My First Month in the Jungle

After my first jungle post you get the general idea of the kind of work that I do, so I guess I'll mostly point out interesting things that have happened rather than a play-by-play of each day.

A few weeks ago the jungle got it's first taste of me - I got bit/stung by some kind of creature while on a foraging walk. We're not sure what exactly it was, but it looked like some kind of ant. It bit me in the stomach, and within minutes my whole front - from my shoulders to my waist - was on fire, and basically felt like someone was jabbing a hot poker in my belly button. It sucked that it was my stomach because I couldn't sit comfortably since that scrunched my stomach. The pain went down after a day, but it was still red, warm, and tender for a while longer.

That's one of the interesting things I've learned about the jungle - there is a complete reversal of creatures that I'm scared of / not scared of. Spiders in my mosquito net? Too tired to kill you. Cockroach on the floor? Beat it, cockroach. Possum in the trash? It'll be gone by morning. Ant on my sleeve? "Uhh, hey, there's an ant on my sleeve and it's big. Get it off of me ... I think it's a bullet ant. GET IT OFF OF ME. SERIOUSLY GET THIS SHIT OFF OF ME." (Bullet ants suck, by the way. Apparently they have the same venom as a cobra, and their bites make you feel like you've been shot. The pain spreads through half your body, and you either get diarrhea or you throw up.)

Oh, so you know how last post I said that a tourist invited Katharine and I to the bar for drinks for his brother's birthday? Well that same tourist ended up smelling me. I was at the Colpa one morning with Carloncho, and he walked over to our observation area to chat and see a different view. He started talking about looking forward to having machine-washed clothing again because he couldn't get his clothes to smell clean after five days in the jungle. Carloncho and I laughed and said that five days was nothing... he should try for a month or two. Then the guy said he wanted to know how bad it was, so he leaned down to where my arm was propped over the back of my chair (armpit exposed), and took a big whiff. That may have been the weirdest thing that's happened so far. Carloncho was staring with his mouth hanging open, and I kind of froze in my seat, shocked that this guy would actually WANT to smell me. *I* don't even want to smell me. But he agreed with our original statement and said "oof, that's bad". Thank you, kind stranger. At least you bought me a soda.

While I'm talking about gross things, it wasn't until my third week (I think) that I finally got diarrhea. (Carloncho warned me in my second week that I WOULD get diarrhea at some point and that it was only a matter of time.) Since most of you don't want to read about this, I'll only say that jungle diarrhea is like 15 times worse than city diarrhea, and is sometimes called "The Explosion". You are warned.

What else... oh! So American Thanksgiving isn't exactly celebrated in Peru. Instead, Katharine and I spent the night talking about all of the food we will eat when we get home. Our conversation lasted at least 45 minutes (actually, it's been continuous for about a month). We also spent a good hour googling pictures of cake. I may have hit an all time low when I seriously contemplated licking the computer screen hoping that it might taste like a warm lava cake. Fortunately, I used all remaining willpower and resisted. Apparently Peruvians don't really crave chocolate like Americans and Europeans (granted, they have crappy chocolate here). As a result, the rest of the researchers were just staring at us as we drooled and cried over pictures of desserts. Anyone want to celebrate second Thanksgiving in January?

Oh man, so a couple days after Thanksgiving there was a HUGE storm during the night (we're in the rainy season now, so it rains every other day, if not every day). The storm hit around 3 am, and I thought I was the only one who was awake, but I found out the next day that the rest of the researchers were all awake, too. We sleep in a loft on the second floor, and the middle section of the roof (where the two sides meet at the top to form the ridge along the length of the building) is made of some kind of... plastic? I only specify because we were able to see the lightening flashes through that strip of ceiling. And holy crap there was a lot of lightening! There were lightening strikes every 1-2 seconds for a good half hour (and that was only the high point of the storm - the whole thing lasted for hours). It was like an extreme fireworks show... hosted by NATURE! There was also so much to hear - lightening striking trees or the ground, trees falling down all night (and into the next day), and the thunder! Our loft was shaking from the storm (granted, it shakes when anyone walks up or down the stairs). That was seriously cool. Of course, it's after nights like those where entire sections of trails have disappeared in a tangle of fallen trees/branches, which is something our machetes are no match for (oh yeah, machetes are one of our daily accessories).

The storm continued into the next day, which delayed our climbing (can't climb when the rope is wet). Instead, Katharine and I made (aka watched Carloncho make) brownies, and then she and I ate heaps of batter... like a sickening amount of batter... like I still felt ill six hours later. That was totally worth it. Again, that is not something that Peruvians typically do, so there were half a dozen staff members just staring at us as we shoved spoonfuls of batter into our mouths. We paused briefly for a picture and then just kept eating. I think that should happen again soon. Oh, so after that I had to do nest observations at the nest Hugo. Just a reminder - nest observations are where you sit in a chair and stare up at a nest for six hours. This isn't like colpa where you record data only every five minutes... you have to pay attention for six hours. That sounds nice and easy, right? "But you're sitting in a comfy chair... it's not tiring like climbing is... just listen to music." No. You don't understand. Try staring at one thing for six hours and convince me that you're not crazy by the end of it. It's not even something interesting for six hours. In that time there is maybe 30 minutes of activity in total. That's like watching grass grow for five and a half hours and seeing a line of ants for 30 minutes. I think you get it now. Anyways, after that I was pretty fried and not in a great mood, but as I was gathering my clothes and stuff for a shower, I noticed a plate with a fresh-baked brownie on my bed. At first I couldn't comprehend what this goodness could possibly be, but then the realization set in and I started gasping/shrieking more and more loudly until the guys in the loft thought that maybe I saw a rat or something. Shoving warm brownie into my mouth somehow erased the previous six hours. It was amazing.

The day after there was more rain, which hit while I was observing at the colpa. The rule with the colpa is that after two hours of rain you can radio back for the boat to pick you up. It started raining around 5:45am, and so at 8:00 I packed up and started calling for the boat. Unfortunately the radios weren't working well, or no one was listening on the other end, because I was calling for the boat for 45 minutes. Eventually it came, captained by the barman who brought the chef with him (the barman actually does drive the boats... it was the chef who I was confused about). Instead of taking me straight back, they wanted to go for an adventure, so we took the boat around the island that I was on (in the pouring rain). They even taught me to drive, which was pretty fun. I only ran us into shallow rocks once! By the end of that I was completely soaked, despite my poncho. That afternoon was also cool because Carloncho and I got to make pizzas! Katharine and I had been fantasizing about pizzas for weeks, and so we finally got to make some. One had bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, cheese, and sausage on it, and the other had bacon and ... who cares what else was on it?? THERE WAS BACON!!!!

The next day I was out climbing trees on some of the islands with Carloncho. While we were leaving Colpa Island we heard rustling in the trees, and it turns out there were 20-30 squirrel monkeys all around us!! A tree had fallen down and it's branches were hanging over the trail, so the monkeys were running across, jumping from branch to branch, and watching us as we stood there, completely surrounded by monkeys. There was one monkey who we assumed was the head honcho because he was bigger than the rest, and he was pulling down fruit and dropping it for the others to grab. There were medium sized monkeys, and the babies were the cutest little things ever. They were so small (could have held some of the smallest ones in my hand), and some were just hanging onto their mother's fronts as the mothers wandered through the branches. The monkeys were so curious, too, because as we stood there watching them, they gathered all around to watch us! We were incredibly close, too, maybe only a meter or two from the nearest ones. But of course, neither Carloncho nor I had a camera on us, so this will just have to be one that I remember.

Let's see... so at the end of November some of the macaw eggs started hatching! This means climbing trees to take the chicks down so they can be weighed and measured. One person climbs the tree, then they send down a carabiner using a pulley on the back of their harness, the person on the ground sends a bucket up with a hot water bottle and towels, the climber puts the chicks in the bucket and sends it down, the person on the ground takes all of the measurements and removes any parasites (botflies and mites being the most common), and then sends the chicks back up for the climber to put back in the nest, and then they come down. There can be a lot of down time for the climber while all the measurements are being taken (20-50 min), which can either be good or bad. Some trees have a bunch of ants on the trunks, so you don't want to be bumping into them. Some nests have macaw parents who will squack at you from a distance, and others will attack you. Sometimes it starts raining - if it's a light rain you have to stay up there, and if it's a heavy rain you have to get the chicks back immediately and get down quickly (either way the climber gets soaked). However, the early morning sun over the jungle canopy is pretty much one of the most amazing things ever. And you're up there for so long that it's easy to hear where animals are under the canopy - there might be a herd of peccaries off to your left, some parrots flying behind you, monkeys climbing through the trees on your right, and hey! A climber in the tree a couple hundred meters a way! (That was really cool the one time it happened - Carlitos and I happened to be climbing at the same time, so we got to chat and take pics of each other over the canopy. Unfortunately the early morning sun isn't conducive to pictures.)

The first chicks I retrieved were in Hugo (the first nest to have chicks). That was a relatively easy tree - some ants, parents yelled at me from the branches, nice view. The second nest with chicks was Franz, and that mother is crazy (actually, no, she's just a good mother) - most macaws will fly to the branches when you climb up to their nest, but this mother sits in her nest on her chicks and attacks when you open the door. Sucks for us, but she's being a good mother. To get her chicks, you have to wear thick gloves, throw a towel over her, and hold her down. Then you can grab the chicks while she is immobile. You need to have a fair bit of confidence for that job because she will bite the towel and take it from you, snap at your fingers and arm, and generally make your job difficult. The nice thing is that she doesn't leave her nest, even when her chicks are gone, so you can sit up there in peace while waiting for the vets to finish.

However, the mother in PVC nest is a different story. (Reminder: PVC was the first nest that I climbed, and there were two eggs in it!! There was a third when we started climbing to check for chicks.) The first time I climbed that nest to check for chicks the mother came out of the nest and hung from the entrance waiting for me. Gustavo told me to keep climbing and she would fly away. She did. Great! But no chicks. The second time she didn't fly away, so I had to wave my glove at her, at which point she flew away. Good. Still no chicks. The third time she climbed onto my rope and started coming at me, and when waving my glove at her didn't work, I slapped her in the face with it and she flew off. Okay. But this time there was a chick! (Unfortunately by the next day that chick (and one of the eggs) had died. We think it was because of nest fighting, so the chick either got caught in the crossfire, or the parents were too busy defending the nest to feed the chick.) The fourth time I climbed that nest I had to slap the mom in the face 7 times, and she didn't move. So I patienty hung below the nest hoping I wasn't going to lose fingers or an eye, and then I had to blindly put the chick back (the second one) because I didn't want to climb higher to see into the nest. The fifth time was when it got interesting - the mom came out, I slapped her a couple times, and then she flew at me and grabbed onto my arm. Without even thinking I flung my arm around and threw her like 20 feet before she took control of her flight. That was exciting. The sixth time (and most recent, I believe), was probably the best - when I was getting ready to start climbing, we noticed a couple spider monkeys in the nearby trees! They were climbing all around and were really cute, but then I had to focus on climbing. Halfway up the tree I noticed that MORE spider monkeys were gathering. They were curious as to what I was doing, so they started climbing closer and surrounded the tree I was in. At first I was a little nervous because I didn't know if they would attack or not - a couple of them were jumping on their branches in what I learned later was a threatening manner. Fortunatey they all just seemed to want to watch me and didn't bother me at all. That made it hard to climb because I just wanted to sit there and watch them! At one point I noticed four of them all sitting in a row just staring at me. How cool is that?? It was amazing because I climbed up to where they were, and then higher, and a bunch of them followed and climbed higher in *their* trees! The closest ones were less than four meters away. I also learned that these monkeys are just ridiculous and love to play around. There was one monkey who, instead of climbing himself, decided to hang onto his buddy and catch a ride while he climbed the trees (this was definitey not a mother and child - they were both medium-sized monkeys). Another monkey launched itself from one branch to another, except it wasn't even really a branch, but more like a bunch of palm fronds, so the whole thing dropped a couple meters after he landed in them. These monkeys sure are ballsy. Probably my favorite monkey was one in a different tree from the others. He was watching me and playing around the whole time. He started by swinging on a branch with one arm, then he used an arm and a foot, and then at one point he grabbed it with just his tail and was swinging back and forth like a rag doll with his limbs flailing everywhere... and staring at me the whole time! It was just the most ridiculously cute thing I've seen. Once again... no camera. However, this time would have been difficult to take pictures, even if I had the camera, because I spent my entire time up there making sure I wasn't about to die -- I was able to get the mother away initially by swinging a towel up at her, which she bit onto and was then pulled out of the nest by. However, with all of the monkeys around, both she AND the father came back to perch on top of the nest and protect their nest. So there I am, hanging from a tree in the high canopy of the Amazon, stealing baby macaws as 20 spider monkeys surround me and two angry macaw parents perch above me to defend their nest. How often do you get to say that?? But all was good - got the chick back in the nest and got down with all of my fingers intact. What an amazing climb.

Since nothing else is going to top that, I think I'll save the rest for later!

10 Interesting Jungle Things

I'm in the middle of another *real* post, but I made this list of 10 interesting jungle things while at the colpa the other morning, so I thought I'd share:

1. Spiders that I considered to be "big" at home are now allowed to build webs in the corners of my bed's mosquito net. Spiders that are actually big are fortunately only out at night.
2. Ants are terrifying; they fly, they bite, they make you feel like you're on fire, they can be over an inch long, and they are EVERYWHERE.
3. There is nothing in life that smells worse than a herd of peccaries... except maybe a herd of wet peccaries.
4. I have a new found respect for SoCal water after drinking brown water for a month and a half. I've actually kind of forgotten what clear water looks like, so I don't mind this stuff anymore.
5. Chocolate in the jungle is equivalent to cigarettes in prison. There are laptops and iPhones and whatnot lying out in the open, but it's chocolate that people lock up.
6. I will shamelessly scavenge for food from the remains of the tourist breakfast... like a dog in a trash can.
7. Nothing will make you climb a tree faster than incoming rain clouds, because once you've seen them you have two minutes until you're soaked.
8. You don't quite realize how loud scarlet macaws can be until you're climbing to their nest to steal their children.
9. The three most common topics of conversation are chocolate, sex, and diarrhea.
10. Five minutes after you put something down or walk through an area, there will probably already be a spider building a new web there.

Hoping to get the next post in soon!

Jungle time!

Finally! My time in the jungle!

I left Cusco on Tuesday, November 6 (election day) and arrived in Puerto Maldonado around noon. Arriving at the airport was interesting because we kept getting closer and closer to what appeared to be very thick jungle, and only at the last minute was there a clearing for the airport. It was very warm and raining a ton. After grabbing my bag, I met a woman from the Rainforest Expeditions office who took me to my hostel. Unfortunately she didn't speak a word of English, and she didn't speak slowly to give me time to understand her Spanish. I figured out that she needed to go back to the office to find out what time my boat was the next day, and she said she would be back to give me the information. Unfortunately she didn't give me any indication of when she would return (which turned out to be 7 hours later), so I was kind of tied to my hostel for fear of missing her. Around 5 I gave up and went to the main plaza for dinner and something cold. (As it turns out, Puerto Maldonado is Hell on Earth. Or maybe it was just my hostel with no airflow... or the fact that I was coming from Cusco where I had 3 blankets on my bed and my hands would freeze trying to use my computer outside at night. No matter the reason, I was so hot and uncomfortable that I couldn't even exert the effort to kill the mosquitoes that were biting me.) After some food I went back to sitting in my hostel (the woman came back and told me she would pick me up at 11am the next morning) and watching election results start to come in. Just as it was getting good (around 10pm?), the power in the hostel went out. Great. That meant there was no internet and no fans. Fortunately it came back on 30 minutes later, so I got to watch more results come in before giving up and going to bed (as sad as this is, it was hard to care about seeing the outcome that night considering I hadn't been around for any of the news in the last 2 months, no one else around me even knew what was going on, and I felt like I was being cooked alive).

The next morning I slept in, through breakfast apparently. I went out to grab a quick bite before getting picked up, but everything appeared to be closed, even at 10:30am. I figured I could grab a snack later, so I went back to wait at the hostel. The woman picked me up, took me to the Rainforest Expedition office, told me a lot of stuff in Spanish, from which I could only understand that a guy named Carlos would be meeting me, and I would take a bus with him to the port. She didn't give a time or anything, and it turned out that I waited for over 2 hours. There were no stores near the office, and I didn't see any food available for purchase, so I just sat there waiting. Around 1pm I wanted to make sure I was still in the right place, so I asked a woman at the desk if she knew who Carlos was and when I would be meeting him, and she said "oh, he's right over there". So apparently Carlos had no idea he was supposed to be meeting me... great communication on their part. Fortunately he came over and introduced himself, and I was relieved to see he spoke some English. Not long after that he said our bus had arrived, so we got on with the tourists for the 45 minute drive to the port.

During the drive the tourists' guide passed out food baskets for them, and I was sad to see that there weren't any extra. (By this point it was like 2pm and I hadn't eaten since 5pm the night before.) Fortunately there was a tiny little snack shack at the port, so I bought some crackers and gatorade. It was there that one of the tourists introduced himself to me, and I found out he was actually a visiting professor at Pomona for one year while I was at Harvey Mudd... small world! We chatted a lot on the boat, and with another guy who turned out to be a biologist living in Oregon. They were both really awesome. Pomona guy was also being super nice by trying to make me one of the tourists - I knew that since I wasn't a tourist I didn't get all of the touristy benefits, but when they started passing out food packets wrapped in giant leaves (and I'm sitting there nibbling on crackers), he grabbed one for me (and a juice box, too!) and told me to eat real food. And when we finally got to the Refugio Amazonia lodge (3 hours by boat), there were snacks, drinks, and cold towels for the tourists, which I hesitated about getting, but he told me to grab a towel and then got me a glass of juice. Seriously my favorite person that day.

But yes, so Carlos and I had to stay overnight at Refugio (which is pretty normal when trying to get to the Tambopata Research Center (TRC)). The nice thing was that we stayed in a tourist room, which had two beds, a hammock, private bathroom, and a wall missing for us to enjoy a view of the jungle. The not nice thing was that we had to stay a second night (because there was no boat heading to TRC the next day either), and we had to move into the staff quarters, which were 3 bunk beds per room, communal bathrooms of a much inferior quality (no toilet seats??), and my bed's mosquito net was falling apart and had not been cleaned in what must have been months.

The first night we just wandered the lodge (which was HUGE) and talked to people, ate dinner in the staff dining room, and that night a bunch of staff members were drinking in the bar, so Carlos bought me a drink and we joined them. That was fun and all, until the lights went out at 9:30pm and they lit candles. When you have the only source of light for ... a very long distance, the bugs WILL find you. And they are HUGE. The first bug someone brought over was some kind of water bug, which was nearly the size of a hand. Then came the cockroaches. They were ... 5 inches long? I was impressed because the guys got rid of them by just grabbing them in their hand and chucking them as hard as they could at the ground. After the cockroaches were other flying things. Normally at home when a flying thing flies into a flame, it gets burned and drops dead. The flying things here are so large that they fly into the flame and put it out. I had never seen bugs that big in my life, but the staff members tried to make me feel better by saying that these were nothing compared to the ones I would see at TRC, which is another 4 hours up the river. Fantastic. Anyways, Carlos and I didn't stay more than 30 minutes after the lights went out, so I was able to retreat to the safety of my mosquito netted bed. It being my first night in the jungle, I wasn't sure how many creatures would be crawling into our room during the night, so I just piled everything I could possibly need next to me on the bed - clothes for the morning, flashlight, earplugs, mp3, toiletries, etc. Turns out very little actually crawls into the room - it's mostly just grasshoppers, beetles, little cockroaches, and such (I was imagining turning on my flashlight in the middle of the night and not being able to see through the wall of creatures that had formed over my mosquito net, but thankfully that was not the case).

The next morning we got up at 5am for breakfast (we actually ate the tourist food!) and then intended to join them for an exploration of some lake. For some reason Carlos told me to follow him (on a different trail from the one that the tourists were taking), but we ended up getting lost and never found the lake. Instead we wandered around the trails for a few hours and went to an overlook of the river, climbed to the top of the Tower (like... 30 meters? 35?) to look out over the canopy, and generally just explored. It was on that hike that I realized my sweating potential was way higher than anything I ever expected. We happened to get back to the lodge just as the tourists were getting back, and my Pomona friend grabbed me a glass of tourist juice and a piece of tourist banana bread. After that Carlos and I showered in our fancy tourist room and then packed up and moved to the staff quarters. We ate lunch with the other staff members, and then a bunch of them played volleyball while I sat in the staff living room and chatted with guides - that was when I discovered that Peruvians, or at least every male employee for Rainforest Expeditions, really like white girls. That night was much more calm - we ate dinner, chatted, watched TV, and then went to bed.

Friday we were finally heading to TRC, but our boat wasn't until 11. I woke up with cold symptoms, so I skipped breakfast and just napped on the couch. One guide, Julian, was actually genuinely nice and got me some medicine. I liked him. Finally Carlos and I walked to the boat, but we had to wait a bit until the couple of tourists made it down. From there it was 4 hours to TRC, with a stop at a checkpoint along the way. On the way I mostly chatted with one of the tourists and his guide, Manuel. They were both really nice, and I liked that tourist because during his few days at TRC, he would stop whenever he saw me and tell me about what he saw that day and then ask what new things I did/learned. Really cool guy. Manuel was awesome, too - he kept checking in to find out what new things I was doing, and the day he was leaving was when I first learned to climb, so he was encouraging me with only a handful of sarcasm.

Anyways, we finally got to TRC around 3pm. Carlos and I took a separate path to the researcher's part of the lodge (as opposed to the tourist entrance). On the way we ran into the other three researchers - Carlos (Carloncho from here on out), Lukas, and Yessenia. Turns out Lukas was leaving the next day, so I only saw him the one night. Carloncho had been there two months already and had one more to go. Yessenia had only been there four or five days, but I believe she is staying for two months, like me. At the lodge I met Gustavo, our field leader, Agusto, the lodge manager, and a handful of other guides/employees.

Then Carlos (the one I'd been traveling with, who I'll be referring to as Carlitos) showed me the researchers' loft and my room. We are the only ones living in a second floor of the lodge. It's nice because it's our area and other people don't really come up there, but it can also get quite warm up there, despite all of the open windows/gaps. There are seven rooms, and I think five of them have multiple beds, but for now everyone has his/her own room. We have three hammocks, a couple tables and chairs, a bookshelf half filled with biology/reference books and half with fiction, and in general it's a cool little space to live in for two months! The one downside (to the lodge in general) is that there is no private space anywhere. Yes, I have my own room, but the walls are made of bamboo and they only go up about three meters, while the ceiling is nearly twice that. In fact all of the walls here are made of bamboo, and there is no room that is fully enclosed on all sides. There are also no doors - we have curtains for bedroom and bathroom doors. So basically you can't expect privacy anywhere, and you assume that someone is always listening. The nice thing is that we share the bathrooms with the guests, so they are really nice - toilet seats and everything! Having a nice bathroom was one of the best surprises, especially after using the staff bathrooms at Refugio. So we are in the loft at one end of the lodge, and below us are the guide rooms, the manager's desk/room, and the room with our climbing gear/other equipment/fridge. If you head down the main walkway, the wing with the bathrooms is on the left, and then you pass through the stretch of tourist rooms, reception and the five guest hammocks (which don't smell like mold!), and you end up in the guest dining room. There is also a bar and a little lounge area here. If you take a left at the bar you end up in the kitchen, and turning right you end up at the kitchen staff's bedrooms and the staff dining room, where we eat most of the time. Every other night or so one of us researchers eats with the tourists and their guides, and then gives a presentation afterward about the research that we are doing. But yeah, that is the entire lodge!

The next day (Saturday 11/10) was my first day of work! Every day we have the same basic work schedule, which is broken into three sections: early morning (work from 5-7am-ish), morning (work from 9am-12pm-ish), and afternoon (work from 3-5pm-ish). These are rough times which change based on the activity we are doing. (We have breakfast at 8am, lunch at 1:30pm, and dinner at 7:30pm.) The activities that we do include colpa, arrivals, census, climbing, foraging walks, nest fights, phenology, and nest observations. Colpa is where we go to the clay lick where the birds eat clay during the early morning and count the number of birds of each species that are on the clay lick every 5 minutes. For this we have to get up at 4:15am and take a boat to the island we observe from at 4:45am (this is our earliest activity). Usually we only stay an hour and a half to two hours, but we have to do ten full-day colpas a month, where one person leaves at the usual time but the other stays for 6 hours. At 11am a different person comes to take over, and they stay for 6 hours. I initially thought that job was the devil, but then I realized it's really not bad at all because you only need to pay attention for 30 seconds every 5 minutes, which means you can spend the other 4.5 minutes reading, writing in a journal, listening to music, or napping. Nest observations, which we started this past week, are the devil. We do these when a macaw egg is going to hatch - we start a couple days before we think it will hatch, and then do 3 full-days (12 hours split between 2 people) of observation after an egg hatches, followed by 2 full-days and 5 half-days (6 hours) every week. There are no breaks during nest obs - you have to stare at a nest for 6 hours and record any and all macaw activity. It seems easy, but staring at something for 6 hours is exhausting, and you can bet that even if nothing has happened for an hour, the minute you look away the birds will try and mess with you. On my first day doing nest obs I had been staring for an hour and I knew there was one macaw in the nest (because we have a camera in there). She decided to come poke her head out, and so I noted that down, and when I looked up she had moved on top of the nest, so I noted that down too. When I looked up again, there was another macaw coming out of the nest. I have no idea where that macaw came from, or at least which macaw I had seen on the camera. I really think they know we're watching them and just coordinate when to screw with us.

Anyways, all of the other activities fit into one of our three work times. Arrivals is an early morning activity which requires you to sit on the island across the river from Colpa Island (geography lesson: the colpa (clay lick) is attached to the mainland, Colpa Island is separated from the colpa by a little river and is where we observe the colpa from, and Lost Island is separated from Colpa Island by the main Tambopata River and is where we usually record arrivals from) and count the number of birds of each species flying to the colpa. You have to record the time, direction, size of the group, and number of subgroups (if any). The thing that makes this incredibly difficult is that the sun isn't up, so you can't see color on these birds - you have to identify them by flight pattern and sound. I don't know flight patterns at all, but I've got a number of bird calls down (not enough to do arrivals on my own, though). Census is an afternoon activity where you go to certain locations to listen/watch for birds for 10 minutes. The activity itself is very short, but it often requires a 40 minute walk (or even a boat ride) to get to the census point, so it ends up taking a while. Foraging walk is where you walk along a specified route to listen/watch for birds and note down if they are eating anything (and if so, what). The routes are usually pretty long, so this activity can take a couple hours. Nest fights are where you go to specific trees and watch for birds fighting over the nests. However, it's rare that you will actually see a nest fight - there either won't be any birds at a location, or there might be some in the nest who peek their heads out when you arrive. Phenology is something that our field leader, Gustavo, is mainly in charge of - he goes around to specific trees and determines if they have buttons, flowers, unripe fruit, or ripe fruit, and how many of each. We don't know the trees, or how to identify those items, so our job is to basically wander around with him and be his scribe as he tells us what he sees.

Climbing is my favorite activity - we climb trees with natural or man-made nests in them to check for eggs, and eventually to take the chicks out to weigh and measure them. The trees that we climb have small ropes strung through them that cross in front of the nest. The non-climber has to tie the end of this rope to our fat climbing rope and then pull that one over the tree (we can't leave our climbing rope in the tree because our equipment doesn't work if the rope is wet, and this is the rainforest so it's always wet). Also, pulling the rope is surprisingly difficult/tiring, which is why the climber doesn't do it. Once the climbing rope is set up and tied to a tree, the climber uses umars (sp??) to climb the rope. The top umar is attached to the harness and supports the climber's body, and the bottom umar is attached to foot holds. The umars catch on the rope and can't slide down, but they can always slide up. So the technique is to stand on the foot loops and slide the top umar up, which will then catch and hold your weight, and then you sit in the harness and pull your legs up so you can slide the bottom umar up. Now your legs are curled up, so you straighten them and stand on the foot loops and again move the top umar up. You repeat this like a hundred times and then you're at the top of the tree! It's quite tiring, but you get better over time. Before you're allowed to climb trees you have to practice climbing in the lodge - there is a practice rope that hangs next to the staircase up to our loft. But yeah, there are... maybe 30 trees with nests in them? Some we climb more frequently than others, and a few of them have cameras so we don't need to climb them. Each tree is different and has certain benefits or drawbacks - some are shorter and are easier to climb, but some of the taller ones have amazing views. Some of the nests are really easy to check, but some you have to climb to the top and then pull yourself up and over a branch - not what you want to do after just climbing 30m. Some trees have a ton of ants on them, and if the rope brings you close to the trunk you have to climb while trying to avoid rubbing into the tree. Then there are trees with bee or wasp nests in them, so you have to climb in a bee suit. Now, climbing in general is quite a workout and makes you hot and really sweaty. Climbing in a bee suit is like climbing in a sauna. You end up climbing faster because you can think of nothing else besides getting the hell out of that devilish contraption. When you do get out of it, there are seriously just rivers of sweat running down your body. None of what you are wearing will be dry by the end of a climb in a bee suit.

Let's see... oh yeah, so my first day of work I did arrivals with Carlitos in the early morning, watched Carloncho and Carlitos climb in the morning, and did census points with Carlitos in the afternoon. I think it was that day that Katharine, another researcher arrived. She had already been here a month but was using some of her days off to go renew her visa. I was pretty happy to have Katharine around because she is from England and speaks fluent English. Carloncho speaks fluent English (and German and Spanish), Carlitos speaks pretty decent English, Yessenia speaks some English, the guides speak decent English, Gustavo speaks minimal English, and I speak some Spanish, so I've been able to communicate with everyone, but I'm actually able to have a conversation with Katharine without things getting lost in translation. It turns out that she and I are leaving at the same time, so we'll be taking the same boat back to Puerto and sharing a hostel there. She was happy to have me around because for a while she thought she would be the only one here during Christmas (Carloncho left yesterday, Carlitos, Yessenia, and a lot of the staff here will be going to their homes in Puerto for Christmas, so that leaves me, Katharine, Gustavo and his girlfriend Deysi (who showed up this past week), and any guides who happen to be around at that time). Also, Katharine taught me to wait around in the morning after eating our breakfast for the tourists to finish eating their breakfast, because the leftovers get wheeled into the kitchen for us to devour like savages. For some reason the staff breakfast here always consists of rice, chicken, and other lunchy-type foods, as well as bread, and sometimes eggs and pancakes. Katharine and I can't eat rice and chicken for breakfast because it's just too heavy, but the tourists get fruit, yogurt, and cereal, so we wait around for that. If we're lucky they even have leftover bread. Actually, just a couple days ago Gustavo talked to Agusto about how we can't eat much for breakfast but are expected to climb all morning, and now suddenly they are setting aside bowls of fruit, bread, and pancakes for each of us. Hooray!

On my second day I went to the colpa with Gustavo and Yessenia. Gustavo was really good about helping me learn to identify birds - he found them all through the telescope and told me what they were, and then later he went back through and had me identify them all. That day I also watched more climbing and learned to do nest fights with Carloncho. After lunch it was super hot, so Manuel and I went to swim in the river (by swim I mean hold on to the rocks on the river bottom so you don't get carried downstream). Unfortunately no one told me that the river in the middle of the afternoon is pretty much the worst place you can be, because I got the shit eaten out of my legs by sand flies. Those things are the worst because you can't feel them biting you, but there are little drops of blood where they bite, and I had about 50 on each leg. It's one thing to try and show restraint and not scratch a mosquito bite or two, but when you have about 17 bites in 2 square inches of leg, restraint isn't even possible. Well... lesson learned.

The next day I went to the colpa again, and then Carloncho taught me how to climb! I spent the rest of the morning practicing in the lodge. In the afternoon I went to do census points with Gustavo. They were really far away, but on the walk back I saw something move in the bushes and pointed it out to Gustavo. It looked like some kind of dog, which looked back at us and growled. It (and another one) walked away from us, and then we saw that there were four babies! They were adorable and small and curious little things. Gustavo got really excited when I pointed them out and used my camera to take pictures. When we got back he pointed them out in one of the guide books and found out they were short-eared dogs, which are apparently incredibly rare. Like... it's more likely that you will see a jaguar or a puma here than a short-eared dog... and we saw a whole family! On my third day! I think everything here is pretty cool, so I was just normally excited, but when I got back and told Carlitos and some of the other guides, they were all really jealous. Carlitos has been here two years and hasn't seen a single one.

The next day (I think this is now Tuesday 11/13) I did a census with Katharine and then practiced climbing for much of the day. That was also Agusto's birthday, so Carloncho made brownies and we had a little fiesta that night (the lights stayed on past 9:30pm!!). I chatted with some American tourists and then joined Carlitos and some of the guides/staff. Turns out my Spanish is much better after a couple Cuba Libres. Eventually went to bed around midnight so I could get up a few hours later and climb my first tree!

I kept hearing how some previous researchers were scared of heights and would occasionally panic at the top of a tree, so I was concerned I wouldn't do well with the heights. But just as with the climbing in Cusco, turns out I had no problem with it. But yes, my first tree was supposed to be Angeles, but the camera turned out to be working so I didn't need to climb it. I didn't need to climb the next two either because their cameras were also working. Those were the only ones for me, Carlitos, and Gustavo to do that morning, and I was sad that all of my trees had just been stolen, so we ran ahead to steal one from Katharine, who was also climbing in the area. My first nest ended up being PVC, and there was an egg in the nest! There was also a curious macaw who came out to bite at my rope. I was relieved that I found out the night BEFORE that the birds might decide to bite at my rope, because if they started doing that without me having some notice, I bet I would've been less calm. That morning I climbed Cuba, and then later Max (which is on Colpa Island and requires a bee suit). Fortunately for me it was just before a storm, so it was kind of cool and not very sauna-like in the suit. Unfortunately, the boat took a little too long to come back and get us, so we got absolutely drenched. We could see the wall of rain making it's way down the river. The fun thing was that just before that, a capybara swam over to where we were on the edge of the island and started rolling in the mud. It was adorable! I took a video of it. That night we played lots of Jenga, and I was exhausted from my first day of real climbing, so I went to bed by like 8:45pm.

The next day I climbed Pukakuro, which has bees but according to Carloncho they never attack women (I found out a couple weeks later that this is false), so I didn't wear the suit. The macaws here are very protective of their space, though, because he said they might come out and try to bite me. This was true. I got to the top with one of them peeking down at me the whole time (kind of cute). But when I needed to go back down, every time I reached for the top umar, the bird in the nest would lean forward and try to peck my hand. It was like some kind of game  getting the macaw to lean out of the nest. I even tried moving slowly, and then the bird just moved slowly. It was fun, until the other one jumped onto the rope and started climbing down toward my umar to bite at me from above. That's when I had to get my other glove out and start waving it around to scare them off. In the afternoon I went to the colpa for 6 hours, during which time the water level rose at least a meter from rain upstream. It was crazy to see how much land disappeared from the time the boat dropped me off to when it picked me up again. That night I ate dinner with the tourists and gave the presentation. Unfortunately there was a really annoying tourist there who was pissing everyone off... including the other tourists. There was a collective sigh of relieve when he decided to not stay for the presentation. One of the really awesome things was that one of those tourists gave us some chocolate and tea bags that she had. I love friendly people!!

The day after that we all had a free day, which is unheard of. We still don't know why it happened, but we didn't dare question it. I spent most of that morning in my PJs just relaxing in hammocks. Katharine and I got evicted from the guest hammocks when some new guests arrived (apparently we are unsightly or something), so we went to sit at the bar lounge, but we got evicted from there too. We ended up sitting on the couches in front of Agusto's desk, being very bitter, and then one of the new tourists came over to chat with us, and eventually invited us to the bar with him to have drinks for his brother's birthday. Take that! No amount of evictions can stop us... when we're with tourists! These guys also said they had chocolate, and that they would definitely give us some before leaving. How do people know this is what we desperately need??

Okay, this is enough for one day, I think. Now I'm only like two weeks behind!

My Last Week in Cusco

I never actually told you about my last week in Cusco. Well that's kind of too bad because I don't remember a lot of it. I'll tell you about Halloween and my climbing day, though!

I think it was Halloween day that I finally went to the Chocolate Museum down the street from my hostel. That place was awesome! When you go inside you get a free cup of chocolate tea, which is tea made from the husks on cacao beans. It tasted like hot chocolate, but it was tea -- crazy! You could tour the museum for free - they had a bunch of informational signs all over the walls, a couple short movies to watch, and you could watch them making chocolate. I also signed up for the 2-hour workshop in which you make chocolate starting from the cacao beans! You start by roasting the beans, shelling them, and then you have to grind them into a paste. That was a little competition for the participants - the person who ground their beans into the most pasty consistency won a bag of the cacao husks for making chocolate tea. I totally won! After that the woman used our pastes to make different drinks for us to try, including Mexican hot chocolate. I think we skipped some steps because there should have been a tempering process in there, but it would've taken too long for us, so they gave us chocolate to use for making our own candies. We got molds to fill with chocolate and other things, like sprinkles, milk powder, chili powder, almonds, M&Ms, etc etc. They kept them in a fridge for us to pick up in an hour. Very yummy! So glad I went there - it was a great museum.

That evening I ate dinner at a restaurant overlooking the plaza, which was awesome because all of the local children gathered there in their costumes to meet up with friends, take pictures, and get candy. I went down after dinner and saw so many cute costumes! There were adults dressed like Disneyland characters with photographers around for families to take pictures with. There were also people selling candy (basically to the tourists) so they could give it away to the children. I bought a bag and was instantly mobbed by little children with their hands out yelling "HALLOWEEN! HALLOWEEN!" There were so many of them I was literally getting pushed over by the huge mob. When I finally ran out of candy, those around me gave me looks as if I had just killed their dog. One woman came up to me with her crying child in her arms, expecting me to get more candy for him. It was a very strange experience because I was doing something nice, but then people got mad when I couldn't be MORE nice. Oh well. A bit later I was just standing around taking pictures and whatnot and I swore I felt the guy next to me pull his hand out of my (fortunately empty) pocket. After that I moved everything to zippered pockets, but it was another 15 minutes before I even thought to check my backpack (which I had had with me from earlier in the day) -- one of my pockets was partially opened, and someone had taken my SteriPen (water purifier). DAMN! Fortunately it wasn't my mp3 player (which was right next to where my SteriPen was), passport, laptop, or any other vitally important thing, but it was still pretty frustrating. After that discovery I went back to my hostel.

That day 4 or 5 new girls showed up to stay in my room. I got to talking with one of them (Caroline) outside the room, and a bit later another one (Yvonne) joined us, and then we decided to go out for dinner and drinks. We went to the Irish Pub in the plaza and were invited to sit with this couple (limited seating), and we got on really well with them. We stayed a couple hours and then decided to head back (Yvonne needed to bring soup to her friend in the room who had altitude sickness). By that time there was a party in the hostel - live band and some dancing, but it cleared out pretty quickly after the rain picked up. So, despite my hiccup with the theft in the plaza, my night turned out to be pretty fun.

The next day I hung around the hostel in the morning and then went out walking and exploring with Yvonne. We went to the San Pedro Market, which is a huge market with food, textiles, and gambling. We ran into a guy from our hostel there, and he offered to buy us some fertility powder. What a sweet guy. Yvonne and I also ran into some boys who had a llama and some baby sheep, so we took pictures with them. (Yeah, anyone who tells you they have a baby alpaca is lying.) On our way back to the hostel we went to a panaderia and had some delicious butter croissants (which resulted in me going back daily until I left Cusco). We got Yvonne's sick friend (Ali) from the hostel and wandered around with her for a bit, and then later we all got massages at this really cheap (but decent) place near the plaza -- $10 for an hour massage! They never actually told us when the massage was over (they had left a couple times during it to get hot stones and whatnot, so when they left the last time we assumed they would be coming back, so we all started talking and saying how warm it was under the blankets, and that we weren't going to leave until they actually told us to get out. Turns out they HAD finished, and after 10 minutes one of the women came back, peeked in to see that we were all still lying there, and said "finite!!" Whatever -- we had fun!

The next day (11/2?) Yvonne and Ali had plans to go climbing and zip lining in the Sacred Valley, and they had invited me to join them. I agreed, and so we all got picked up at the hostel around 8am. It was an hour or hour and a half to get to the site, and the route we took was the reverse of the Sacred Valley tour I did with my dad, so I recognized a lot of places we drove by. When we got to the place (a parking lot with a giant metal storage bin that housed a toilet and little snack stand), they got us all (there were 2 vans... about 20 people) fitted with harnesses and explained procedures and whatnot.

Ali and I were under the impression that "climbing" meant "walking up the mountain on a nice clear trail". What it actually meant (which Yvonne thought was obvious when she said "climbing") was scaling the side of the mountain by climbing up metal rungs and clipping into a safety wire with carabiners. As soon as we saw this, Ali and I just looked at each other like "oh crap". We were debating joining the group that actually WAS just walking up a safe little trail, but then Ali decided to jump on it and try climbing first (which was super awesome of her). She got like 5 meters up and then froze, with Yvonne on the wall halfway below her. Yvonne climbed back down, and we decided we would all just go on the hike once the guide got Ali down. Little did we know, the guide went up there to coax her further... so we were going to climb the side of the mountain, apparently. The guide with Ali stayed with her pretty much the entire time. Yvonne and I decided to go last, thinking that the other guide would take up the rear. In the end, the second guide mainly bounced between Yvonne and another girl further up who kept getting stuck/nervous. I was dead last, which was nice in the sense that I took a bunch of pictures while waiting for everyone else to move, but it meant that I also had to wait for everyone else to move. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had no problem with the heights, including when we crossed over a suspension "bridge", which was essentially two cables to balance on and another to hold. After a few hours of climbing, we finally got to the zip lines. (There were four zip lines and one belaying section to get us back to ground level.) I've never been zip lining anywhere else, but the Sacred Valley seems like the most amazing place to zip line. It was absolutely fantastic! After the climbing adventure was over, we had an hour and a half ride back to Cusco, and then some of the climbers/guides went out for dinner. Later that night a couple of us met up again for salsa lessons (which may have been a mistake given how sore we were from climbing), but all in all that was a pretty amazing day!

I spent the next couple days wandering around Cusco, hanging out at my hostel, shopping, eating, and generally just relaxing. Tuesday (election day) was the day I left for Puerto Maldonado to start my 2-month jungle adventure! But I'll save that for the next post (which HOPEFULLY doesn't take as long to get to as this one did... sorry!).

Lake Titicaca

First off, I'm posting this using the Blogger app on my tablet, and it doesn't seem to like pictures, so this may be picture-less for a while. But I'll work on it.

I left off with that wonderful, first class day that we had with the nice hotel and the fantastic train ride, yes? Well here starts the problems of budget travel...

My dad got picked up to go to the airport around 10am on Sunday. Surprisingly, check-out of the hotel was at 9am, so we sat around in the lobby for a while, watching some parade going down the street. Turns out the entire plaza was filled with people dressed according to the group they were with, and everyone was marching around the plaza. I thought it was some kind of spectacular celebration, but the same thing happened this past Sunday, so maybe this is a weekly thing...

After watching the activity in the plaza for a little while, I wandered the couple blocks to my hostel, checked in, repacked my things for my trip to Lake Titicaca, and then spent a few hours at Starbucks, reading and watching the plaza. The Starbucks here is huge, as in there are 5 different rooms with a ton of tables, couches, etc, and windows all over the place to enjoy the different views. There is also a doorman who opens the door for you. At first I thought he was pretty cool, but it turns out he also walks around and makes sure things are tidy, which can get kind of annoying at 5-minute intervals for 3 hours when no one has even entered the room I'm in to make a mess. Oh well.

The next morning (Monday) I got up early to get a taxi to the airport for my 10:55am flight to Juliaca (near Lake Titicaca). The hostel was great about getting my taxi and storing my huge bag while I was gone for the week. So I get to the airport around... 8:45ish. The StarPeru line was relatively short, which was awesome, until I got to the counter. The guy asked if I was flying to Puerto Maldonado or Lima, and I said Juliaca. He looked at me with bug eyes (that's never a good sign) as I passed him the ticket I purchased from the StarPeru website in August. The only thing he said was "we don't fly to Juliaca". Umm... WHAT? I pointed at the ticket that I bought from the StarPeru website and showed where they charged my credit card, asking how I was charged for a flight that didn't exist. He got up to ask someone about it, came back a few minutes later, and said that no, they don't have flights to Juliaca. He suggested that I take a taxi to the StarPeru office in Cusco and ask for a refund, which I pointed out still wasn't going to get me to Juliaca. He said I could probably find a bus company in Cusco that would get me there in 5-6 hours (what bus company? where are they located? what is their reputation?). I asked if there were any other airlines that had flights to Juliaca that day, so he went around asking and found one through LAN at 4pm for $208. I left the counter and tried to think what to do. At that point I was really upset and annoyed, particularly because the ONLY reason I chose to fly to Juliaca was because it was far cheaper ($60) than the train ($210). I decided I should just buy the plane ticket because it would be easier/safer than a bus company I know nothing about. So now I was paying the same price to fly as it would have been for the train, but instead of enjoying 10 hours of beautiful scenery on the train and really nice food, I was suffering through 7 hours of sitting in the airport with crappy food, uncomfortable seats, and loud children.

I. Was. Furious.

Somehow I was slightly comforted by the fact that a woman in my row on the flight also bought a ticket through StarPeru first. We ended up sharing a "bus" (a very large van) to Puno, which is the city right by Lake Titicaca where all the hotels are. Fortunately my hotel was pretty nice - there was good wifi reception in the room (which isn't very common, even among good hotels), there was free tea, and a huge shower.

Tuesday morning I was supposed to be picked up from my hotel by a tour agency and transfered to the pier for a 2-day tour of Lake Titicaca. I had emailed the guy several days earlier asking what time I was getting picked up, but he never responded. The online trip notes said 8:00 - 8:30am, so I just went with that. At 8:30 I asked the hotel to call the number provided for problems with pick-ups (which turned out to just be an answering machine in Cusco). Then they called the emergency number, and fortunately the guy who answered quickly arranged for someone to come get me. Unfortunately, it was so late that my boat had already left, so I had to catch up to them on another boat. Fantastic. The really crappy part was that the first stop was the Uros Islands, which are the floating islands made of reeds, the main reason I paid for that tour in the first place. Everyone else got over an hour to explore the various islands, talk to the people living on them, learn about them, etc. and I barely got 10 minutes. Starting to dislike this whole budget travel thing... (I emailed the guy who arranged the tour, and he forwarded it to the complaint department, so hopefully something happens with that).

The rest of the day went quite well - it took us 3 hours to get to Amantani (?) Island, where we were divided up for our homestays. I ended up staying with 2 Brazilian women in probably one of the nicest houses - there was an actual toilet to use (flush by dumping a bucket of water in the toilet bowl) and even a light in our room! Another couple told me that had a bucket out back for a toilet and one candle in their room. All of the houses were made of mud bricks, but ours had something like a layer of plaster over the front of the house (to make it look nicer?). We were definitely living the high life.

Once we got to our house, our Mama (the mother of the house) cooked us lunch, which was quinoa soap, little potatoes, some kind of root, lettuce, tomato, fried cheese, and tea. It was actually quite good (especially the cheese, but I wasn't crazy about the root). Then we had a little siesta during which the other women napped and I read. Sometime in the afternoon we met up with the rest of the tourists and guide to climb to the top of the ... larger-than-hill-but-smaller-than-mountain ... to see the sunset. First of all, that was exhausting. We were over 12,000 feet of elevation, so walking up a flight of stairs is tiring, let alone climbing a mini-mountain. Needless to say it took quite a while. Second of all, the air there was incredibly dry. I was constantly finding blood in my nose, and we all woke up the next day with dry throats. It made the hike that much more difficult. It was at the top that I also realized that other people really suck at taking pictures. A number of people asked me to take their picture, and I'm not saying I'm a fantastic photographer, but I know how to keep my fingers out of a shot, not take pictures directly into the sun, and include actual scenery as a background rather than a rock wall. After looking at some of the pictures other people took of me, I think I might be better off taking facebook-style pictures of myself. Anyways, once the sun went down it got quite cold quite fast, so we wandered back down to the houses. For dinner our Mama made maize soup, rice, eggs, and tea. There was another guy who joined us for dinner (who I found out the next morning was the president of the community - each community has a president who is elected every 3 months. This guy was staying in one room in our house - I'm not sure if the president always stays at this house, or if it changes based on the president.). After dinner the father asked the president to help his son, William, with his math homework. It was basic geometry, areas and stuff. I was surprised because the president read the problem, and then said "oh, okay here's how you do it..." and then did the whole problem for the kid. He got stuck on a later problem, so he had to translate it to English for me so I could explain it to him, but rather than make sure William understood the concepts, he just wrote down the answers. Hopefully William learns it at some point...

After that our Mama provided us with traditional clothing to put on so we could go to the fiesta in the library! It was a little party that happens every night (apparently there are tourists most nights) - there was circle dancing (just like in Zuleta), but with hand-holding. There was a 3-person band and a little table to buy refreshments from. The president asked me to dance like 4 times (when was the last time YOU danced with a president?), and then we all wandered back to the house around 9:15 (in bed by 9:30... crazy). Unfortunately I only had one sheet and one thin little blanket, so I froze my ass off that night. It was really cold! I was also next to the window, which despite being closed probably let in a lot of cold air. Plus, when the Brazilian in the bed next to mine started snoring, I reached for my ear plugs... and dropped them under my bed where they rolled into the corner. I did not get much sleep that night.

The next morning we were up at 6:30am, ate breakfast (which was a simple pancake and tea), took pictures with the family, and then got on the boat at 7:30am to go to Taquille Island. The ride was only about an hour and a half, but the waters were incredibly rough. We were in a tiny little boat, and it was rocking from side to side so much that the water was just rolling onto the deck. Waves were crashing into the front of the boat so hard it sounded like a hammer. Our guide tried to be funny by pointing out where the life jackets were, but no one laughed (by this point most people had moved to the back of the boat, outside, and were being sick). Thankfully I applied what I learned in the Galapagos and just smooshed myself against the window and stared at the horizon like it might disappear any second... and I didn't get sick, yay!

Once on Taquille Island, we wandered on the beach for 10 minutes (enjoying land), and then started our hike across the island. Fortunately there wasn't much elevation gain, so it was a pretty easy hike, but it was at least an hour or more. At the other end of the island we stopped for lunch. Our choices were trout or an omelet, so I opted for the omelet. Overall there was quinoa soap, the omelet (which was HUGE), rice, and fries. I only ate half of mine (because it was huge, I didn't want a full stomach for another boat ride, and I was the last one to be served by about 20 minutes), and then we had another 20 minute walk to the boat and about 500 stairs to climb down. After that it was a 3-hour ride back to Puno (fortunately the waters were much more calm), and then we were transfered to our hotels.

Thursday I ended up staying at the hotel all day. I was really tired from traveling and Puno didn't look like the nicest city. In retrospect I should have gone out a little because staying inside made me forget to drink water, so I wasn't feeling great by the evening. Also, this seems silly now, but when there is one TV channel in English, it is infuriating when the episodes shown in the morning are repeated in the evening.

Friday I got up early to pack, eat a quick breakfast, and get a taxi to the train station at 7am. There is only one type of train that runs from Cusco to Puno - the Andean Explorer. This train was nearly as nice as the Hiram Bingham (tablecloths, roses, comfy seating, window curtains, etc). I had my own little seat and table by a window (solo traveler) - it was super cute. At the back there was even a lounge car with a bar and comfy chairs everywhere, and behind that was a car with an open back and windows all over. Lunch and afternoon tea were free, but breakfast and anything else cost money (needless to say there were not endless bottles of free wine - only one free glass of house wine at lunch). One unfortunate thing was that our car got incredibly warm. I mean, I find that I can't handle heat as well as other people, but there was another group of travelers that were just short of finding a crowbar to get their windows open. And the thing that killed me was that a server kept coming by asking if I wanted anything hot to drink... NO! I asked if she had anything at all that was cold. She suggested a soda with ice, and I happily risked digestive issues for some sweet relief. Soon after we stopped at a station for a few minutes and they let us wander around outside, so that definitely helped, too. (By the way, that station was 14,172 feet above sea level - highest elevation I've been at.)

OH! And food on this train: I ordered scrambled eggs for breakfast and they were delicious, then I got a yellow potato with mushrooms in some kind of chili sauce, followed by sirloin beef and quinoa with ... something with traditional Andean flavors. For dessert there was some kind of 3-layer ... thing (I should really be a food critic). It was fancy, but I wasn't a huge fan of it. For afternoon tea we had finger sandwiches (I think one had some kind of egg salad, and I know the other had at least a tomato), a little skewer of fruit, and two little chocolates filled with stuff. Yum! By the way, the trip was absolutely beautiful. There were also creatures pretty much throughout the entire trip (cows, sheep, llamas, donkeys, etc.). At one point we passed what must have been a llama/alpaca farm - there were hundreds of them! It was like that scene from Return of the King (used by all those Energizer commercials or whatever) where all of the horses are gathered together and Aragorn is making some kind of inspirational speech... yeah, it was that but with llamas and alpacas.

So that was pretty much the end of any planned travels. Saturday and Sunday I basically ate breakfast at my hostel, read in the plazas, sat at Starbucks for a few hours sending emails, doing blog stuff, and applying for more jobs, and tried food at various places. Turns out my hostel has pretty good food for super cheap - twice I've gotten a plate of spaghetti with mushrooms, red peppers, and onions, cooked in wine, and topped with cheese... for $4. Might have to stick to eating at my hostel. Monday I went to an Irish Pub (the highest one in the world). They had DELICIOUS chicken quesadillas with bacon, guacamole, and other stuff, and didn't question me at all when I ordered a beer at 11am (had no idea it was still that early). After that I walked to the StarPeru office for my refund. They told me to come back later because the guy who deals with money wasn't in. So I sat at Starbucks for a couple hours (breakfast beer and afternoon coffee...) and went back at 5pm. The guy didn't speak English, but he had already been told I needed a refund, so it was pretty straightforward. However, he gave me my refund in US dollars (that's what I paid in initially). I asked for it in soles, and he said no. StarPeru inconvenienced me with 7 hours waiting in an airport (essentially a lost day of travel) and 2 separate trips to their office, and he couldn't give me soles?!? If he had spoken English I would have argued and not left until I got soles, but it wasn't worth it to try and do it in Spanish. Now I have $63 which I am refusing to pay to change into soles.

Speaking of money issues, I've learned that ATMs here are really stupid. Since I'm not using Chase ATMs I get charged a flat fee for every withdrawal, so it makes sense to take out as much as possible only a couple of times rather than many small withdrawals, yes? Well the ATMs give you the largest bills possible, whereas US ATMs don't give you anything larger than a $20. So I end up with 100s and 50s, which no one wants because they don't want to give up all their change.

I have three more days here in Cusco until I fly to Puerto Maldonado, spend a night, and then take an 8-hour boat ride up the river to the Tambopata Research Center. Can't believe it's so soon! I'll hopefully get another post in before then to finish up my time in Cusco. I haven't gotten to Halloween or climbing a mountain!

Lima, Cusco, and Machu Picchu

My last post ended with us leaving the Galapagos Islands for Lima on Monday, October 15. We had a layover in Guayaquil where my dad and I got lunch at some little restaurant. The cool thing about this place was that they had buzzers on the table that you could push to receive service. It was awesome! The waiters didn't come by three times to ask if we were finally ready, and we got the check exactly when we wanted it. Nifty.

Our hotel in Lima was nice, but strange in some ways. There were two beds, just as we asked for, but there was about an inch between them. And in order for my dad to get out of bed, he basically had to step into the bathroom. It wasn't even a tiny room, it was just strangely organized.

Lovers Park

Tuesday we started with brunch at the hotel (a buffet with lots to choose from), and then we went on a 3-hour tour of the city. This was pretty much one of my favorite tours (besides the Galapagos). Our tour guide, Sheila, had the perfect balance of providing information without overwhelming us for 3 solid hours. Our tour covered the Plaza de Armas, City Hall, and the Cathedral, where we were able to go down into the catacombs and see where 25-30,000 people were buried. SO many bones. Some of these buildings did not allow pictures, so it's harder to remember what we saw in each place. After the tour we just wanted to relax, so we sat in our hotel room watching movies all afternoon/evening. It was so nice. We went downstairs for dinner at the hotel, and then packed our things (while watching more movies).

I think this is where Francisco Pizarro is buried.

Catacombs under the Cathedral! We couldn´t take pictures down there, but we could take them through the grates in the floor of the Cathedral.

Wednesday we had another buffet breakfast, and then we were taken to the airport for our flight to Cusco! It was a relatively quick flight, but we had to circle the Cusco airport once because the tailwind was too strong. This was also when I realized that I'm just more prone to altitude sickness than other people - we had been taking pills to help with the altitude for a couple days (and I spent 5 weeks in Ecuador for crying out loud), but after landing it felt like I was hyperventilating in my seat, and I was sweating like crazy because they turned off the air in the plane for the descent. That combination kind of makes you think you're dying. After getting our bags, we met up with our driver and guide who took us to our hotel. At this point I was having difficulty comprehending the things around me and I was incredibly tired, but at the hotel the guide wanted to go over our next 4 days in detail. FORTUNATELY she wrote everything down, either on a map or on our printed itinerary. I really appreciated that considering I had no idea what was going on at the time, haha.

So many sides, and the rocks all fit together so well!

After that we had a couple hours to rest before our 3-hour city tour. Here's a tip: DO NOT plan any kind of tour your first day in a high-altitude city (particularly over 10,000ft). The good thing was that our guide, Celio, was completely understanding that we were still adjusting to the altitude, so he took baby steps the whole time and didn't make us climb crazy hills or ruins. [As many of you know, I walk incredibly fast. Next time you want me to slow down, just take away half of my oxygen... that should do the trick.] I was also in full zombie mode by this point. Several times I realized that I was just standing there, staring at Celio or the scenery with my mouth hanging wide open. The really unfortunate bit is that Celio taught us SO MUCH about the Incas, Cusco, and other things, but I remember almost none of it. Darn. After seeing several sites of Incan ruins, he took us to the Cathedral in the Plaza de Armas. My one complaint about this tour was that we spent an hour in the Cathedral. My dad and I were used to popping into cathedrals, taking some pictures, wandering briefly, and leaving within 20 minutes, but Celio wanted to explain every aspect of the Cathedral to us. Given that I hadn't been absorbing any other information that afternoon, I could've gotten away with 10 minutes in there. After the tour we walked less than a block to a restaurant called Incanto and had quinoa soup (not as good as the one Daniel makes in Zuleta!) and some kind of quinoa main dish. Then we went another block or two to our hotel and crashed.

This is where the Incas would perform sacrifices.

The Cathedral in the Plaza de Armas.

Thursday we had an all-day tour of the Sacred Valley. First we ate breakfast at the hotel and heard the firecrackers that call people to church, and then we were picked up and put on a bus of Spanish-speaking people. We ended up switching buses at a little bus "terminal" to an English-speaking bus with Alfredo, quite possibly the worst guide I've ever had in my life (which should become evident a bit later). Before I get into the tour, here are a couple notes about the driving: double yellow lines (indicating that you can't pass) mean absolutely nothing, it's completely normal to shoot to the center lane in a roundabout and then swerve across the outer lanes when you want to exit, if there are two lanes of traffic moving in the same direction, apparently it's okay to cut inbetween them going the opposite direction, and if you're not constantly laying on the horn, you must not be from around here.

Back to the tour - we started by making a quick stop at a vista point overlooking the valley, and then a few minutes later we stopped again at a market. We paid to explore the Sacred Valley, and our second stop was to a market which had the same souvineers that every other market in South America seems to have. Good use of time. After that we drove up a very large hill to get to a big Incan terrace site. There were something like 11 of us tourists - some had gotten used to the altitude, but an older couple, a couple that had just flown in from Miami, and my dad and I were still trying to adjust. When we started the climb to the top, I asked Alfredo twice in less than 5 minutes if he could slow the pace. His response was to just keep climbing and leave the slow-pokes behind. When I FINALLY got to the little house at the top (where the others had been for 5-10 minutes already), Alfredo came over and said "you take your picture and then we go back down, okay?", to which I replied "no, I want to take LOTS of pictures, and I just got here so I'm not about to climb back down". Once again he left half of us behind while leading the other half down. With the pace he was keeping I was sure we had a lot of things to squeeze into one day. Unfortunately, half the places we went were markets where he likely earned some commission off of our purchases for bringing us to them. I wanted to punch Alfredo in the face when I realized he rushed me up and down a mountain at something like 12,000 ft of elevation so that we could get to his precious market that much faster. Jerk.

The little bump in the top center of the picture is the house we hiked to.

Pisac market! Very colorful (and cheap).

Where we ate lunch!

After the Pisac souvineer crafts market we headed off to eat lunch at a really nice hotel in the valley. It was a HUGE buffet lunch with a variety of meats, sauces, salad things, sushi, grains, and desserts. Our table was looking out on the nearby river and was right by some guys who were playing music on traditional instruments. It was such a nice and relaxing change from the rest of the morning. Despite all the wonderful food, none of us wanted to stuff ourselves because we knew we had to endure another long drive in our van. Fortunately the driver went a bit easier on us after lunch (as in making sure the front AND back sets of tires cleared a speed bump before accelerating again). Our next stop was the Ollantaytambo fortress which was huge and looked magnificent, especially at that time of day. Alfredo must have turned over a new leaf, because he kept the pace slow while we were climbing, and when we got to the bottom again, we were only missing one person! After the fortress we had one more stop at Chinchero, where we saw a demonstration of washing and dying wool. This was actually really cool because they use a plant called the "shampoo plant" to clean the wool - when you grind the leaves and mix with water, it makes soap! They also use anything from dirt to bugs to get the basic colors, and then mix with other types of powders or rock crystals to change the shade. I bought a shoulder bag here, and probably paid more for it than at another place, but the demonstration and explanations were really awesome. We finally made it back to Cusco around 7pm, and my dad and I grabbed a quick dinner before heading home. It was a LONG day.

Me with an alpaca in the morning...

... and again in the afternoon! (check the fork)

Ollantaytambo Fortress

Look at that fit! The knobs helped with transport.

Floating stairs

Note the perfect Incan parts and the not-so-perfect restored parts.

Wool-dying demonstration - you can even kind of see a stripe in the middle wool indicating where she added powder to change the shade.

Lunch on the train!

Friday we took the Vistadome Train to Machu Picchu! It was a 3-hour ride that got us into Aguas Calientes (the town below Machu Picchu) around noon. [[Side note: the planes and trains here have MUCH better food than in the US - on this train we got roasted potatoes and cheese cubes in yummy seasoning, a quinoa dish, cookies, and a drink. Our plane rides have included things like scrambled eggs and ham, bread rolls that are relatively fresh, fruit, and other edible things that I've actually consumed and enjoyed.]] Anyways, a guy from our hotel was at the train station and took our bags ahead. Another guy was supposed to take us to Machu Picchu, but he told us we could stop by our hotel first to check-in and see the room. That sounded fine to us, so we wandered down to the hotel (the last one on the block before the road to the ruins) and took our time. Then he finally stuck us on a bus to go up to Machu Picchu. That drive was incredible! Okay, it was also switchbacks the entire way in a bus, so it was a little terrifying, but there were mountains completely surrounding us and it was just an incredible sight.

View from the train. Notice how brown everything is.

View from our hotel balcony. Notice how green everything is!

When we got up there, our guide surprised us by saying we were over an hour late... WHAT? Apparently the guy who picked us up at the station was supposed to send us DIRECTLY to Machu Picchu so we could get to our tour on time. He must not have been aware of that. (I definitely thought it was strange that a porter was taking our bags down the road when we were walking there ourselves.) So our guide said that we could either start our private tour with him right then and only get the abridged version (something like 1.5 hours), or we could wait that 1.5 hours and go on the 3pm tour he was leading for a larger group of people. We opted for the shorter tour, and honestly it was still fantastic. I would have been pissed if he had said things like "over there is this really cool thing, but we don't have time for it". He still covered a ton of information and we walked around a lot of the ruins. It was amazing!! The sun was shining right on the ruins when we caught our first glimpse, and it just made everything seem alive. Turns out the Incas were pretty smart in the way they built their city - the perfect fit of the stones, the location of doors and windows, the way they tapped into natural water sources... everything was so thoroughly planned. When the guide had to go meet his other group, he pointed out two locations that we should definitely check out on our own - I'm so glad we did, because one of them (up near the top by the guard house) is where my dad and I got some great pictures of the entire site. Seriously, I don't know how else to describe Machu Picchu other than amazing and breathtaking (literally and figuratively). You should probably go and see it for yourself...

This room is nifty because there are two main windows that let in direct sunlight at each solstice.

Three windows, one for each element (they only believed that fire, water, and earth were the basic elements).

I wish those Incas had thought of hand rails...

Toward the end of our visit it started sprinkling, so we figured it was best if we headed back to the hotel. (My dad booked this 2-week trip though a travel agent, and she had a free night at this 5-star hotel, which she threw in for free as a thank you for booking with her.) This hotel (SUMAQ) was basically the Ritz Carlton of Aguas Calientes. It was so nice I wanted to cry. We each got queen beds (as opposed to fulls at some of the other hotels) with about a dozen pillows each, the room was spacioius, the bathroom was HUGE, the tub had jets in it, and we had a balcony overlooking the river. The one problem was that there are not screens in the windows, and the bugs go crazy at night, so it got quite warm with the windows shut. Other than our room there was a bar on our floor where we got free pisco sours (Peru's national drink), there were guest computers as well as wifi, the floor below was where meals were served, there was always tea in the lobby and freshly baked things during tea time every afternoon... it was so nice. The meals... absolutely fantastic. At dinner there were waiters standing around the perimeter of the room ready to get you anything. For dinner I had a Sumaq salad (cannot remember what was on it, but my dad has a picture of it), spaghetti with yummy sauce, a variety of ice creams, and lemonade... and this was all included in that free night! No wonder the Incas settled here... it's right by the SUMAQ Hotel!!

Saturday morning we had the largest breakfast buffet I've seen in a long time - there were cereals, chestnuts, about 8 types of bread, a variety of fruit (I tried Opuntia cactus), yogurts, juices, bacon, sausage, pancakes, crepes, eggs, rice, turkey, cheeses, etc. That day we had early morning tickets to Machu Picchu so we could see the sunrise if we wanted (we opted to sleep instead). Honestly, we had seen just about all of it the previous afternoon, and we were exhausted from all the travel in the last two weeks, so we just wanted to relax. It was also good that we slept in because it was overcast for most of the morning, and it rained periodically throughout the day. The "unfortunate" part was that our train ticket had been modified (for unforseen reasons, and at no cost to us), so instead of taking the Andean Explorer (one step above the Vistadome and second nicest on the route) at 4:30ish, we were scheduled to take the Hiram Bingham (the classiest and most expensive train, named after the American explorer who discovered Machu Picchu) at close to 6ish. So we had a lot of time to kill. My dad and I wandered around the crafts market right by the train station for an hour or so (and ran into a couple from our Sacred Valley tour), and then we returned to the hotel to get massages! This was pretty much the nicest massage I've ever gotten. It was 90 minutes of pure relaxation. My dad got a hot rock massage which I found hilarious, because just earlier we were talking about how we hate being too warm and stuffy (like in the hotel room with the window closed), and when he walked into his massage room he said it was something like 150 degrees in there, haha! Overall, the massages were fantastic and a great use of our time.

After that we sat in the lobby for a bit longer since we still had a while until our train left. We were even around until tea time, during which we ate quite a bit of banana bread and drank a bunch of tea. At this point I was considering what I could take to decorate my South American shrine room in my house (you know, the one I don't have). I had already contemplated sitting in our jacuzzi bathtub with my comforter wrapped around me, holding onto the little clay Inca people that decorated our walls, and screaming that they could never make me leave... but I figured being kicked out by security wouldn't be the most gracious way to end our free stay. Anyways, the most that I took were the extra shampoo, conditioner, lotion, and soap bottles in our room (so at least my shrine will smell the same), and like 20 coca tea packets from the lobby. By that point we realized we wouldn't be getting into Cusco until 9pm, and we hadn't actually eaten lunch, so we walked up the road to grab a quick bite before the train. We both got an order of fried cheese sticks with guacamole. They were delicious... and possibly our worst decision of the trip. We knew that we would get food on the train, but we figured it would be just a little snack basket like on the way down... we forgot that we were taking the Hiram Bingham back.

When we got to the station, there was a separate entrance for Hiram Bingham passengers to go to the luxury lounge. They didn't check our passports (rich people never lie...), they gave us cold towels to wipe our faces with, and there were musicians inside serenading people as they sat on comfy couches. As soon as we sat down, a guy walked over to take our tickets, and he worked some magic to get us better seats than we originally had. If we had sat there much longer, I'm convinced we would've gotten free champagne and appetizers (there were half-filled glasses around the room), but we were escorted to our seats on the train. We ended up at a table for four, but the other side was empty, so we put our bags there (and had so much leg room!). There were fresh roses on every tableclothed-table, wine glasses, window curtains... it was amazing (and should have cost over $300). We had so much wonderful food on that ride - it started with some kind of squash appetizer thing, then soup, a basket of different breads, a duck appetizer (first time eating duck), tenderloin beef, some kind of dessert, a second dessert of little bite-sized fancy cookie things on a silver platter, and unlimited wine. For free. I am horrified to say that I literally could not finish my tenderloin beef because I had filled up on fried cheese sticks. :-| It was a fantastic ride though. The bathroom was even amazing - there was a wooden toilet seat, a fresh rose next to the paper towels, and the window was frosted so people couldn't see in (unlike another train we passed). Before getting to the station, two guys even came into our car to play traditional music and welcome us to Cusco. By that time I was threatening to sit in one of the bag racks and hold onto the coat hangers for the rest of my life, forever riding from Cusco to Machu Picchu and back. I also wanted to take the curtains for my South American shrine. This was after my fourth glass of wine, but I don't think that had anything to do with it...

When we finally got to the train station in Cusco, our driver took us back to our hotel (and tried teaching me Quechua along the way). We spent the rest of the evening repacking everything since my dad was flying home the next day, and I had to switch hotels (to something more along the lines of MY budget). This was seriously a first-class day for us.

I think I'll stop here, as the next part of my adventure covers Lake Titicaca!