Saturday, November 25, 2017:
We got up at 5 am, which isn’t so hard when you go to bed at 9:30 pm (something I should perhaps try at home). This was the view from our room at that hour:
The point of getting up so early was to spot monkeys as they conducted their morning tours. There are several different monkey troops on or near Finca las Piedras, and apparently each troop takes a spin through its territory each morning to reestablish boundaries. The monkeys were easy to hear but not as easy to see. This guy stared at us for a while, but by the time any of us took a photo he was darting away. But the point is to see the wildlife, not necessarily to photograph it, and we definitely enjoyed his presence.
Christian was scheduled to pick us up at 10 am for the drive back to Puerto Maldonado. As late as we possibly could we bathed. Here is the bathing station. It’s only about two feet deep, which may explain why David (6’2″) smells a little ripe most of the time.
We were sad to say goodbye to David, but he’ll be home in a month so it wasn’t nearly as bad as the last time we said goodbye (which as I recall, involved some sobbing on my part at the TSA line at EWR). Christian drove us to the airport, through Puerto Maldonado, which hadn’t improved any since our previous two visits on Tuesday and Friday. This was a long travel day, and things got more screwed up than on any other day of our trip. Our flight to Cusco was seriously delayed, which delayed the flight from Cusco to Lima (same plane). We originally had a 7-hour layover in Lima and had grand plans to go to dinner and have a stroll in the Barranco district of Lima. We even had a reservation at a place recommended by friends, but that plan went to hell between the late arrival and the fact that United wouldn’t let us check our bags for the next flight. Plus we were cranky and bickering, and it seemed too stressful to take an Uber to a place 45 minutes away, eat dinner, then turn around and come back. So we ate at the one place we knew well: the restaurant in the airport hotel, where we’d had two meals (dinner and breakfast) at the start of the trip. Kind of an anticlimactic way to end the trip. Even worse, after we finished dinner we went back across the street to the airport…and found that our flight was now delayed for several hours, until 2:30 am, so we could have found a locker for our luggage and gone to Barranco after all.
Enough complaining. Of all the many things that could have gone badly wrong on this complicated trip, this really wasn’t a big deal. When all was said and done, the only thing that actually went wrong is that Dave’s grandfather’s mother-of-pearl pocketknife was confiscated at security for one of our flights; after packing it in the checked luggage for the trip to Lima, Dave left it in his carry-on for one of the domestic flights, and it showed up on the X-ray. That was sad. Also, David left his rubber boots at the eco-lodge (which was a problem because he is a towering giant in Peru and would never have been able to buy new boots in his monster size), but that turned out OK because Julio was able to send them along to the Operations Office for David to pick up later.
I’ll end on a peaceful note instead of the trivial bad stuff that one has to expect when traveling. These are some of my photos of riverboats on the Tambopata River. Dave made fun of me for taking these shots, but I really enjoyed our time on the river and was fascinated not just by the wildlife in the Amazon but the human existence as well. These riverboats are the only method of transportation throughout the Tambopata Reserve, and they reflect the limited (legal) options in this corner of the world: agriculture (note all the green bananas headed to market) and eco-tourism.
Mostly, I was struck by how the jungle seems to dwarf the human element. Let’s hope that lasts.
