We spent the next two hours speeding through rain and river spray with flooded banks to either side. The river, swollen to its widest in twenty years, had been causing chaos in local plantations and communities for a good few weeks. Tufts of leaves stood out of the water, the only sign of submerged trees below. Our boat engine kept choking on debris and enforcing brief stops in the middle of the river's countless intersecting currents. Thankfully the driver knew his stuff.
Upon reaching Tambopata Lodge, we found that the dock had been entirely swallowed by the river. This meant that we were forced to climb up or under the wooden railing. The first person who tried almost dislodged the railing, which greatly increased everyone's confidence in their chances of survival, but ultimately even Kathy - dressed for the jungle in short dress plus thongs - managed to crawl through with the rest of us.
The ecolodge was surprisingly luxurious. There was a lounge area complete with a bar, a dining room, a series of thatched cabins with open fly-netted roofs and walls, hot and cold water in the bathrooms, and an optional fly-net curtain over the beds. Additionally, as our guide told us girls, there was even a big mirror in the communal bathroom so we could do our makeup. "For the monkeys!"
After settling in and exploring our hammock, Kathy and I went for a short walk around the lodge. As it got darker, the buzzing and chirping of insects and frogs grew louder. How peaceful the sound of approaching malaria! We took daily DEET baths. We were very excited to catch sight of one bouncy creature with a marsupial's head and rabbit's hindquarters. It wasn't quite a puma, but it was excitingly unfamiliar and Amazonian. Back outside the lounge area, a handsome green parrot said hola to Kathy.
We followed dinner with a night walk along a path by the dock. Borrowed gumboots combated the thick brown mud. Niki was a natural at the spider-spotting game, though she walked right past the first massive tarantula along with the rest of us. I wish we'd kept walking, really. Before heading back to the lodge, we turned off our torches and listened to the night sounds of the jungle.
We slept like logs beneath the mozzie nets until our 6:30am breakfast call. The menu featured sweet and juicy jungle pineapple. We climbed into our gumboots and onto a motorized canoe, which took us fifteen minutes upstream to the approximate location of water-vanished stairs. Not to worry; out hopped our jungle guide, "Mancho" the machete in hand, and started hacking makeshift steps into the mud and the plants. He then proceeded to lead us through the jungle machete-first. Talk about bush bashing.
The jungle was everything I'd imagined it to be minus the singing bears and lions. Everything was green.
There were fruits shaped like frightened hedgehogs, alien seed pods, jewel-bright berries, and tree trunks studded with razer-sharp spikes. We slopped along in knee-deep mud as our guide pointed out things of interest: socialist spiders in their mammoth web city, red ants, leaf carrier ants, a lizard perfectly camouflaged to its tree trunk lodging, another tarantula, etc etc.
Our flooded path led to Lake Condenado, where we wobbled aboard yet another canoe. The first lake wildlife spotted was a tarantula resting on the face of the guide's paddle: cue screaming and general panic, while I quietly tried to calculate the odds that further tarantulas were located under our seats. (I did not look. I didn't want to have to dive off the canoe and into a lake purportedly teeming with piranhas.)
Once the tarantula had swum safely away from the boat, we picked out several hoatzins (also known as mohawk or asthmatic birds), which wheezed and fluttered between branches by the shore. We also caught sight of parrots overhead, alerted by their telltale strangled squawk. In quieter moments, the guide rapped his paddle on the bottom of the canoe. You could hear the echo punch out over the trees in the distance.
We clambered out onto the opposite side of the lake and went for a quick splosh towards two massive trees. Six or seven of us climbed inside the hollow trunk of the first one, which had been killed by a strangler fig. Once holed up in the tree, we discovered we had company. Presumably these were the rabid vampire bats described in Lonely Planet. But still more disconcerting was the jungle guide's next suggestion, pointing to a narrow tree nearby: "There's a pole if you ladies want to dance for the monkeys!" How tempting.
Damp with humidity and face-painted with red berry dye, we started our multi-canoe journey back to the lodge. While walking, we crossed paths with a poison-green race-striped frog.
Lunch back at the ecolodge featured yucca chips (a potato-type vegetable) and avocado. I asked if the white cucumber was special jungle cucumber, and was told that everything on the table was special and from the jungle. Our guide then advised that I ought to have kissed the poison frog in order to procure a nice jungle husband "with lots of bananas".
Later that afternoon we took a cautious walk around a brazil nut plantation. Brazil nuts are as big as coconuts and possess similar skull-squishing potential, so we skirted most of the trees and hurried beneath the unavoidable ones. We returned to the lodge loaded up with gathered nuts. The guide handed his machete to Kathy and told her to have a crack at opening one. Challenge accepted. Kathy went at it like a lumberjack competitor at the Royal Melbourne Show, or that guy from Psycho, in a terrifying ten minute display of machete-wielding determination. She couldn't get past the first layers. I took the next go and didn't even manage to make a dent. It was like trying to crack open a cannonball with a butter knife. And then, of course, one of the boys gave it a shot and hacked the shell apart first go.
Mid-machete, we were called over to the dock to take a look at a group of saddle-backed tamarins, the second-smallest monkeys in the jungle. They raced between the trees using branches as bridges. Ever keen to educate us, our guide explained that the tamarins are polygamous, just like Germans and Danes - but not, looking to Niki, Kathy and I, like koalas.
When our scheduled caiman-spotting canoe ride was cancelled due to river flooding, we elected to take another night walk. The first half of our trip was fairly uneventful, but on the way back to the lodge our guide shone his torch on a baby lancet snake.
The men crowded forward; the cameras came out; and here began a half-hour photo shoot of the second most poisonous snake in the jungle. Kathy was entrusted with Mancho while this went on. And on, and on. Boys.
Our jungle experience ended early the next morning when we set off on our long journey to Lima. And then it was just two more lomo saltado dinners and a cooking class until the end of our adventures in Peru. Mozzie bite count: zero. Poison frogs kissed: zero. Ongoing stomach infections: undetermined. We came, we saw, we survived, we conquered.
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