So then, Peru...
Click to viewAs I promised, here’s a write up of my summer adventures in South America (be warned, it’s long):
The flight over there was a bit of a nightmare; I started by flying from Newcastle to Heathrow, followed by Heathrow to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Sao Paulo (followed by a 12-hour wait in Sao Paulo airport), Sao Paulo to Lima, and finally Lima to Iquitos. Iquitos itself is a frontier city surrounded by rainforest in all directions, and is the largest city in the world which is completely inaccessible by road. The only way in is to fly in or to sail upriver from Manaus in Brazil, about 2000km away.
A few glimpses of Iquitos town are shown here:
I won’t lie: Iquitos is a largely ugly town, with high unemployment and over half the populace of 300,000 living below the poverty line. What it is also, however, is vibrant. The place is full of more life and energy than anywhere I’ve seen in England; populated by people who do their best to enjoy life’s every moment because the life expectancy is somewhat less than 50 years. When things like rabies, dysentery and malaria are everyday hazards simply by virtue of where they live, what can the locals do other than get on with living? Safe as I was with my list of medication, I found the place quite inspiring.
Iquitos was the base from which the expedition began, and the first four weeks were spent in the Lago Preto region of Peru, five days downriver from this city. The boat on which we lived and worked during this time was the Clavero, a former steam-boat built in the 1890s in France, then shipped to South America to act as a transport vessel during the late 19th/early 20th century Rubber Boom, when Iquitos and Manaus were briefly the two wealthiest cities in the world. The boat is picture here:
By the standards of Amazonian research vessels, it’s not a bad deal at all. The rooms were cramped, but the communal dining area was large and the atmosphere was good. I think it’s safe to say that on an expedition you can either get along with the people around you or you can be miserable, and given the circumstances I for once managed to voluntarily interact with the social scene onboard, and found it to be okay. We had a decent crowd of people, and there wasn’t anyone on the boat whom I vehemently objected to working with.
As for the work itself, that was done mainly on motorboats at night. Hunting Caimans is done with a spotlight, which causes their eyes to glow bright orange-red as the beam reflects off the retina. They can look very cool and sinister in the dark, like so:
Once the target is located, the next challenge is for us to motor over as quietly as possible and for the catcher to be ready to strike. Caimans are caught using a long wooden pole with a steel-wire noose on one end, which is looped around the thing’s neck and used to wrestle it out of the water. Obviously the Caiman puts up a hell of a fight, and during the capture process it wasn’t uncommon for the noose to be torn from the end of the pole, or for the pole itself to be snapped in two. Bear in mind that we were not attempting to catch any Caimans much bigger than two metres long, and yet they were strong enough to do that. Imagine then, what a fully grown 5- or 6-metre Black Caiman is capable of.
Once caught, the specimens would have their legs and jaws tied to prevent them escaping or biting anyone. In the case of those which were in the correct size range to have their stomach contents extracted, a piece of plastic piping would be placed between the jaws for them to bite down on, through which a hose could be inserted and water pumped into the stomach in order to suspend the contents. After this, the Caiman could be held upside down until all of the stomach contents came rushing out, and could be collected in a bucket. With the messy business out of the way, the Caimans could be weighed, measured and have their gender determined. The method through which this last variable was tested was not a pleasant one:
Yeah…that opening is known as the Cloaca and is the one hole through which the Caiman performs all reproductive and excretory functions; sex determination required inserting a finger in order to discover whether there was a penis or a clitoris inside. With the measurements taken, posing for photographs generally followed. We caught all sizes of Caimans in Lago Preto (within reason, of course). The majority of Caimans we caught were of the Common or Spectacled variety (Caiman crocodilus), though we also caught a handful of Black (Melanosuchus niger) and Smooth-Fronted (Paleosuchus palpebrosus) specimens. A few of these are pictured below:
Some pretty gorgeous specimens there, I think. In addition to working with Caimans, I volunteered to help out on some of the other expeditionary projects during the daylight hours. These involved working with birds and bats, which could be caught by hanging nets from the rainforest canopy, and resulted in some pretty spectacular catches including a frog-eating bat with the biggest jaws and teeth I’ve ever seen on a small mammal! There was also work to be done with Giant River Otters (there is something simply wrong about otters six feet long), frogs, invertebrates, and River Dolphins, which have a very colourful local mythology surrounding them. The pink (Bôto) river dolphins in particular are said to be able to take human form and seduce young women with their supernatural charisma, which is why no few unmarried pregnancies in the local villages end up being blamed on the nocturnal affections of dolphins. The Bôtos themselves are very curious animals, being the only surviving descendants of an ancient lineage of Dolphins which existed in the open oceans prior to the rise of the Andes Mountains, and were since trapped in fresh water when those mountains rose from the seas 11 million years ago and formed the western coast of South America as it is today. The other species of river dolphin in Peru is the grey river dolphin, or Tucuxi, which looks more like an oceanic dolphin and only arrived in South America in the last few million years after swimming upstream from the mouth of the Amazon. I’ll show some more photos, because they do more to demonstrate the magnificence of the animals out there than what my words can. The pictures of the giant otters and the grey dolphin are not my own: credit there has to go to two of the biologists working on the expedition, namely Dr Mark Bowler and his fiancée Meribel.
Those are just a few of the incredible creatures to be found in the world’s largest rainforest. Our time in Lago Preto lasted four weeks total, at the end of which we headed back to Iquitos for a few days to enjoy some more Peruvian culture and await the arrival of the next bunch of students (of all who took part, only four students actually took the full 8 weeks available for the trip. I was very, very glad to be one of them). During that time, I visited the Pilpintuwasi butterfly farm close to Iquitos, where in addition to numerous butterflies and caterpillars the...slightly eccentric German owner keeps a number of outlandish pets. These include a young Jaguar, Two-toed and Three-toed Sloths, a Tapir, a Giant Anteater and various monkeys which have decided to live there because nobody shoots them and they get free food (one of the monkeys, a Capuchin which they have named Tony, was found at a very young age by a gang of pickpockets, who raised him to help them out in their “work”. I think they must have handed him over to the farm when they got tired of him stealing their stuff). Once again, there are photos:
That Jaguar in particular was the highlight of my trip to the butterfly farm; even though it was the only animal there we were definitely not allowed to pet! The Tapir is marvellous in its way, and the Giant Anteater is a fascinating example of a breed of mammals unique to the Amazon, but when it comes down to it, I have to have respect for the big cat which is strong enough to break a man in half or kill you accidentally just by playing with you. All of these animals live wild in the Lago Preto and Pacaya-Samiria regions, but with the exception of the monkeys you’d have to be very lucky to see them in the wild. Giant Anteaters are very rare, Tapirs are notoriously shy and Jaguars have learned to avoid humans due to our nasty habit of shooting them on sight. Most people in the rainforest villages are terrified of Jaguars, and convincing them that these beautiful cats have a right to live there is difficult work.
Our port of call for the next four weeks was the Pacaya-Samiria reserve, Peru’s only government-funded National Park and the largest protected area in the country. Where Lago Preto is centred around the whitewater Yavari river, Pacaya-Samiria has an altogether different ambience about it due to being based upon the blackwater Samiria river. Here the water is satined to the colour of strong tea due to the numerous tannins leeched into the river by decaying leaves. The water contains less sediment, and yet the river here is more alive than in Lago Preto. Dolphins are literally everywhere, and spotting them on the river is like spotting rabbits in England. Although there are no Giant Otters or Uakari Monkeys, there is a greater abundance of wading birds, freshwater turtles, big snakes and especially Caimans. While I saw a variety of cool stuff out there on the boats at night (including two enormous anacondas and an ultra-rare Amazon bush dog) for me nothing could compare to the fact that we were catching a different calibre of Caiman here to what we were the previous month. In Lago Preto the most abundant Caimans are the Common/Spectacled variety; in Pacaya-Samiria, Black Caimans are the dominant species, and they grow much bigger and more ferocious than their common cousins. Over the four weeks spent there I was lucky enough to see one male Black Caiman five metres in length, which can be really quite scary when you’re only on a boat seven metres long. In Australia the locals wouldn’t dare be out on a small boat with a crocodile that large in the water, and it occurs to me that had the Caiman gone on the offensive, we would have been really, really screwed at that point. Fortunately, Black Caimans don’t seem to be as aggressive as their Australian saltwater relatives.
All the same, we caught some large and impressive beasts, and here are a few photos of some of them:
That last one was the largest specimen we caught on the trip; a male Black Caiman 1.9 metres long (just over six feet). It took four of us to pull the thing out of the water, and it broke the catch-pole clean in two with a single death-roll. Those things are damn strong, though fortunately they tire quickly. Once we had the thing on the boat it was relatively easy to restrain it and get some tape over the eyes and jaws. Not being able to see the humans calms them down a lot, it would seem.
Other stuff out there in Pacaya-Samiria included Piranhas, which as a group pretty much define the freshwater ecology of South America. They’ve evolved to thrive in low-oxygen environments, and most species are capable of feeding on more or less anything they can get their jaws around. Here’s a shot of a white piranha caught in one of our fishing nets:
I love the eyes - they just look so eeevil. Below are photographs of turtles (which are very shy things in the wild), a Tegu (a big predatory skink which does the same job in the Amazon that Monitor lizards do in Africa) and a very cool-looking Amazon Mantis:
All pretty awesome stuff.
Leaving the Amazon was nothing short of heart-wrenching, I have to admit. It was a two-day sail down river to get back to Iquitos from Pacaya-Samiria, and during that time I could only really think about how much I wanted to stay there. The handful of wilderness areas of the world that I have visited - especially the rainforests - are the only places where I have ever had what might be termed a “spiritual experience”. There’s something about those primordial areas which just resonates with me, and as much as I went out there to gather data for my dissertation this year, I knew that I would gain much more from the experience than scientific results. There’s a feeling I get from those places which I find difficult to replicate anywhere else.
Still, on my way back I had a few nights to spend in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo and unwind a bit. That was quite cool, and Sao Paulo is certainly a city with a lot of culture. It did manage to surprise me in a few ways: I knew that finance and commerce would have a heavy presence there; many people forget that Brazil’s economy is a powerhouse, the eighth largest in the world, and that their massive natural resources offer them tremendous buying and selling power on the world stage. I knew that food and drink would be popular, and the many street-side cafes and bars did not disappoint in that regard. I expected there to be an extensive sex industry, but I didn’t expect it to be so completely visible. You would struggle to throw a stone from my hotel window and not hit a sex shop, as the whole neighbourhood was full of them, and one particular street seemed to be the central workplace for the local prostitute population. At any given time there would be a dozen or more hanging around in the area where the hotel’s neighbourhood backed onto the central business district. It was kind of creepy, like something out of a World of Darkness game.
Here are a couple of photos of the city itself:
Well, I’m afraid that’s going to have to be all; I don’t have space to document everything here. Hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into how incredible a trip to South America can be, and I would recommend that anyone who is considering going travelling for a while jump on every opportunity you get. It’s a beautiful world out there.