Jungle Madness

As Jack Handy once said: ¨If you find yourself in the underbrush, in your underwear, don´t start thinking about other words that start with ´under´.... that´s the first sign of jungle madness.¨

Yesterday, we returned to civilization after five days and four nights in the deepest, darkest jungle. We´ve got ten thousand bug bites, we´re dirty, we definitely stink, and worst of all, our camera batteries are nearly dead. But we´re alive. And we´re free from jungle madness. We hope. Only time will tell.

After Cusco, we took another 20-hour bus ride up and over another set of mountains, this time with a much more sedate bus driver (which, combined with a lack of syrupy doughballs, meant no gastrointestinal distress of any kind for Nic). The last half of the trip, though, was an entirely new experience. Picture another typical Greyhound bus. No special tires, suspension, or equipment of any kind. Imagine it bouncing down a one-lane, muddy jungle road, scraping jungle trees on both sides, splashing through jungle streams, creeping across tiny jungle bridges no wider than the bus, and generally going places no bus had gone before. Cool stuff.

We got to Puerto Maldonado, booked a cheap jungle tour (after much checking around and haggling) and set out the next morning for our four-day, three-night excursion with our boat-driver guide and three Peruvian adventurers about our age. After a full day of boating around, gawking at turtles, caimens (like crocodiles), crazy birds, and generally awesome scenery, we pulled in to shore for the night.

Forging into generally awesome jungle scenery.

While the guide was busy with guide-ish things at the back of the boat, we wandered 50 yards up a jungle trail to the thatched-roof shelter we were going to pitch our tents under. We waited there a couple minutes for the guide, swatting at the increasing numbers of mosquitos and flies interested in sucking our blood. Then we started to get larger flying things stuck in our hair and clothes. Angry-sounding flying things. Lots of them. Turns out there were not one, but two beehives in the eaves of the shelter. Needless to say, we cleared out of there darn fast, pausing a safe distance away to flick the remaining bees from our clothes and hair (which was particularly difficult in Nic´s flowing locks). We quickly switched to swatting at our feet and legs, though, as we discovered we had stopped on or near a trail of equally angry, tiny biting ants. We retreated the rest of the way to the relative safety of the boat, where we satisfied ourselves with swatting mere flies and mosquitos.

And our trusted native guide, source of wisdom and protection? He laughed at us, and assured us repeatedly that these bees weren´t stinging bees -- they were just interested in ¨burrowing¨ in our hair and clothes. Right. Anyway... he went up and lit a smoky fire, to keep them safely tucked away in their hives for the night. We were able to eat dinner and set up our tents in relative safety, until we noticed yet another jungle friend making his home in our lodge:

Oh yeah... and there were vampire bats flying around. Ah, the jungle.

So... What happens to untended fires overnight? They go out. What happens to bees in the wee hours of the morning? They wake up. Thus, Nic and I awoke to find fifteen or twenty bees crawling on the outside of our tent, with several dozens more zipping around in the air. We refused to move until the guide (who was merrily frying eggs, unphased by all the bees) agreed to make a smokier fire.

One of the bees on our tent, doing its best to bite through the mesh. Not the most pleasant thing to see mere inches from your face when you open your eyes in the morning.

The first stop for the day was fishing from a quaint bit of land in the middle of our lake. After a few minutes we dubbed it Wasp Island, for reasons that shall go unmentioned.

Piranha fishing from Wasp Island was a success....

...for some of us. Nic shows off his biggest catch.

Our guide, preparing my piranha for lunch. This isn´t the best picture to see it, but if you look closely you´ll notice that he is missing his ring finger on his left hand. Coincidence? I think not.

Here, the piranha was my lunch....

...and here, I´m about to be piranha lunch. That´s right. Later that day we went for a dip in the same lake we caught piranha in. Maybe we do have jungle madness...

We visited a native village... Nic entertained the kids while I bought the sweet lizard-tooth necklace you can see in some of the later pictures.

We visited the canopy, by way of a 150-foot high cable walkway. Amazing jungle views, sweet jungle sounds, lots of jungle insects interested in our bodily fluids.

We visited the jungle floor, checking out monkeys, crazy plants, and anthills the size of Volkswagons.

Have you ever been attacked by butterflies? It´s sort of like being beaten to death with feathers. A much more pleasant experience than being attacked by, say, bees, or biting ants. Believe us, we speak from experience.

At one of our stops, we encountered a very friendly, completely wild monkey. I guess checking my hair for bugs and pestering the caged birds and turtles was more fun than hanging out with his monkey friends.

Each night we tented somewhere different. Each night, the sun set around 6 PM. Each night around 6:01, every mosquito within a square mile honed in on our heat signatures. We´d put up with it for an hour or so (a bit more if our guide was telling jungle ghost stories). Then we´d retreat to the tent, to relative safety from the swarms of bloodsuckers. First, though, was our nightly ritual -- we had to spend ten or fifteen minutes with the flashlight, hunting down the handful of bugs that had snuck in with us during the few seconds we had the tent unzipped.

Some footprints we found near our tent one morning. We were convinced they were from some crazy lizard-beast, like a velociraptor or something. Our guide told us they were from a capybara, which is basically a big rat. An ROUS. I don´t know... I´m thinking it was a man-eating lizard, and he just doesn´t want to scare away business. There were also prints from birds, ocelots, jaguars, peccaries, and caimens.... hey, it´s a jungle out there.

At the end of our trip, we weren´t ready to go back into town yet, so we asked our guide if he could drop us off to camp somewhere within walking distance of Puerto Maldonado. He brought us to his dad´s place, a jungle farm complete with pigs, cows, a dog, chickens, chicks, and a rooster that started crowing at 5 AM.

Our only dinner and breakfast - authentic jungle oranges and coconuts.

Victims of jungle madness? You decide.