our previous hikes with him, he has made a large number of different calls, He knows how to make sounds to attract all kinds of birds and primates, and even caimans (crocodiles). Sometimes we could witness him talking to birds. He would make a call and a bird would answer with the exact same sounds, then they would repeat. Impressive, indeed!

Viktor endured the entire 6 hour hike without a complaint of any kind or ever slowing down!

Back at the lodge the others had had a relaxing day, mostly reading. They had done one small excursion of about half an hour and had seen Pygmy Marmoset monkeys! Hélène also took a picture of this cool lizard:

After lunch we had planned to take the boat down the river and hiked for 5 minutes to a small lake where Weninger said we could catch Peacock Bass. He said they took lures. Cool!

Just before we were to leave some deity had finished its bath and decided to empty the bathtub contents on mother earth. What a  downpour! It only lasted about half an hour to 45 minutes.

Except for a night of rain this was the first rain we had after over a week in the RAINforest in rainy season. I am starting to wonder if Hélène has sold her soul to one of the weather gods in return for good weather during our entire voyage.

After the rain calmed down and eventually stopped we could leave for our planned expedition. On arrival I could see that the lake was covered with pollen and that there were many fallen trees in it.

I couldn´t see below the surface at all because of the pollen. This was going to be a challenge, with high risk of loosing lures. In addition the jungle around the lake was very dense and difficult to navigate. After half an hour I had lost two lures and seriously dirtied my only pair of clean pants. I decided to give up on the lure fishing and went back to the others who were using bait. Weninger was nowhere to be seen.

Bait was much more effective, but only the small fish wanted to bite today. We all caugth numbers of small catfish and miniscule red-bellid piranha.

After half an hour Weninger showed up with a gigantic Peacock Bass on his spear!

He had found a spot where he was sure a bass would pass. Then he had been standing completely still for about half an hour with with his spear ready. Once he saw the fish it was so far away he had to throw the spear, but he hit it. The fish had swum to the middle of the lake with the spear in its back. Weninger had swum out to get it. What a guy!

He wanted to know why I had stopped using lures. I told him that even when fishing just under the surface I had lost two lures. He responded: “But you have to know where you are casting.” Exactly! How he managed to see the bass under the pollen layer is a mystery to me, but he obviously has more trained eyes for this sort of stuff than I do.

In the evening we went night canoing. Viktor stayed behind to sleep. He was exhausted after the six hour hike, the longest in his entire life.

Unfortunately there was not much wildlife out. We had hoped to see some snakes and other stuff. We did see a pair of possums high up a tree for a few seconds, though. It was still an experience to slowly drift along a river in the Amazon in a canoe in pitch darkness, only interrupted by searching flashlights.

Eirik

—–

I got up at 5:30 and left at 6am to go fishing with Weninger. He brought Jack, a boat driver, and we spent a couple of hours fishing in various places up the river.

Very little activity. We only caught a small one each. Oh well, I´ve already had my fishing adventure here. You cannot win every time.

We started the day with a jungle hike in the hope of seeing some more wildlife. We had heard many good things about the research center and how there should be more wildlife here. It is impressive how systematic they have been about recording spotting of different species. A large area next to the lodge has a network of trails in a perfect grid with marks on poles showing you where on the grid you  are. Trails are named with numbers in one direction and letters on the other. They have created the jungle equivalent of Manhattan! When an animal is observed they note in which part of the grid it was spotted.

We did not see any mammals or rare birds today. Partly because it was so hot (they often hide in the shade on hot days), and partly because the kids were making too much noise. We still saw some intersting stuff. Here Weninger is showing us a termite nest that has been built at the end of a liana. He told us this is very unusual, normally they are built in trees. The thing was hanging there like a demolishing ball and could be swung back and forth:

Here is a very big termite nest following a tree branch:

We found a wild rubber tree. Adrian is feeling the latex:

A forest which is submerged a large part of the year creates some strange trees:

This one looked like a rocket ready to be launched:

Iseline was allowed to try out Weninger´s machete:

We stayed out for an hour and a half. The heat and humidity is getting tiring now, even for me. We relaxed, had lunch and then relaxed some more.

We were the only guests at the lodge today, and received special treatment for lunch and dinner. Instead of the usual buffet we got ready made plates with lots of good stuff.

The lodge here is really great. View from our room:

Parents´s room:

Lodge pictures:

Viktor did his saxophone practice:

At 3pm we left for a canoe trip:

Weninger is just amazing when it comes to spotting stuff. He spottet these long-nosed bats way before anyone else. The bats were resting on a trunk by the water:

When we got close enough they flew away. A few went over to a nearby tree. Their camouflage is impressive. Can you spot all 6?

We have seen lots of beautiful butterflies here, including the gigantic bright blue ones. The butterflies here are very difficult to photograph since they never seem to sit still. Weninger came to the rescue today when he spotted some butterflies and silent as a mouse managed to navigate us very close to them:

We saw one type of hawk

and then another:

These are catfish “nests.”

The catfish dig these using their bodies and lay their roe in them. They guard them for 8 days until the fry hatch. We could see the holes because the river is so low. Catfiwh spawn around December. Weninger commented that they might have to wait this year. Rainy season is supposed to have started, but the rain does not come.

The boys enjoyed the ride:

Iseline made a self-portrait and sone great photos of her mom:

I spent the last hour of sunlight fishing again. A few bites and only a baby catfish on land. As I made my way along the shore at the end I suddenly saw something long, thin and dark dash for the water before it made a huge splash. It was probably about a meter and 20 cm (4 feet) long. Later Weninger confirmed to me that it could only have been a caiman (crocodile). I did not get any closer, but hurried back to the lodge. This is not completely like the woods around Oslo, after all.

Another very hot day in the jungle. We discussed with the kids that the morning excursion was not very successful because they had been making too much noise. The result was that we agreed to split up tomorrow. Viktor and I will go hiking with Weninger deep into the jungle to spot more wildlife The others will take it easy at the lodge.

Eirik

—–

Another day with getting up at 5am and no fish.

We had spent our last day at the main lodge and packed all our stuff to head for what Amazonia Expeditions call their research center. It is a lodge very much like the main one, but is inside the national park about an hour and a half further up the river. Research is only done there for about 3 months during the end of wet season.

The heat was the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) so far. We used an open boat to the center and I have to admit it would have been tempting to turn down the sauna a little bit. The view from the boat was as always great and relaxing.

We noticed as we made our way up the river that the jungle was getting denser and the river more wild in the sense that many fallen trees were lying in and by it. We were now in the national park where there are no villages.

On our way we stumbled across some otters They were quite far away, but with my suerduper zoom I managed to get a photo of one. While there we only saw black moving blobs. It was only when I post-processed the images on the computer that I got to see the otter.

We also saw some bats who were resting by the shore, but they flew grumpily away before I could take any pictures. The research center gave a good first impression:

Iseline wanted to have a swim while I made sure to keep my lures humid. Iseline was a little bit skeptical when Weninger told her not to swim too far out into the water, but stay by the boats. There could be anacondas where the water was deeper…

I tried more or less every single lure I had brought, including trout lures. No results. I could hardly see the lure myself when it came in because of the muddy water. Nope, this is definitely bait country.

Weniger took us out in a boat on a fishing excursion. There was not much activity in the water. The day was simply too hot for fish to be biting much. I did manage to get a nice catfish (foot added for scale) and Iseline caught a fresh water sardine (no photo, sorry, but it was a nice, fat sardine).

Hélène didn´t last very long and read a book while the rest of us fished.

Afterwards I continued fishing a bit by the shore next to the research center. As I was heading back, when dusk was starting to set in, one of the guides was down by the boat and asked me to not move. They had seen a caiman, a type of crocodile, in the water. I froze and kept looking at the shore 4-5 meters from me. After a short while the beast stuck its nose tip and eyes out of the water (nose to the left):

Very cool, i have never seen a wild crocodile before.

The sunset was beautiful and made the trees seem to burn:

I´m writing this at about 10pm in the evening. i believe most others at the lodge are sleeping now. The big difference between being in the forest in Norway and being here is the noise level at night. There is an impressive cacophony of sounds out there now. Insects and frogs are fighting for the audio spectrum while fish are continuously making loud splashes while they are eating each other.

Eirik

—–

Getting up at 5am is easier when you have slept 8 hours. It was still pitch dark outside, but by the time I was out at 5:15 it was already possible to see colors. The sun sure rises and sets much faster here than in Norway. We are at 4 degrees south and night and day each lasts roughly 12 hours all year round. That magic in between period, when the sun is not visible but still gives light, a light that makes everything seem different, like a painting with dark colors and sharp contrast, that period lasts a few minutes here. In Norway in summer it lasts several hours.

Ah, morning mood! The jungle woke up around me. This place changes dramatically between night and day. The animals which are active at night were now busy finding a safe shelter, while those on the day shift were slowly getting out of theirs. The birds were taking over for the bats, the butterflies tag-teamed with the moths, who were happy to be able to go to bed. The tarantulas and scorpions let the ants and dragonflies have their turns.

The sun was pretty soon in my eyes and I had to put on my sunglasses. I was so sure of success that I had taken a larger bassin from the kitchen this time. I had after all about double the time at my disposal compared to last night. That should easily give me 20 piranhas. If I worked hard I could reach a hundred before leaving the Amazon. I cast out, pulled in. I did it again, and again. It would probably take some time until the scent of the bait reached the closest school of piranhas? Nope. After 20 minutes it started to dawn on me that it wasn´t me who was exceptional the last two days. It was the fishing conditions. I got a couple of bites but the fish weren´t hungry enough, they just nibbled, never swallowed.

After two hours I had to admit that I was nothing but a mere mortal. No fish wanted to get caught today and I sheepishly returned the plastic basin to the kitchen. The chef tried to motivate me with a “mas tarde, senor.”

Today´s first activity was a visit to the local village, their shaman and then their herbalist.

First Iseline and Viktor needed to say good morning to the pacca:

The two of them have taken up bottle cap collecting the last days. They lurk around in the dining hall of the lodge and grab bottle caps as soon as someone has opened a new bottle. We have severely limited the use of their iPods in the Amazon, telling them that we don´t think it fits in the jungle. It seems the bottle cap collecting and playing with them is a result of the limited access to the games on their iPods. They have been inventing board games they can play with the caps and played one of them on the boat ride to the village:

The shaman was a old woman living in a typical wodden house for the area. There really isn´t much here that hasn´t been fetched from the jungle. Houses are made from wood, and planks are made on location with a chainsaw! Houses do not have windows, you do not need them in this climate. The insides of houses are mostly empty, with very little furniture, except for a few sitting benches and a table. It is a stark contrast to our rich and industrialized world.Here we are outside the Shaman´s house:

A shaman is a sort of healer that supposedly can get in touch with the many spirits people here believe in. She (the shaman we visted was a she, it can just as well be a he) also uses some herbs and other stuff for healing. Here she is, the village shaman:

She performed a sort of ceremony for and on us, I believe to remove bad spirits. She shook a magic stick with leaves on us, put some alcohol with camphor in our face and hair and then made a slurping sound close to our hair before she spit the spirits out in another direction. It felt a little bit strange.

It is fascinating how humans have a need to come up with explanations for things when there is not enough data. Instead of accepting that we don´t know yet, the human race comes up with surrogate explanations. In my view, so called modern religion is only an extension of the human need to believe in greater powers and to try to explain what cannot be explained yet. After having read large parts of the bible myself it is so clear to me that this is stuff invented by humans a long time ago both for consolation and to control groups of people.

Babel? I´m sure linguists agree that story makes sense.

Noah? Of course he had ample and easy access to koala bears, emperor penguins and pygmy marmoset monkeys.

He who has had his male member cut cannot enter heaven? Punishments that bar all descendants for 10 generations to enter heaven (that´s fair to the unborn!)? (That one is a clear indication of a culture where family is more important than individual. Very interesting in an anthropological sense) Jesus kills all the pigs of a poor farmer because he says they have evil spirits in them? And then the disciples don´t understand why the farmer is unhappy afterwards?

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot of strange stuff in there.

Sure there could be a creator, but I cannot see how we can know either way. And if there is one, given what we today know about the universe, it is clear as day to me that that deity cannot possibly speak to us through the bible.

For more discussions around this, I recommend “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. He has some bombastic ways of putting things, but his logical arguments and discussions about religion are sound and very well thought through.

What is mind-bogling is that we today know with almost certainty that the universe started from a single point 13.7 billion years ago. The smoking gun is there in the form of background radiation, which is consistent with the theory. Mankind has proven that the universe had a beginning. That is a very significant discovery, and it has been done recently. A hundred years ago mankind did not know this, and it was only first really confirmed in 1964.

Not only did the universe have a beginning, but it is relatively young. The sun is about 5 billion years old and it has an expected total lifetime of about 10 billion years. The universe is only old enough to just span the lifetime of a single star like the sun. Other larger stars, have much shorter lifespans, while really small ones are projected to live a trillion years. In addition, the stuff that we are made of, the atoms in your body, were crated in another star that lived and died. Then the dust from it became part of the molecular cloud which formed our solar system. Life needs heavy elements to exist, and they can only be created in stars. A star has to complete its lifecycle and become dust, and then another one has to form to create planets that can host life.

Isn´t that something? In cosmological time we are here at the beginning.

Oops, sorry.

The herbalist had a really nice garden with lots of different plants and explained many of their uses to us. Here she is:

and here is Weninger showing a plant.

We went back to the lodge for the hot and quiet period of the day. It was a very hot day, and with the constant humidity here we sweat a lot, as you can see in this great photo Adrian took of Viktor:

After lunch we headed back to the village for a house visit.

It was a very modest bare house. A large sack of rice was hanging from a rope in the ceiling, probably to protect it from animals. Otherwise there was not much there.

Only the man was home, he had been hunting and showed us the result of his hunt. The large rodent he had caught probably died instantly when he shot it in the head:

He was drying piranha heads:

He also had puppies and tame parrots:

Afterwards we took a stroll around the village. The main commercial part is a store and a phone house with a solar powered satellite phone system. Weninger told us this was considered a big store for the area. Here you can see pretty much all of it:

This is the village church

The village was organised as a large square common area with grass in the middle and with the houses in a straight line on each of the 4 sides. There was a children´s playing area in one corner of the square  and goal posts set up for playing soccer in the middle of the square. I cannot remember having seen this way of organizing a village anywhere else:

The concrete pathway around the square was built as part of a program done by previous president Alberto Fujimori.

Weninger invited us into a large open house to relax

while the kids played.

The boys threw themselves into a barefoot soccer match in the main square of the village.

Evening fishing was almost a repeat of this morning, but I did manage to land a single piranha. 26.

In the evening, after dinner, Weninger came over to us, as he usually does, to discuss the next days activities. Previously he had been very efficient in his communication. Today was different. Just as we expected him to leave he settled down a little bit more in his chair and started talking abut himself. He had grown up in a village called Diamante which is a village by the Rio Blanco further upstream. He told us about his brothers and sisters and his parents who all now live in Iquitos. The guy was full of surprises. He has a 3 year computer science education from the university of Iquitos! However, he wanted back to the jungle. When he applied for the job as a guide, and they saw his CV, they were wondering what a guy with that background wanted to do in the jungle. He has never regretted his choice and is happy with his life. I always find it great when I meet people who have found the place where they want to be in life. You can feel their positive energy.

Eirik

—–

After yesterday´s fishing bonanza I decided to sleep a little longer for once and get up with the others. We got up at around 7am. We have definitely established a different routine here than the “start at 11am” one we had in the US.

Today´s first activity was a visit to see a wolly monkey called Dorilla. The lodge works with rainforest conservation on a number of fronts. One of them is close cooperation with locals. They have managed to greatly reduce hunting of endangered species and are also actively working to reduce black market trading of animals. They cooperate with the police and sometimes when they arrest people who are in posession of illegal animals the animals are handed over to the people running the lodge. For primates they run a 3 month program where they keep them at the lodge and try to prepare them for the wild, then they set them out in the jungle.

Dorilla is one such animal which was saved from black market trading. Unlike many of the others she has stayed put in the area where she was set loose and can be visited. Whenever they drop by her they bring her bananas and other fruit. Easy food is always a winner with animals. Weninger told us she has found friends of the same species in the jungle and sometimes even bring them with her when she is visited. It has been 5 years now since she was released and she is healthy and doing really well.

On our way down to boat we were greeted by a pet animal kept at the lodge. It is a type of rodent they call a pacca. It is very cute and comes willingly to you so you can pet it and scratch its head. It seems to behave a lot like a cat towards humans, really; independent and seeking human company when it wants to.

It took us a boat ride of exactly one hour to reach Dorilla (photo time stamps are my friends).

On our way out, as always when we are in the boat here, we saw a number of large and/or cool birds. There are vultures in the sky

and vultures on the ground

And other cool birds:

Let me use the opportunity to show a cool bird we saw while in the canopy doing the zipline. This bird lives in the canopy and is therefore difficult to photograph, unless you are pulled up by a rope, of course.

Once we arrived Dorilla saw us coming and ran along the shore at great speed the last couple of hundred meters before our rendevous point.

She was in the boat the second we touched the shore.

She is a very friendly monkey, and her fur was really soft, softer than any plush animal I have touced. The kids fell in love immediately.

Dorilla wanted to stay with the boys, especially Adrian:

You can see that they are our relatives:

After 33 minutes with Dorilla it was time to head back.

On the way back we were visited by butterflies a number of times. In general there are many beautiful butterflies here, but they are difficult to catch with the camera since the darn´ little critters keep moving all the time. This time a couple of them decided to land. One of them on Viktor´s face,

the other on Adrian´s toe.

My wound from yesterday had managed the first 24 hours quite well. I bet there aren´t that many people who have used Norwegian bought Bacimycin anti-bacterial cream on a piranha bite. Having a closer look at it I realized I had been lucky to not lose part of my finger. Piranhas have an impressive force in their jaw. They are known to squash stainless steel treble hooks like they were boiled spaghetti.

After siesta and lunch we ventured out to look for an electric eel. After a 40 minute boat ride we had to hike for about 20 minutes. On the way we passed an enormous strangling fig tree. These trees start their lives high up in other trees. They develop inconspicuous slim branches who spread like tentacles before turning into the tree equivalen of Dracula. They find a host tree and start to encircle it. They follow the trunk to the ground and establish their own root system. In the end they consume the host tree and take over its place in the forest. It branches out and can take over many trees. Some have been known to grow big enough to cover the area of an entire baseball field. Whereas most trees only spend energy growing upwards, the strangling fig´s fascinating strategy makes it possible for it to also reach out in the horizontal dimension. Its many branches reaching both sideways and for the ground makes a single tree create an enchanted forest of its own. It was really cool walking for a long time under the many trunks and/or branches of the same tree.

The goal of our hike was one of the strangest lakes I have ever seen. The lake was formed about 4 years ago, from what I understood by the river biting itself in the tail as often happens in meanders. In those 4 years it had been completely covered in plants floating on the water. It´s difficult, without a trained eye, to see that this is a lake. Please do not walk on the grass. You risk falling in and drowning.

There are electric eel here and Weninger knows where they hide. Unfortunately he had forgotten to bring some meat to lure them out. Oh well, those things happen. He did manage to shake one of them up by splashing with a stick in the water. We saw something moving down at the bottom. We saw about as much of the eel as the first view you get of the garbage monster in the scene in Star Wars IV when they are stuck in the garbage onboard the death star. Here´s where we saw it. This small pond is actually quite deep and an underground canal going into the lake.

I really wanted to fish during the last hour before sunset, but we arrived back just too late for that. I did get to try for 20 minutes together with Adrian. We kept going until it was pitch dark. Result: Adrian 1 piranha, me 0.

After getting the kids to bed I wanted to do a blogging session but once again I was out of energy. I went to bed at 9pm and set the alarm clock at 5am. It is fascinating how early you get sleepy when there is no electric light around you. This is the environment we have been designed for.

Eirik

—–

At 06:30 we left the lodge and headed up the Tahuayo river to find some good fishing grounds. Weninger had brought breakfast in the boat.

Tackle was even more kosher than what I thought was the world standard for low-cost bait fishing; a stick with a line, a floater and a hook. Here in the Amazon they don´t use floaters. Possibly because the piranhas attack them, as I found out yesterday.

Fishing here is a dream and very well adapted to children. Throw out a hook with some meat and you will feel fish after less than a minute. Iseline quickly got a piranha, and then another. She had two in the boat before anyone else had managed to hook anything, and she knew it.

Everyone of us got something after a short while.

Héléne is not known to consider fishing one of her top 10 activities, or top 100 for that matter. During our honeymoon hike on Finnmarksvidda (a plateau of marshlands, lakes and reindeer grazing areas in the extreme north of Norway) she tried out fishing one of the first days, probably in a fit of pure love for me. We had hiked off the trails for more than a day and had reached a lake very few people visit. I had hauled in a nice catch of 2 trout and 5 beautiful red brook trout in about half an hour. When she got the rod she kept going for about half an hour without as much as a small bite on the lure. She seemed to do everything right, but didn´t catch anything. When she asked me for a demonstration cast, to make sure she really did everything right, I cast the same place she had and immediately caught a half kilo (one pound) brook trout. She was disgusted and seemingly cured for life of any inclination to enjoy fishing. She returned to the tent and her Hamsun book while i took care of the fishing for the remainder of our trip.

Except for a few futile attempts at the Norwegian island HItra many years ago and some fishing at a fish farm (doesn´t count), Hélène has not been fishing since that ill-fated moment up in Finnmark almost 20 years ago. And now, for the first time since I met her, she caught fish. Maybe there is hope after all? She even caught a red-bellied piranha, the dream of many a fisherman and -woman (Donnerwetter! How i hate those gender-specfic terms. I refuse to use fisherpeson, and using fisherwoman consequently just seems artificial. I will use “fisherman” and “he” from now on. You are going to have to take my word for it: I am not prejudiced). As you can see she really enjoyed it:

We were so busy fishing, we forgot to have breakfast. Weninger had to remind us around 10 o´clock. Both Viktor and Adrian caught their red-bellied piranha:

This is a fresh water sardine:

Adrian caught a dog fish. Look at those teeth:

We caught an amazing number of piranhas. We let most of them get away with a fearful experience they could tell their grandchildren about around the campfire. These guys also have teeth to write home about:

As you might have guessed by now I do find fishing to be an enjoyable activity. One of the things I find intriguing is the unpredictability of it. Fishing can be described by game theory. Just like a good Black Jack player, a good fisherman knows how to increase the odds in his favor. On average a good fisherman always wins over a bad one. On a single fishing trip, however, the results can be very  surprising and sometimes downright unfair. Such as the perch fishing trip I did when I was about twelve years old. There were four of us. Me and a friend my age. We were very scientific about our fishing and did the usual adjustments of floater heights, searched for overhanging trees (where insects fall into the water), patches of reed (where the perch find prey), etc. Systematically we covered the best spots in the lake, making sure to make no sound (communicating with gestures), etc. Then there was my 10 year old sister and her friend, the equally old sister of my fishing companion. The two of them lasted about 3 1/2 minutes before their acute mouth diarrhea unfolded itself in all its glory. Bored, they started to drag their fishing rods back and forth in the water while talking loudly together, giving the earth worms the thrill ride of their lives. Making sounds by dragging your rod back and forth in the water is an absolute faux pas in the angling world (it is the equivalent of voluntarily farting loudly while giggling at a funeral). Not only are you making a fool of yourself, you are also willingly scaring away the fish for everyone else.

Guess who caught the 300 gram (2/3 pound) trophy perch, the largest perch taken by anyone in the family in that lake, by hooking it while dragging the worm back and forth? Yup, my sister! Not only that, the fish fell off the hook before she landed it and it fell into the water. She immediately threw herself over it and caught it with her hands, throwing it onto the shore! That last feat is supposed to be impossible. Perch are so fast you hardly see them moving once they hit the water. Now you see it, now you don´t. Who ever heard about somebody actually pulling that stunt off? It is the holy grail of fisherman ability, the black belt (10th dan) of angling, to be able to do that. It has probably previously only been done in comic books with superhero fishermen, like Green Lobster Lantern and Flounderman. My 10 year old unpalatable annoying little sister did it, and she knew very well how to use the fact that she had done it.

It is still painful to think back at the humiliation and sense of unfairness when we returned to our parents from that trip and I was empty handed.

Interestingly enough, in the Amazon, you are allowed to make sounds in the water with your fishing rod. Of course you have to do it in a dignified and masculine way. The splashing sounds attract the piranha, as they think it might be a hurt fish in distress. This is also why you have to be quick in getting your fish out of the water here. Look what the small catfish I caught looked like when I got it out of the water. It was strange to first have a small fish on the line, then have a very large fish and finally pull a small one out of the water. I had felt the drag of the pirahnas eating the tail off my fish!

Viktor was so fascinated by this that he staged a reconstruction of the incident using one of the white piranhas we had caught:

Then, at last, unpredictability struck in my favor. I had been using my own rod all morning and could fish further away and seek out areas that looked favorable. At 10:44 (cameras with time stamps are cool) I felt something much bigger than usual at the end of the line. I hooked it well and deep and it gave me a god fight. Once I could estimate the size of the fish I yelled the magic mantra all anglers look forward to using: “NET!”. I have raised my children well and Adrian immediately got the net out and got the fish into it like a professional would have done.

Oh, the joy of a fishing man catching something exceptional is pure primitive instinctive happiness.

It was a very large white piranha. I had made a wodden “priest” (he who is present at life changing or ending events) and grabbed the fish while it was still in the net. I whacked it with a well placed blow on the scull, Man, what a thick skull that thing had. The first blow only made it more angry and it slipped out of my hand. Still inside the net it made an incredible last attack. In a split second the fish managed to jump up and bite the ring finger on my right hand. An acrobatic and fearless feat worthy of the history books. I could feel three teeth digging deeply into my flesh. I really couldn´t blame the fish, I was after all trying to kill it. The piranha, like the nordic pike, has an enzyme in its saliva that hinders coagulation. Blood started pouring while I finished the kill:

We managed to get a great catch to bring to the cook of the lodge:

Everyone was tired:

After lunch we went primate watching with Weninger:

This is a family of owl monkeys, the only nocturnal monkeys. Parents on each side, kid in the middle, They were just as curious about us as we were about them:

Afterwards Hélène and the kids went swimming while I went fishing on the shore of the river next to the lodge. Early on I had something very big at the end of the line, but it managed to break the metal wire leader and run away with the hook. After an hour and a half I had no less than 11 piranhas! The others were back and Adrian came down with a plastic basin he got from the cook. It was starting to get pitch dark. I didn´t want to stop because something large was playing with me and nibbling away my bait. On something like the 7th attempt I managed to hook it. Wow, this was the catch of the evening. I made sure to let it fight a bit before trying to land it. A typical beginner´s mistake with a large fish is to try to pull it out of the water too early. If you tire it out first it will have less energy to wriggle and it is less probable that you will lose it when you pull it out or try to get it in the net. You shouldn´t let it run for too long, of course, since you then risk the hook tearing off of the fish. It´s all about maximizing the odds.

I managed to land number 12 by pulling it out of the water, it was simply too dark to use the net. Whoa, another beautiful white piranha! Adrian gave me the light to be able to remove the hook. This is when I saw it. The hook I had lost an hour and a half ago was in the piranha´s mouth! I got my hook back and I even have Adrian as a witness that this is not just another fisherman´s story. All in all I now had 25 piranhas on my CV after 26 hours. Not bad.

One of the guides was in the kitchen when I handed it all over to the cook:

Come and get it:

After dinner we went on a short night jungle hike. We saw a number of creepy things. There were giant tarantulas everywhere:

We saw several scorpions. This one is feasting on an insect:

We found 2 giant bullfrogs:

These ants are bringing parts of flowers to their nest about 30 meters above the ground. Weninger told us that they live in the tree that has the flowers. One team cuts the flowers into pieces high above the ground, while the other team picks up the fallinmg pieces from the ground and carry them all the way up again for storage

It had been a great day in the jungle. It had been overcast all day and the heat was slightly more bearable.

Eirik

—–

I got up at 05:15 and prepared the fishing gear, this time with the reel handle in place. I then went over to wake up Iseline and she got up immediately. She is very much like me when it comes to getting up. If she has fishing to look forward to, no problem.

At 5:30 we went over to the kitchen. The cook had promised to have some bait ready for us and he gave us a cup full of chicken and beef in chunks.

Down at the shore of the Tahuayo river we could see that the sun had just come up. We found a stick of the right size and I made a fishing pole for Iseline. She would fish close to the shore, and I could cast further out. After a few minutes I got my first bite. Damn´, the line broke! I was very surprised, since I was using a very good braid that was brand new, Oh, well, maybe the knot had been weakened by friction when I tightened it? I put on a new hook and tried again. Same thing happened, but only after I felt there was something really big on the other end. OK, time to swich the spool.

I put on a spool with thicker and better line. This time the line broke above the floater, What the? This was a very expensive braid of the finest quality. Had I been fooled into getting a line that had been lying too long in the shop? I tackled up again, and once again the same thing happened, only this time I saw that the floater was actually being attacked by fish, This is when it dawned on me. That must be piranha that is not only taking the bait, but also trying to eat the floater. They were cutting the line with their sharp teeth!

I ran up to the room to fetch my metal leaders. Holy mackerel! I had forgotten, when we left Iquitos, that I stored them separately from the rest of the fishing equipment. They were in the side pocket of my electronics filled carry-on suitcase which was, of course, stored back in Iquitos. Bummer. I was really not meant to get any fish on this voyage, I have been in the Amazon once before, 14 years ago, in the Brazillina part. I went fishing several times then, but never caught any Piranhas, something which has nagged me ever since. And here I was, with hungry Piranhas all around me, and no metal leaders. Grumble!

Iseline had also had  a couple of bites, and nearly managed to land one, but no fish. Resigned and hungry, we both gave up.

There is a great swing here, and Iseline was very happy to have it all by herself, since no one else had gotten up yet.

The swing was just too high for her to be able to get on it herself. It swings from a platform and has very long ropes attached to a tree. It really gives a trapeze artist feeling. Friction at the top must be pretty high and the swing stops after a few back and forths. I helped her get on every time and she had a ball with the swing for about an hour. There was a Canadian woman next to us in a deck chair. She had been here for 8 days already and was staying for 10. She had nothing but good things to say about her jungle experience. Together we commented on Iseline´s progress. From a very slow and timid start she asked me to pull her further back and push to give her maximum speed. Her technique for getting off was worthy of a circus artist. Possible career?

After breakfast we headed out for our first activity for the day; the canopy zipline.

On our way we spotted these snails, they are each about the size of my fist.

Weninger also pointed out an animal sticking its head out from a hole in a tree. We could barely see a black smudge far away. Again, the camera proved its worth. Not only does it zoom, but it also adjusts brightness and contrast so you can see something. With the camera we could se how cute this little creature was. Say hello to a yellow crowned brush tailed rat (got that?):

The canopy zipline is a series of 3 platforms that has been put almost at the top of some of the highest trees in the area.

Between them are cables that you can use to fly from tree to tree, a bit like Tarzan. They have something similar at the Parc de la Schappe in Briancon in France, where we spend our summers, so the kids were familiar with the concept. Once we arrived we realized that this thing was in a totally different league. The platforms were at a height of 35 meters (120 feet)!

I am more than a little afraid of heights and started to prepare myself for the fear that I knew was coming. Strange thing these instinctive fears. Anything from 5 to a few hundred meters will freak me out. Anything above that evolution has not taken into account and I am fine. I have never had a problem taking off and landing in an airplane since the plane crosses the heights I´m afraid of in a very short time. But try to make me climb down a ladder and I have to concentrate real hard to be able to move at all.

There was no elevator or crane to bring us up. Everything was muscle power based. We were given two choices to get up. There was the sissy and kiddie option where they would pull you up using a rope and a pulley. Then there was the real jungle option where you used two devices which would roll up the rope, but not down. These were attached to a rope of their own with loops for your feet. Weninger got up using the latter and was up in no time. It seemed to me that he was first and foremost using his feet and legs to push himself up, then elegantly and easily sliding the metal thingies to move them up the rope.

We were all correctly equipped:

I have a muscle injury in both my wrists from having used the computer too much. In the geekiest period of my life, from I was 14 until I was 32, I programmed on computers whenever I had the opportunity to do so. It´s difficult to estimate, but I  would guess I  averaged 6-8 hours a day during that period. Evolutionary pressure has unfortunately not yet prepared the human body for such decade spanning hack festing. I had my first symptoms of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) in 1992. In 1994 I was knocked out with useless wrists for abut half a year. It was very difficult to get a diagnosis at the time. One doctor treated it like a sports injury and gave me ultrasound heating treatments, probably making the wrists even worse. I used the internet to get information and was intrigued by what people were telling. It seemed the medical community in different countries was putting different labels on this phenomenon and explaining it in different ways. Almost everyone in the US was told it was Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, a disease where the nerves to the hand get pinched because of swelling in a narrow bone tunnel in the wrists. Almost everyone in Norway was told it was tendinitis, a disease where the tendons have an inflamation and swell. In the UK they used the new term RSI.

After a long search I found a doctor that seemed to have some real knowledge. He told me that this type of repeated light movements cause a number of symptoms. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and tendonitis are common, and almost always part of the disease complex. However, the most important is a type of muscle injury. When you use a muscle you press all the blood out of it. It takes about half a second for the blood to come back. In other words, if you use the same muscle more often than 2 times per second, there is no blood circulating through it. This causes byproducts of energy production in the muscle to accumulate and eventually permanently damages the muscle tissue. His advice to me was to take micro breaks and stretch my muscles. I made a program that popped a 30 second counter up on my screen every 10 minutes, so I could stretch. I got so used to it after a while that I was able to keep my flow while stretching. It made a world of difference, and my hands quickly got better to the point where I could program for long periods again.

I have now learned to live with the condition and can go for months without feeling any pain. I do have occasional “flare-ups” (the pain comes back and lasts for a few weeks), but know when they are on their way and am normally able to slow down in time. When I got hold of a 7×7 Rubik´s cube some years ago, and refused to put it down until I had solved it, I managed to induce a flare-up. It was stupid of me. It is fascinating how easy you can forget, I hadn´t had pains for almost a year and thought I was invincible. I did manage to solve the cube thuough, after about 36 hours, but the pain was pretty bad, and the domestic humiliation of having to tell Hélène even worse.

Uhm, where was I? Oh yeah, getting up to the canopy platform!

Hélène chose the real jungle option and made her way up fairly easily. Here she is on the right, while Adrian is being pulled up on the left:

Thinking that this was a leg exercise I chose the same. I didn´t have much choice, though. The two guys helping out Weninger for this activity were very polite, helpful and service minded. They also only spoke Spanish. I could clearly sense that they were not very tempted by the thought of having to pull 90 kilos of slightly overweight gringo 35 meters upwards.

They attached my harness, I grabbed the metal thingies and threw myself off the platform we were standing on, a couple of meters over ground. It took me about 5 seconds to realize I had made a major mistake. The thingummybobs were hard to push upwards and you really had to pull hard in them to get your body upwards, leg power was by far not enough, at least with my legs. I was trapped. I made a few full-hearted attempts and managed to move half a meter up or so. I felt like a fly in a spider´s web and must have looked pretty funny while energetically wriggling my way up at few centimeters at a time. Many thoughts went through my head. Getting off now was even worse than choosing the sissy option straight off the bat. I would now be seen as a sissy gringo who is unaware of his own limits and also gives up too easily. OK, Eirik, you got yourself into this mess, and you know there is only one way out of it.

I told the guys that I could not do it. My rusty Spanish is not sufficient for eloquent explaining away of things, so I simply asked bleakly: “El otro, es possible?”  (The other. Is possible?) I could sense the respect and credibility points counter spinning wildly in reverese. They pulled me in and attached me to the other one. I felt like a bag of potatoes hanging in the air as they puled me up with the pulley, one slow decimeter at a time. I had ample time to think while I was slightly swaying back and forth between each time the poor guys made a new hard effort.

At the top Weninger was waiting for me and pulled me in to the platform. RSI is difficult enough to explain to someone I meet in Oslo. How do you explain it to someone who has grown up in the jungle and whose English is a bit limited? I tried by saying I have been typing too much. He responded with a giggle while repeating my sentence with a sense of incredulity. I could just as well have told him that I have been reticulating splines too many times or that my fustasjeopphengsforkoblinger were malfunctioning. Lost cause, bonus points permanently lost, let´s move on.

I could feel the rush of the height anxiety coming in waves as I stood on the platforn. I made sure to stay in the middle and/or hold on hard to something.

Here´s a photo of Weninger at the top:

The view was pretty awesome:

The first zipine was dramatic. After we were attached we had to sit on the platform with 35 meters of void under us and let ourselves fall forward. The cord was loose and we would fall for a few decimeters before really hanging by it. Scary stuff. Adrian and Viktor effortlessly zipped over. Then it was Iseline´s turn.

We had warned her and prepared her for this, and she was very certain that she wanted to try. But when she sat there, ready to push herself forward, it became too much. We tried to sweet talk her for about 15 minutes, to no avail. She still wanted to do it though, and suggested herself that she could do it with one of her parents. Weninger said that I could do it. OK. He attached us both and I had her on my lap while sitting at the edge. I had to concentrate real hard to not show her too clearly that I was scared stiff. I have done 2 bungy jumps in my life, partly to try to overcome my fear of heights. The primitive and bottomless fear of jumping was pretty close to the fear I felt when I willingly let myself fall forward with my daughter on my lap.

Once we felt the line holding us it became much easier. Iseline made a “whee” sound and smiled. Unfortunately she got her arm squeezed between the rope and me when we arrived, so she arrived crying on the other side. Luckily she got over it very fast.

On the next leg Isline went by herself and cried out ; “This is fun!”

I was very relieved when we were lowered down to the ground. I was shaking from such a long period of continuos fear. Still, it had been a very cool experience to fly through an Amazon canopy 35 meters above the ground.

After lunch siesta was observed until 3pm. A good choice of rythm, since it is unbearably hot here between noon and 3 pm.

Afterwards we took a boat and went looking for the famous pink fresh water dolphin. After only a few hundred meters we spotted two of them. We got within about 50 meters and could see the backs of these gracious animals as they touched the surface of the water.

We all jumped into the river and let the boat drift down together with us.

It was a good to cool off in the water.

The heat here coupled with the humidity is hard and unforgiving for those who dislike it. If you are cold you can always put on more clothes. If you are too hot there is only so much you can take off. I actually like hot and humid, it feels like being in a sauna all the time, which I really enjoy. I do realizes that my condition is quite uncommon and probably comes from a difficult childhood where my parents forced me to do cross country skiing in  -25 C (13 below zero F). Ooops, just kidding, mom and dad.

We spent a long time in the water. Everyone was happy to just swim around and enjoy themselves.

I had been thinking a lot during the day about our miserable fishing attempt in the morning and how amateurish ot was of me to not think about using a metal leader, not to mention actually bringing them.

I mentioned the misery to Weninger and he quickly produced a piece of metal wire and twisted it into a leader before my eyes and gave it to me. I was now well equipped and used the day to plot my revenge. When we got back was getting late, but I had around 40 minutes of daylight left to execute.

Down by the shore all by myself I found peace, took a couple of deep breaths and went to work. Since I now had abandoned using a floater my options were limited. The people here just put the bait on the hook and let it hang straight down from the rod. When the fish arrive they hope to hook it. I thought I could do better, since I had a casting rod. If the iine is not tense when the fish bite it is easier for them to get the bait inside their mouth and more of a chance to hook it. It´s all about increasing the odds of getting a fish.

First I tried a technique called jigging. I let the bait sink all the way to the bottom, pulled it hard upwards and towards me and then let it sink again. I tried for quite some time, with no luck, but had a couple of bites. After a while I noticed that all bites were at the surface.

Hm, maybe I could use a technique called “harving” in Norwegian. It basically means to drag a large bait at the surface, creating ripples that attract the attention of the fish. Then, if a fish bites, you have to let the line go completely, for a second or two, so the fish can get the bait inside its mouth, but not long enough for it to sense the hook and spit it out, before you hook. I had read an article about it, but never tried before.

I gave it a go. Bingo! After a few minutes I had a very nice pirahna on land! Man, oh man, I love it when you hit jackpot with a technique in a new place. It has only happened to me a couple of times before.

When Adrian asked if I had caught anything ten minutes later I could answer “five!”. By the time he was down at the shore I had six which he carried to the cook.

In the few minutes left of daylight I managed to land three more.

My first nine red-bellied piranhas, and they were beautiful. Best of all, the people working in the kitchen couldn´t believe their eyes. “You catch that where?”  “You great fisherman, you fishing for the entire lodge”

I slept well during the night.

Eirik

—–

Our day started with our jungle guide showing up at the hotel. His name was Weninger. I had chosen him specifically since I had found great reviews on the net from others who had had him as a jungle guide. When planning for the voyage I had an email exchange with Paul Beaver, the founder of Amazonia Expeditions, the travel agency we are using in Peru. They own the lodge we were going to. I am reading Paul´s book about the history of Amazonia Expeditions, he has been through some stuff. He grew up in poverty in the US and his parents worked hard for him to go to university. He did not thrive there and as an indirect result was divorced from his wife and separated from his children. He went to the Amazon to find peace and wilderness and then went on to found the company.

We were told the night before that Weninger would have breakfast with us to get to know us before he would follow us on the boat ride up to the lodge. When he showed up he seemed a bit shy. He did not have breakfast with us.

After our breakfast he brought us on a mototricycle taxi ride to a nearby port where a boat arrived to pick us up. We got another impression of Iquitos and its busy traffic.

Busses here do not have windows.

Construction comes in many different qualities:

Our luggage was carrried down to the port

where our boat arrived:

We drove up the Amazon river for 2 hours followed by about an hour on the Tahuayo river.

We were 3300 kilometers by boat from the Amazon delta and the Atlantic ocean. Yet, the Amazon river was already very wide. Our altitude was roughly 100 meters (330 feet) above sea level. 100 meters in 3300 kilometers is pretty flat, giving an average drop of only about 3 centimeters per kilometer. We were not expecting any water falls, in other words. Depending on the water flowing in from side rivers the Amazon changed color drastically several times:

Here a side river with clean water created a divide which lasted several hundred meters:

There is a public boat transportation system that transports people and goods. Many villages are dependant on this, much like the coastal steamer (hurtigruta) has been the major transportation option for people along the coast of Norway. The roof is used for transporting of all sorts of stuff, including pigs:

It was pretty clear from many of the boats that rapids, water falls and big waves are not a problem here:

As you can see this extremely low boat even transports a car in the front:

Our driver had engine trouble with oil pressure falling dangerously low all the time. Whenever the alarm went off we would need to stop, about every 10 minutes. Half way up our stretch of the Amazon river we stopped at a trading post to rest and fix the problem:

We saw lots of gray fresh water dolphins in the water just outside the trading post. Unfortunately they were impossible to catch with the camera.

Some people were stocking up on supplies:

There was a small café at the trading post, basically 4 walls, a counter, a back room (presumably with a kitchen) and one table with a bench on each side. They did their dishes in the Amazon river:

As we made our way up the Tahuayo river traffic became less dense and the river narrower. We stopped at a local clinic that has been sponsored by a charitable organization started by the owners of Amazonia Expeditions. The clinic has 2 full-time nurses and was originally meant to serve 11 local villages with a total population of about 1000 people. On average they treat 16 people per day, a number that is increasing, since more and more patients are coming from further away. We had donated to the clinic when booking our stay. The leader there could tell us that general health in the area has improved much since they started their operations. An important part of their work is information about how diseases spread. They also do vaccination tours of the villages.

The kids found it a bit boring to be listening to adults talking about health and vaccinations in English and pseudo Spanish. They found some other kids to play with. As is often the case with kids contact was instant and they had a good time together.When we left the local kids came down to the shore to wave good-bye.

Just before our destination we had to stop by a police station. Weninger went inside with copies of the signature pages of our passports. Everyone entering the Tahuayo national reserve is registered. Here is the police station:

The lodge is actually just outside the national reserve.

At last we arrived at the lodge; our home for the next 5 nights (photo taken a few days later).

Weninger was not very communicative. When we asked if he had guided Norwegians before he answered “yes” and that was the end of that conversation. He was going to be our guide for the next 9 days and I was already seriously considering to ask for someone else. However, knowing myself and that first impressions sometimes are wrong I thought I would give him another 24 hours. Hélène thought I was being much to quick on drawing any type of conclusions. Luckily she turned out to be right.

In fact, Weninger turned out to be the perfect guide once he had warmed up to us. He was great with the children, extremely knowledgable, yet treated us more like equals then gringos he had to show around.

After a great lunch we headed into the jungle for an introductory walk of a couple of hours. Indiana Jones was ready for the jungle (appropriate movie music in the background):

Weninger was a fantastic wildlife spotter. He also communicate more freely now. He told us that he grew up very close to the lodge, in a village further up the river. He had also been a guide for the same company for 11 years. It seemed like he was more in his element now, and that he was himself once we got into the jungle. I quickly reset my impressions of him. Later, talking to one of the other guests at the lodge, we understood that we had made the right choice. We were seeing more wildlife, and that was after all one of the reasons for coming here.

This area is considered the most biodiverse part of the Amazon, and therefore the most biodiverse place on earth. There is a theory that this place was one of the few that were forested during the latest ice age, and therefore kept many of its species through that period. Most of the rest of the Amazon was dry desert. In the Tahuayo national reserve there are 16 different species of primates, 93 different non-flying mammals (yup, scientists exclude bats when counting in the Amazon, since there are so many different species of them) and about 540 species of birds.

During our hike we saw Pygmy Marmoset monkeys, the smallest monkeys in South America. This guy is 15 cm (6 inches) long (excluding the tail) and weighs about 140 grams:

These monkeys live primarily from tree sap. They bite holes in trees and then come back later to collect the sap. Here are some of their holes:

We also saw Red Titi Monkeys.

They were all the way up at the top of the canopy, some 30-40 meters above us. I quickly discovered that my 14x optical zoom compact camera was worth more than its weight in gold for this part of the voyage. The photo has been blown up so that the combined optical and digital zoom is 56x. Not bad for a compact camera, huh?

We saw an ant type, called fire ant, which is dangerous and which lives in symbiosis with a tree, They live in the tree and “patrol it” by walking up and down the outside all the time. They clean the bark of the tree and attack anyone trying to hurt the tree, To return the favor the tree produces a white liquid internally that the ants live off. If you grab the tree you will very fast have an arm full of ants. The really cool (well, to an observer, anyway) thing is that they don´t bite immediately. They wait for an ant messaging chemical, a pheromone, to be released. Then they all bite you at the same time! Nature is a cool thing.

Weninger told us that the natives previously used this tree as one of the most serious punishments. The culprit would be tied to a tree and not released until unconscious.

Iseline got a little bit too close to the tree and Weninger stopped her with a firm arm. When she was told that the ants were very dangerous I could see that she got a small shock. It was a challenge to get her to hike in the jungle for the next couple of days, but she did come with us and really enjoyed it.

Another ant type we saw was the army ant. A strange creature. They form a nest made up of the ants themselves every night. During the day they march through the jungle looking for food, sometimes attacking and plundering ant colonies they find on their way. They are the ant world´s plundering vikings.When they march they form a line and move rapidly. It really looks like a highway. Weninger told us that the colonies can number a million ants, and that the first arrive at their nightly destination quite early and start forming the nest . When the last arrive it is just the time when it gets dark. When they need to cross gaps some of the ants form a bridge with their own bodies to let the others pass. Did I mention that nature is a cool thing?

This photo has been taken without a flash. You can see which ants are standing still and creating the bridge, while the others run by.

Here´s an even more impressive bridge, taken with the flash this time:

The river is at its lowest now. Rain season has just started, but the rain is late this year. The area we walked in is submerged for large parts of the year. Weninger took our picture by the roots of a tiny tree:

We saw a bullet ant. The second largest ants in the world. They live in colonies of about a hundred. They are called bullet ants because being stung by them feels like being hit by a bullet. They pump a neurotoxin into your flesh. Nice. On the Schmidt pain scale the bullet ant is rated as the highest of all insect stings. This little buddy is 3 cm (1 1/4 inch) long. Normally I would add a finger for scale, but not this time:

We also saw some caterpillars who seemed to be doing some group hug thing:

There were termite nests everywhere:

It´s striking how many things have spines. There must have been pretty hard evolutionary pressure here to avoid being eaten by animals. This is a nice little tree trunk. Please do not fall on the tree:

When we got back the sun was starting to set. I quickly got out my fishing rod and tried out some lures. No luck.

I asked Weninger how they fish here, and he told me they put a piece of raw chicken or beef on a hook. I knew what I was going to try in the morning. Weninger told me I just had to speak to the cook and he would prepare bait for me. I went over to the kitchen and learned a new spanish word: “carnada.” Obviously it must mean meat used for bait. I would use it much during the next week.

At the dinner table the kids and I sang the Norwegian “happy birthday” song for Hélène, to much amusement for the other guests. Hélène turned 41 today. Weninger asked me why I hadn´t told Paul, the founder of Amazonia Expeditions, that Hélène had her birthday when we arrived. They would have prepared a surprise for her. Well, why didn´t I? Sigh, bad husband again.

Eirik

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Getting up at 4:30 was really tough for all of us.

We were driven to Puno, this time on them main road, which is remarkably straight. We got our last glimpse of Lake Titicaca.

We again got to see the poverty of Puno, the countryside and Juliaca.

We had a guy from the travel agency with us. He spoke fluent french and we had a good talk with him during the drive. He could tell us that the ministry of agriculture had started a program back in 1968 to support farmers, making it possible for them to rent tractors and other farming machines. Unfortunately the rent is at 120 soles per hour, enough to buy a sheep, The result is that very few use them and rather continue the traditional way. Also, he told us, each farmer normally only has 2.5 hectare. This is because there was a land reform way back during military rule where land was taken from the rich and given to the poor in chunks of 2.5 hectares.

He also called someone in Puno to check the election results. Cristina´s sister had not been elected. On the other ham an Uros had been elected to some sort of governor position in Puno for the first time!

We took another A319 (yawn) to Lima. The plane was full of Norwegians on a group tour.

At the airport in Lima we sent some packages back home. We had bought handicraft on Qhantati and needed to offload it from our luggage.

Our flight to Iquitos was done on yet another A319. After so many outside pictures, how about one from the inside, Marius?

As we approached Iquitos there was nothing but trees and the occasional river to see as far as the eye could reach. What a contrast to southern Peru. Iquitos, by he way, is the largest city in the world without a road connection.

The heat and humidity hit us like a wall as we left the plane, According to our taxi driver the temperature was 38C (100F). The humidity here is at a stable 100%

We were picked up at the airport and driven into town in very old taxis. I tried to get my belt on, but it was completely stuck, so was Adrian´s. The driver said “You don´t need those.” Sure. The opposite was of course the truth, but we survived. Iquitos is a very dirty, polluted and loud city. There are too loud noises everywhere, first and foremost from, traffic.

We´re going to stay at a jungle lodge from tomorrow, but were put in a small hotel in the floor over the travel agency´s offices here in Iquitos for the night. We have a view of one of the three rivers which float thorugh this city. All of them turning into the Amazon river when they join.

We needed to go out to eat and the caretaker and “everything man” here got us a double motortricycle ride. An experience in itself. I didn´t feel very safe, but it was fun.

The restaurant we had been recommended was something like a fast food restaurant. I ordered chicken and rice and got a portion worthy of a US restaurant, I hardly managed to eat half of it. The other portions were also very oversized. What a brutal contrast to the beggars we had seen on the way in! We solved it by asking for doggie bags. On our way out we gave our food to two different beggars.

When we entered our room Hélène found a small bat hanging on our curtains! The kids were fascinated, Hélène less so.

I am now in a bat free hotel room in Iquitos and desperately need some sleep. Tomorrow, eh today, we have a 4 hour boat ride to reach our jungle lodge, There is no internet or even electricity there. We will be off the grid until at least December 1.

Eirik

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