Persistence Pays Off

First of all, I'M IN CUSCO! I'm actually on my last night in Cusco. The process of getting here was a bit tricky. Initially we were told that we would be returning to Cusco on December 18, but two months ago that was changed to December 17, and a month ago it became the 16th. The plan was for a van to pick up the people and equipment from Pantiacolla (the lowland station), and drive them a couple hours up to our station where they would unload some people and gear into our van (there were 13 people in Pantiacolla and only 5 in San Pedro). We were told that our van would be arriving at 2pm, but since we're in Peru, I didn't really expect it to show up before 3pm. Turns out it was after 5pm before anything finally showed up.The good news was that instead of two small vans, we actually had a bus! The even better news was that 13 Pantiacollans piled off and immediately scooped up all our gear and piled it onto the bus (amazing how much more quickly things happen with 13 people than with 5, especially when over a third of those Pantiacollans are big, burly guys).

This bus was wonderful. It didn't reek of coca, the aisles were clear up until the last row of seats, nearly everyone had TWO seats to themselves, and no one was shoving you aside, telling you not to step on their chickens, or handing you children to pass to the back. Plus, we got through the coca police checkpoint in about 3 minutes, instead of 2 hours. We always seemed to have the longest inspection on the Gallito de las Rocas bus, perhaps because of the smell of coca, or the fact that the leaves were still settling to the ground after all the women had frantically shoved bags of coca in any hiding place they could find. Life of luxury, that bus.

Anyways, at some point in the middle of the night one of the tires got a hole, but we didn't have a spare so the driver just filled it up with air and kept going. We stopped every hour or so to fill it up again, and each time Laura would get off to check out the situation, then report back that the hole was bigger. Great. We finally rolled into Cusco around 3am, and literally after passing under the "Bienvenidos a Cusco" sign, the driver stopped the bus and told us we were there. Umm... no. Laura tried to argue with the driver that we were still 20-30 minutes from our hostel, but the guy said he didn't want to go any further with the bad tire in case he got stranded. He told us to take a taxi the rest of the way. First of all, there were 18 of us, which is 5 taxis minimum before you even consider that we had two stations worth of equipment with us. Laura insisted that he keep going, he refused, so we all just stayed put and slept on the bus for an hour! Finally he came back, started the bus, picked up a friend or something to help him in case he got stuck, filled up the tire again, and took us to the hostel. Of course, the driver was annoyed with us by that point, so rather than pull over into the little pull-out on the one-lane road in front of our hostel, he stopped in the middle of it and told us to hurry up... even though he was blocking a line of cars. We all hauled ass and tried to empty the bus as fast as we could, but like I said, there were 18 of us, all of our personal gear, and equipment from two stations... so it took a while. It didn't help that all of the cars behind us were honking the entire time (at 4am), and the driver kept shouting at us to hurry. Sheesh! We finally got everything unloaded, and by the time we moved it all into the hostel rooms it was 4:30am! So, if anything, the hour delay on the border of Cusco meant that none of us needed to pay for a hostel room that night...

After that crazy night, the rest of the week has seemed pretty tame. One morning I went with Ian, Felicity, and Jack to Huacarpay (a lake outside of Cusco) to go birding. I saw 32 new species in 7 hours! (Oh, so I think I'm becoming a "birder"...) There were a lot of cool birds there, and it was really beautiful. Another morning I went with Ian, Felicity, and Juli to Tipon (Incan ruins and irrigation system on the way to Huacarpay). That place was amazing because it was one of the lesser visited ruins, so the place was practically empty but it had all the same stuff as the more popular sites! It was another really good morning. This morning I trekked up to Saqsaywaman, which are ruins just above Cusco (one of the popular sites where the huge statue of Jesus is). However, I heard that if you show up before 7am you don't have to pay the 40-70 sole entry fee. I left around 6am and got up there around 6:30, and sure enough there was no one at the ticket counter but the gate was wide open! Turns out that is when locals go jogging or walk their dogs. Seems fair to let them in for free early in the mornings. This was another fantastic morning because, like Tipon, the place was practially empty. I got all my exploring done in the first couple hours, then spent another couple hours sitting on some rocks overlooking the ruins and the city, and writing in my diary (which, by the way, I am nearly caught up on... if you don't count the missing month in the middle :-P ). Such a relaxing place, and way nicer for diary-writing than any of the plazas because you don't get harrassed to buy something every three minutes! It's also interesting thinking back to my trip last year - when my dad and I landed in Cusco we immediately set out on a three-hour city tour, which included Saqsaywaman. I am absolutely terrible at dealing with altitude, so I was like a zombee. I could barely put one foot in front of the other, and it was apparently noticeable because our guide decided to NOT take us through the ruins, but rather give us the tour from the flat lawn area next to the ruins that I was already struggling on. However, this year I freaking hiked 30 minutes UP to the ruins before wandering around inside of them. Take that, altitude!

So, after four and a half months of working in the cloud forest and exploring around Cusco, it's finally my last night in Peru! This turned out to be a fantastic project (I had my doubts at times). I learned a lot, got a lot of great field experience, met some great people, practiced my Spanish... and now I'm looking forward to being home for Christmas! Soft toilet paper, cheese fondue, hot showers that are more than just a dribble, couches... all wonderful things that I can't wait to have. Last year I never thought I'd return, but look what happened! Maybe I'll be back again at some point...

Finally, something you mother probably doesn't want to hear after you've been working in the cloud forest for four months:
"By the way, you might wanna make sure the washer is primed and ready to go..."

Look out, Mom, I'm coming home!!

The Jungle Diet

Something I’ve been thinking about randomly is my attitude toward food. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m way more lax about what I would normally be considered “bad” food, but I don’t think I’ve elaborated on that. I’ve noticed that I’m a bit more willing to eat questionable food items during field jobs, even more so in the jungle, and even MORE so after four months in the jungle…

At home if I dropped a piece of vegetable – a cucumber slice, for instance – on the floor of my kitchen, I would probably throw it away. Here, so long as it doesn’t land in the mold patch that is spreading across the floor from under our cooking area, then it’s okay to pick up, blow the dirt off of, and toss back in the salad.

Squishy carrots are not bad carrots, they are just more challenging to peel (which you really only need to do if they are moldy).

To drain pasta we prop a colander on a rock outside the kitchen and dump it in. One time someone tipped the colander over and pasta fell into the grass and dirt, right where the dogs and chickens often wander (and shit, presumably). At home, most people would probably not eat that pasta. Here we have a limited supply of food, and more importantly, we were hungry, so we just picked up all of the not-terribly-dirty pasta, rinsed it off, and served it up (with oregano, so you couldn’t tell the good leaves from the bad ones).

Oregano also works when you realize (a bit too late) that one of the four bags of pasta that you just dumped into the pot was filled with tiny little bugs.

We get all of our bread for the week in town on Fridays, so by Wednesday or Thursday our bread supply is dwindling and usually moldy. If it’s the “good” mold (white mold that you can pretend is flour), then you can just rub it off and it’s good as new. If it’s the “bad” mold (green spots), then we have something called “mold remediation”, where you cut off the mold spots and then toast the bread on the stove. That will give it another few days of life before we usually end up tossing it. If we have a lot of extra bread on a given week, or just lots of moldy bread, we make croutons! Some weeks we do end up with heaps and heaps of bread because the nearby lodges will generously give us some of theirs… usually because it’s already going moldy (and we’re hungry field biologists who will eat anything, apparently). That is usually crouton bread. One week we DID end up composting a bunch of it because we had about 30 pieces of (quite moldy) bread per person, and Friday was approaching. We don’t usually waste, but we also like un-moldy bread on occasion.

Lately squirrels have been getting into the kitchen and eating our vegetables. I normally wouldn’t eat a banana with gnaw marks in it, but here it’s fine, so long as you just cut that part off. Same with yucca, plantain, cauliflower, and lettuce. Besides, the outer layer of lettuce was probably turning black anyways, so we would’ve just peeled that layer off.

When rats were getting into our giant sack of rice, we just scooped out the yellow-tinted areas and use the good rice.

Eggs. Oh the eggs. We buy giant flats of eggs at a time, which is something like 180 eggs. We don’t refrigerate them. They are fine for the first several weeks, but at some point they start going bad – very, very bad. At first the yolk just sticks to the inside of the shell – that’s fine. Then you’ll notice a little black spot on the inside of the shell. That’s still okay, assuming it’s small and you don’t notice anything wrong with the egg itself. Large black spots are questionable – eat at your own risk. The definite NO is a black egg. When we notice that black spots have started appearing in the eggs, we crack them into a cup instead of the frying pan so we can dump it out and try again. At first it might just be one bad egg before you get a good one, but soon it will be four eggs, and towards the end of the flat of eggs (like right now) you could end up going through ten a morning. A while ago I got the “lucky” one – I cracked an egg into the egg cup and a black liquid oozed into the cup. BAD egg. Jack and I discovered on our camping trip that hard-boiled eggs are actually a good way to work around the black spots – when they are hard-boiled you can just scoop off the black part and eat the rest of the egg! However, right now most of our eggs are beyond bad. What we used to think were “bad” eggs (a couple black spots) are now the “good” eggs. There are also those with red spots inside, or whose innards have congealed. A couple days ago I finally decided that I was done with the egg roulette, but I made it until the last week!

Cockroaches are nothing. Cockroach on your dinner plate? Yeah, me too. Just swat it off and keep eating.

Finally, anything you drop while wandering in the forest is probably still fine to eat, so long as it didn’t land in a mud puddle or anything visible horrific.

Jungle food… yum!

Unsurprisingly, Pepto Bismol is now a regular part of my breakfast…

Dia de Gracias

I made it back from camping in one very wet and sleep-deprived piece! We had some terrible luck with our first site – a friaje (cold front) hit the day that we hiked up. We did the entire two-hour hike in the rain, we hacked out net lanes and set nets up in the rain, and we pitched our tent in the rain. We were soaked. We couldn’t even open the nets the next day because it rained on and off. Instead we re-pitched our tent in a flatter location that was closer to water, but unfortunately it had a bunch more tree roots covering the ground. The second and third netting days were better – we opened for five and seven hours but had to close early both days due to rain. That site was also horrendous because of the trail – it very quickly turned into a mud slide, so basically every time we went to check nets (every 30 minutes), we would slip, slide, and usually end up on our butts. By the time we finished our third day of netting we were cold, wet, muddy, and sore. Fortunately we got to make a trip back to camp for a night to restock our food and supplies, and also to celebrate Thanksgiving!

We had Thanksgiving dinner a week early, on November 23, because there were no tourists at the lodge and we wanted to cook for the lodge staff and use their kitchen. Jack and I didn’t get back until late that afternoon, but fortunately for us Ian had been busy cooking all day. We had two chickens, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, sweet potatoes, stir fried vegetables, and apple and pumpkin pie. *DROOL* It was so good!! Ian rocked that meal. Before eating, Ian made a speech explaining the significance of Thanksgiving to the Peruvians (and the Brit) and thanking them for their hospitality. It was a fantastic dinner.

The next morning Jack and I packed up everything to go back up to our last banding site. Ian insisted that we take the leftover Thanksgiving food – Jack preferred ramen, which we’d been eating for three days and would continue to eat otherwise, but I will NEVER turn down Thanksgiving food!

Of course, it started drizzling just as we set out on our hike, but it wasn’t bad. Once up there, we hacked out net lanes in our last site and set up the nets, and then I enjoyed my Thanksgiving feast, part 2. The second site was much better than the first – our tent was in the middle of the site so we could just roll out of bed and be right there, whereas we had a 30 minute slog through the mud at the first site. We also never had to close early for rain, so we got three full days of netting in. However, there wasn’t a whole lot of activity, at least compared to some other sites. We still caught some cool birds and I saw several new species. During our very last net check on the last day, we caught a barred forest-falcon! That was the first raptor I’d ever caught, and it was AWESOME! When I was holding it in “raptor grip” (you grab the upper part of their legs since their talons are the most dangerous part), it would occasionally start flapping, and it was incredible how powerful it’s wings were. That was the last bird for the San Pedro banding team in 2013 – good one to end on!

Normally the banding team would start their sites over and cycle through until the end of the season, but because we are now down to only five people (we started with ten), there is no more banding team and everyone is back to nest searching and metabolics. So my time on the banding team was short-lived, but I learned a ton, got a lot of good experience, got a nice change of pace from nest searching, and now I get to finish out the last two weeks with metabolics again. Time here is running out! We all leave for Cusco on December 16, so we’re in the home stretch. Hard to believe after nearly 4 months!

Joining the Banding Team

Recently several people from our station left the project or moved to another station, which means that those of us remaining here have shuffled around jobs a bit. Actually, I'm the one with the biggest change - I moved from the metabolics team to the banding team, which is actually what I wanted to do in the first place! Now, instead of just netting in the afternoons to catch birds for metabolics, I do 8 hours of netting every day starting at dawn.

Here is how the netting is organized - there are 11 net sites at San Pedro, and each site has 10 mist nets. The banding team spends 3 days (8 hrs per day) at each site banding and recording all birds that get caught in the nets. After a site is finished (which may take longer than 3 days if it rains), the nets are taken down and moved to the next site. It usually takes a full day to move the nets because you have to find suitable straight paths for the nets to go, and then hack out the vegetation with a machete. So with the day to move nets, 3 days of banding, plus extra for rain delay, it takes about a week per site. Before I joined, the banding team had completed 7 of the 11 sites, meaning that I get to help out with 4! Today was our (Jack is the other person on the team) last day at the 2nd of the 4 sites, and the last 2 sites are far enough away to require us to camp at them. So, tomorrow we'll take down our nets and pack up our gear for a camping trip! We won't leave until Wednesday, though. The nice thing about these camping sites is that we don't delay for rain, so if it turns out that it rains for 1 of the 3 banding days, too bad - we only band for 2 days. I only say that that is nice because we have to hike up with all of our food, so we've got a limited time to get the work done unless we want to hike back down to restock, which neither of us fancies.

Since these first two sites have been fairly close to camp, we've been waking up at 4:15 to eat, pack, hike, and have the nets open by 5:15ish. after opening the nets, we go around and check them for birds every 30 minutes (not so often that you scare birds off, but often enough that they aren't stuck for ages). The morning is usually the busiest time since that's when birds are most active. I think we've gotten as many as 6 or 8 in one round of checking, which isn't a huge number, but we have to band, measure, and collect samples from everything in time to check the nets again in 30 minutes. On a REALLY busy morning, one person will keep processing birds while the other checks all 10 nets (instead of splitting it 5 and 5). Usually only the morning of the first day is really busy because the birds haven't learned where all the nets are. It's nice when things slow down to only 2 or 3 birds per check because it's plenty of time to process the birds without feeling rushed. However, it's quite boring when you go a couple hours without catching anything.

The cool thing about being on the banding team is that I'm getting more experience extracting birds from mist nets, banding them, describing molt patterns, and taking samples. The descriptions of molt are certainly more indepth than anything from metabolics banding, mostly because I'm now working with someone with a lot of experience who can teach me new things and point out interesting patterns. The samples are completely new. During our first day of banding training back in August we learned to take feather and ectoparasite samples, but we never continued doing that in metabolics banding. Now, however, we take tail and breast feather samples from every bird and collect ectoparasite samples from some birds (by rubbing a special powder into the bird's feathers and collecting parasites that fall off). The new one is blood! Jack taught me to collect blood samples from birds, which is actually really cool. It turns out that I'm pretty decent at it, and since Jack prefers collecting the ectoparasite samples, I'm the one that collects most of the blood samples. Yay, experience!

Apparently I joined the team at just the right time because these first two sites were the best ones they've had yet. We caught nearly 70 birds at the first site and over 50 at the second. Plus, they included some really awesome catches, including a chestnut-tipped toucanet, band-tailed fruiteater, plushcap, black-streaked puffbird (so puffy!), and tons of others. Those names obviously don't mean as much without pictures, so I'll post pics when I return to Cusco (in one month). These next two camping sites should be awesome as well because they are at an elevation of 2000m, which is 600m higher than our station (400m higher than the site we just finished). That means we should hopefully get some species with higher ranges that we don't normally see down below. Who knows what we'll catch! It should be a fun trip. :)

The Crappiest of Days

I know I haven’t *really* updated this thing in ages, but I also can’t think about one thing to write extensively about, so this is going to be a couple random things.

During metabolics, we have to take bird temperatures after they’ve been “cooking” at 10 and 34 degrees C (with 20 and 30 degrees thrown in there as well). To do this, we stick a little thermometer up their butt. They don’t seem to like that. Some birds wriggle the entire time while others are paralyzed with fear. (Don’t worry – the thermometer doesn’t hurt them and they are fine afterward.) Of course, some of them like to get back at us for shoving things up their butt by waiting until the best (worst) time to decide to poop. They just sat in a nice little box lined with paper for over an hour, but a number of them decide that they have to go right when the thermometer starts going in. With smaller birds it’s not really a big deal – you get some poop on your hand. It’s the bigger ones that are more terrifying. For instance, one night I had a motmot in metabolics. Motmots are … as big as a breadbox, if you ignore the tail. Maybe marginally smaller? (I’ve forgotten how big loaves of bread are.) Anyways, with bigger birds, they’re not just squeezing out a tiny little turd into your hand… it’s a big one. And they seem to expel it from their bodies with much more force than the little birds. So when I stuck the thermometer up the motmot’s butt right when he decided to drop a deuce, it was like sticking my thumb over a garden hose. I had motmot shit on my forehead, glasses, hand, knee, and the floor. The person who was standing next to me to get her first ever look at a motmot actually took several steps back while saying, “oh jesus”. I would be mad at the motmot, but considering I was keeping it trapped in a box all night and shoving things up his butt, pooping on me was pretty much his only defensive mechanism. I should also say that that was not the first bird to poop on my face, and it probably won’t be the last.

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, so I was pretty excited to dress up this year. I told people weeks in advance that there would be a costume contest and that they should start planning how to use jungle materials. It turns out that I would be the only contestant. For several days I made mental notes of where certain types and colors of leaves were, which types of grasses were best to use as string, and what tools I would need to construct my Scaly-Naped Parrot masterpiece (I had to get the details right because I’m working with bird-people!). The morning of the 31st I spent several hours gathering materials and weaving everything together so that it was … as perfect as perfect can be when you’re in the jungle and weaving leaves together with more leaves. In other words, it was awesome. It didn’t matter that no one else dressed up because, let’s be honest, they would’ve come in second (in my completely unbiased opinion). That day the lodge staff invited us to have lunch with them, and then to play volleyball. Unfortunately I couldn’t really play, given the wings and all, so I was a designated cheerleader. By that point most everyone was used to the fact that I was dressed up as a parrot for the day… except Senior Demetrio, the guy who lives next to the field we were playing on. He walked past me a couple times and just stared, but kept on walking. I sat on a stool on the sidelines (couldn’t sit on the ground because of the tail) and took pictures and whatnot, until it started raining. We all went to take cover in Senior Demetrio’s place, but there were nearly 15 of us so it was a tight squeeze. That is, 14 people and 1 parrot. Senior Demetrio – and now his wife, too – was still staring at me. When my tail bent funny as I tried to sit on my stool, he asked someone next to him (in Spanish) why I looked like that. I responded enthusiastically that it was my “clothes for Halloween”! One of the Peruvian lodge employees explained that Halloween is really only celebrated in big cities like Cusco and Lima, and usually only the children dress up. Whaaat?! I’d like to think that I brought some culture down the Manu Road that day. That, or I’m just the crazy white girl who wore green long johns and covered herself in leaves.

More later!

City Life vs. Jungle Life

Here's a quick update with the top 5 differences between life in the city and life in the jungle (cloud forest):

1. I freak out if there is a cockroach anywhere in my house, but in the jungle it's normal for them to be hanging out with our food. Just brush them off...

2. When it rains at home I simply stay indoors, but in the jungle I'm *always* outside. Plus our water tank gets clogged after a decent rain (nearly every day), so you have to clean it out if you want to use the sink/toilet/shower.

3. When someone has diarrhea at home they just say they aren't feeling well, but in the jungle they describe exactly what is coming out of them, sometimes with sound effects. It's kind of a way to measure *just* how sick you are.

4. Candy bars are a thing at home, but in the jungle we mix sugar, cocoa powder, and milk powder together and lick it off a spoon. Yum!

5. At home I shower daily, but in the jungle I shower either when it's sunny, or when I can no longer stand my own stench.

All in all, it's fun settling into the normal field life and interesting to see how drastically different it is from life back home. It's an experience unlike any other :)

Driving with Drug Smugglers

I have learned a lot while working on this project, from mist-netting to a whole range of British insults, but perhaps the most unexpected bit of knowledge that I've gained is how much cocaine a drug smuggling old woman can hide on herself. Here is what I do on my days off...

Fridays are our days off because of the bus schedules and the (theoretical) ease of getting to town. The bus passes by our lodge anytime from 11am - 2pm (+/- 1 hour), based on road construction. There are also trucks that pass by all day, many of which you can ride in the back of. The trucks are nice because you can theoretically flag one down earlier in the morning, but you might be riding on a sack of potatoes (or in the case of last week, chickens) for an hour. Unfortunately there has been a ton of roadwork lately, so parts of the road can be closed for several hours, but they usually open up briefly during lunch. As a result, you can spend a few hours (>6 for our friends from the Wayqecha station) waiting on the road without any vehicle passing.

Last Friday, Jack and I wanted to go into town (Pilcopata) to go birding in the lowlands and buy our bus tickets to Cusco for our vacation this week (!). We went out to the road around 10am (where the researchers from Wayqecha had been for 5 hours) and were lucky enough to get a truck by 11:30. This truck was packed. When the driver opened up the back for us to climb in, there were probably 30 people staring back at me, with the only people-less area being a mountain of produce sacks. The driver hurried us in, meaning that we basically toppled over onto the mountain of bags. Immediately some of the women started pointing and speaking rapidly in Spanish. At first I thought they wanted me off of their potatoes, but then I realized that they wanted me off the bag of chickens that was squeezed BETWEEN the bags of potatoes. You're right, my mistake. Jack had the same realization a few seconds later when the bags he was leaning on all started moving. Very fortunately we came to a halt at some roadwork, and when the driver let us all out to wander around, we saw that the actual bus was four trucks behind us and had empty seats. Sure, it was two soles more and a bit slower, but I think the chickens appreciated our sacrifice.

After arriving in Pilco, Jack and I went birding in Villa Carmen, which is a little piece of paradise outside that fairly desolate town. We were delayed slightly by a massive thunderstorm moving through, but once there we saw tons of amazing creatures, including a dozen hoatzin preening in a tree, some kind of jacamar, and an aracari. It was a great day for birds!

After that we started our long journey home. We waited for our bus to leave Pilco, and then we had our typical hour-long stop in Patria, a town only 30 minutes from Pilco, where we usually grab dinner from a little restaurant by the buses. Leave it to Peruvians to serve rice, pasta, and potatoes all in the same meal. But it's good (or at least growing on us)! When we returned to the bus, the driver's assistant (person who rides shot gun and is generally in charge of getting people to take the bus) told us to sit up front in her seat, for whatever reason (we were getting off much sooner than most people?). That was nice because it meant that we didn't have strangers pushing over us or hitting us with all of their bags of coca.

Some details about the coca: dried coca leaves are extremely common in Cusco as a remedy for altitude sickness and to ... stop feeling hungry, whatever the term for that is. The actual coca plant is also used to make cocaine. There are limits to how much coca one person is allowed to bring into Cusco, which has something to do with rural people being able to dramatically multiply their profit at the government's expense. The rural folk also use bags of coca leaves as a cover for the cocaine that they are smuggling into Cusco.

Anyways, before leaving Patria, the driver's assistant said that there were actually two empty seats for us to sit in (not together). There was initially a child in mine, and there was just a mountain of coca bags next to Jack, so we were going to squish, but the woman made the kid get up (and join the horde of other kids in the aisle) so I could sit. I would have preferred to just lean on Jack's arm rest because I had women and children bumping into me from all sides (and crying periodically), but I got used to it. About 15 minutes out of Patria we slowed to a stop (normal because of construction), and as soon as I noticed flashing red lights outside, all of the women on the bus started panicking and whispering and moving things around frantically. I realized that it was probably the police doing a drug bust which was why the women were trying to hide their extra bags of coca. Immediately the driver turned the lights out inside to give the women some cover,  and the woman next to me tried to shove a bag of coca into my hands. I shoved it back saying, "No" several times, and then shouted up to Jack warning him to not take anything. He said that no one tried to get him to take anything, but the women next to him actually swallowed what looked like little baggies of cocaine. As soon as the police boarded the bus and the lights came on, I saw that someone had shoved a bag of coca under Jack's arm and frantically shouted for him to get rid of it. The police walked slowly down the aisle shining flashlights on all the women and collecting passports from the men. Their first problem was the woman who was sitting in the aisle a few feet in front of me on a bag of coca the size of an oil drum. Surprisingly enough, the blanket she threw over the bag did NOT fool the police! She started protesting loudly as one officer escorted her off the bus, while the other kept moving through inspecting and questioning certain passengers. Eventually he left the bus and the woman got back on... with a huge smile on her face... and all of her coca. Good to know Peruvian officers can be corrupted, I guess. Oh yes, and the woman next to Jack promptly regurgitated her baggies.

After that brief encounter we kept going on our way, and all of the women were suddenly smiling and giddy as school girls for having evaded the police check point. However, another hour down the road, RIGHT before our stop, there was another check point. This one had them even more on edge because the driver started shouting, "SAN PEDRO! SAN PEDRO!" and then ushered us off the bus, which we think was so they had slightly more space to hide their stashes. It:also meant that we had a 10 minute walk up the road in the dark through the police check point instead of getting dropped off in front of our camp. Since we weren't actually on the bus for the second raid, I can only assume the first was a decoy for the cops to get some quick money, while the second was the actual bust. The rough life of a drug smuggler!

Well, two nights ago Jack and I got another glimpse at drug smuggling as we road a bus to Cusco for our vacation. We left San Pedro around 9pm and napped on and off for a while, with periodic stops for construction and what not. At one point we were stopped for quite a while, but I didn't think anything of it - just enjoyed the chance to sleep without bouncing all over the place. Eventually I became aware enough to realize that it was 1am-ish and there were police on the bus checking for drugs. They didn't bother us at all, but they started confiscating bags of coca from the woman behind Jack. At first she just kind of whined and halfheartedly protested, but as they started searching her bags, under her seat, and the eight layers of clothing she had on, she got pissed pretty quickly. She was SHOUTING at the officer about how he was taking money she needed for her children, and she refused to let go of the bags she was holding so he had to physically wrestle them out of her arms, and in doing so split the bag so that it rained coca leaves on Jack. Soon three more officers joined in and tried to drag her off the bus, at which point she braced herself against Jack's seat and practically ripped the chair out of the ground as the officers pulled her towards the door. Finally they gave up (figured they got enough coca?), at which point she ran forward and started hitting the closest officer repeatedly and calling him a rat. I was pretty surprised that they didn't beat the crap out of her for that one, because you put a hand on an officer in the UK or US and you go to jail. After the whole thing was finally over, the other women on the bus all started shouting, "VAMOS!" to the driver, probably because they wanted to get te heck out of there before their stuff was all confiscated, too. Meanwhile, the woman behind Jack started sweeping up all the coca leaves she could find on the floor and repackaging them. I should also note that an hour earlier, a kid took a dump in a pot not far from where those leaves fell. I think my coca days are officially over.