On the Río Piedras

After leaving Quito, I headed down to Puerto Maldonado to start volunteering at Piedras Biodiversity Station. I was a bit disappointed to learn that I would only get to volunteer for 2 weeks there instead of the 4 weeks that I had planned (the owner of the station had thought I only wanted to stay for 2 weeks and was leaving the station to go back to England for a few months). But I figured it would still be a cool experience... and now I am really really glad I went. Piedras is about 2 days up the Rio Madre De Dios from Puerto Maldonado. Puerto itself is a bit of a strange little town. Even though it is in the middle of the Amazon, surrounded by nothing but jungle for miles and miles, there are remarkably few trees in town. Everything is coated with dust, and it has more of a frontier, "wild west" feel to it than a jungle feel.

Early in the morning, I met up with the station owner/manager (Emma), three other volunteers (Danielle, Ariel, and Tim), and our Peruvian boat driver (Melo). For the next 8 hours or so, we puttered up the river in our wooden peke peke boat. Those eight hours flew by surprisingly quickly, as we spent most of our time spotting birds and other wildlife from the boat and chatting away. It was so peaceful cruising up the river; there was tons of wildlife and very little boat traffic (we gave a lift to a woman from a small community a few hours upriver from Puerto, who said she had been waiting 2 days for a boat!).

This is also when I got my first taste of Emma's super animal-spotting abilities. Emma is originally from England but has lived in the Peru for the past 9 years and opened Piedras Station, her very own research station and lodge 4 years ago with her partner Juan Julio. I guess that after guiding and doing research in the Amazon for 9 years, you get pretty good at recognizing all the animals. As we made our way up the river, Emma pointed out different birds and wildlife every few minutes. Sometimes, Emma would identify a bird when it was just a distant speck in the sky. It seemed like she could see more with her naked eye than I could with my binoculars! I was very impressed by her abilities. The first day, we passed by three small communities along the river, and then it was just miles and miles of river, surrounded by dense jungle on both sides.

At night, we camped on a small beach, and then woke up early in the morning to resume our journey to the station. We saw so many cool things on the way up: scarlet macaws feeding on a clay lick, trees covered with purple and pink blooming flowers, jaguar prints on the beach, yellow spotted side-neck turtles that tuck their heads off to the side instead of retracting them inwards when there is danger, gray birds that look like missiles when they fold their wings up mid-flight, colorful toucans, snowy white egrets with fluorescent yellow feet, hawks, eagles, falcons. We also took a little side-trip to an oxbow lake, where we came within 15 meters of a giant black caiman mother guarding her eggs and suspiciously watching us with unblinking eyes. When we finally arrived at our destination, we had to walk about five minutes or so through the jungle to get to the station. On the way, we spotted a group of brown capuchins foraging for food in the trees above us! It was the perfect introduction to Piedras! The station itself was so much nicer than I had imagined. When I had learned there was no electricity there, I guess I had imagined we would be sitting around a camp fire every night or something and sleeping in tiny huts. The station though is actually really really nice and very solidly constructed from wood. All of the rooms are open on one side and look out into the jungle. I was also happy to find that there was a proper kitchen there that was quite well-equipped. Emma and JJ also offer ecotourism tours at the lodge, although the location is so remote that they have only had two tour groups there (with about 4 people in each group) this whole year! It is so beautiful there, and the facilities are so nice, I can't believe that more tour groups aren't waiting in line to stay there! Emma admitted that they could use a few more tour groups to bring in more money for maintaining the station and their ecotourism concession. It was really nice though to hear Emma say that she always wants the emphasis there to be on research and not tourism though.