Returned from the Jungle

I decided rather against my will to go into the jungle. We had a meeting about going to Manu very shortly before we were to be going, and the woman who came to give a speech about our trip said that the one complaint they get is that it is too busy and people don´t usually want to have their Spanish lessons. I thought that it wouldn´t be so good to try to have my private lessons if there already wasn´t enough time to do the group lessons, so I talked to the office about it. I mostly wanted them to be able to apply the money from my private lessons to the cost of going to Manu, which was pretty steep. They insisted they couldn´t do that and that there would be time to do the private lessons in the jungle. They told me that I could have 3 hours a day of private lessons (in addition to the 4 hours of group classes) for the last two weeks I am in Cusco, and they told me that I needed to make a decision for sure within 5 minutes. I was leaning towards not going when they said that I was the 6th person signed up to go, and if I didn´t go then no one would be able to. Everyone in the group was so excited to go, so I decided that I would pay the steep fee, have 7 hours of Spanish a day for 2 weeks, and go off to the jungle.
There were warnings about vampire bats, mosquitos, mold and humidity before we left, but none of them stopped us from taking off early on Sunday morning to make to trip to Manu National Park. We had a big bus all for ourselves, and the scenery on the drive was amazing. We wound through mountain passes for hours on bumpy dirt roads until we arrived in the Manu cloud forest. We hopped out of the bus and viewed some birds and some capuchin monkeys. We even got to see the special dance of the Cock of the Rock (Peru´s national bird) before making our way to the lodge where we would spend the night. The sounds of the jungle were astounding, and we slept like babies in preparation for the river trip down the Alto Madre De Dios River the next day.
The six of us plus our teacher and our guide walked up the road a bit, observing the butterflies and birds of the cloud forest the following morning. The bus picked us up a short way down the road and we rode for a couple hours before arriving in Atolaya where we would catch our boat. I had heard all kinds of rumors bout the boats being unsteady, but I found it very smooth riding. We road for 2 hours or so before arriving at Pantiacolla Lodge, otherwise known as paradise. We each shared a room, and my cabin was called Tumuy Tumuy, no doubt the sound a local bird makes. I shared my room with Nadine from Austria. The lodge had no electricity, but candles and oil lanterns cast a romantic glow over the camp. We had mosquito nets around each of our beds, but we were told this was more to fend off the vampire bats than the mosquitoes! We spent our days hiking in the forest, learning Spanish, and generally going to bed early since we rose very early each day. One night we went for a night hike in the jungle where we saw a lot of insects and frogs. Nadine spotted the biggest frog any of us had ever seen, perhaps 7 inches in diameter! On Thursday we visited the local hot springs, lounging for over an hour and a half and occasionally having to move away because the water was so hot. We visited a local village in the park on Friday, introducing ourselves and talking a bit with the children in Spanish. The park is set up in several different zones, and we were in the cultural zone. Many people still live in the park, and live the same way their tribes have always lived, hunting with bows and arrows and poison darts, and gathering various vegetables and herbs.
Our guide, Jose, was amazing. He was educated as a biologist, and his background was particularly beneficial to us as he could explain why things grew as they did in the forest and how the growing things all worked together. Because he was local he was also able to give us a lot of insight into the local people, providing information about the different types of tribes and even the tribes that want no communication with the outside world. Under Jose´s careful guidance we saw many different types of birds (Manu is known as a birder´s paradise), five types of monkeys, an otter, and insects of all shades. The excursion ended with a 15 hour ride back to Cusco. For the duration of the trip our bus was on the verge of breakdown, and this time we were not alone in the bus, but with two other tour groups. We each shared seats, and all our bags were piled in as well. We had to stop every 20 minutes or so to allow the bus driver to add water to the radiator. Our teacher Libia was very sick for the last 5 hours of the bus ride…not a nice place to be sick! Thankfully, however, we made it back to Cusco in more or less the same condition we left, and are back at it again with our busy lives in Cusco.