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!