Pacaya Samiria

After my fit of writing in Iquitos back in January, I finally caught my boat out to Pacaya Samiria to volunteer there for 10 days. The first part of my journey involved another journey down the Amazon on a cargo boat, only this time the cargo boat wasn’t nearly as nice as the one Nick and I took to Iquitos! This one was a fraction of the price, but the two choices were to stay on the crowded upper deck and possibly get rained on in the middle of the night or stay on the SUPER crowded but covered lower deck. I opted for the second choice and whoah, it was quite a different experience. On our trip to Iquitos, Nick and I stayed on a very nice upper deck with plenty of hammock space and reasonably tasty sit-down meals in a small dining room. This time, I had to wait in line with my spoon and plastic bowl for an hour to get my food (a thick stew) and share four grimy bathrooms with more than 250 other people. The second deck was wall-to-wall hammocks with virtually no space between them and people sleeping on the floor as well. The thick air was filled with the putrid smell of bodies, sweat, and birds. Yes, some people even brought their pets aboard, and I was fortunate enough to have a neighbor with a tub full of squawking, dirty parrots feeding on rotten fruit. Depending on which way I laid down in my hammock, I had the option of either having someone’s smelly foot in my face or parrot. Sometimes I would roll over to find the parrot sticking its beak into the side of my hammock. At night even after they had turned out most of the lights, the tiny bar continued blasting reggaeton and Shakira well into the night. Curiously enough, I still like Shakira even after hearing her “Hips Don’t Lie” song about two times per day everyday for the past few months. During the day, the whole deck felt like a sauna and the kids would transform the deck into a giant playground, swinging from hammock to hammock, clambering over other people, running around and shouting to each other, while the adults sat around listlessly drinking large 2.5L bottles of gaseosa (soda). It definitely made for an interesting experience!

Fortunately, if you didn’t mind the scorching sun, the third deck offered some reprieve during the day. When I couldn’t take the lower deck any longer, I would sit up on the upper deck and look out at jungle surrounding the river. There were lots of tall, gangly cecropias with splotchy white bark and large hand-like leaves, giant trees with oropendula nests hanging from their limbs, papaya trees loaded with fruit, enormous patches of caña brava, Mauritius palms, and lots of skinny trees completely engulfed in thick blankets of leafy epiphytes. After 24 hrs on that boat, I finally arrived at Leoncio Prado: a small town along the Rio Marañon. On both boat journeys to and from Iquitos, the boat would stop frequently at tiny towns like this to load bananas and unload people. It was really exciting actually getting off at one of these little towns! There, I met Sandro, the son of the Manuel, who runs the organization I would be volunteering with. From Leoncio Prado, we took a 1.5 hr boat ride into the Pacaya Samiria reserve to the indigenous Cocama village of San Martín de Tipishca where they live.

For the next 10 days, I spent my time getting to know Sandro’s family, playing bingo, peeling yucca, going on boat rides in the reserve, and teaching a bit of English. The volunteer program turned out to be quite poorly organized, but I hadn’t really expected to make that much progress, considering I would only be there for 10 days and all the kids were out of school for their “summer” holiday. Still, some of the classes were quite fun, and I taught some prospective guides a few key English phrases (“What is that?” “It’s a bird with a brown body, a black neck, a yellow beak, and yellow wings!”). The coolest thing for me though was simply to see what life is like in San Martín and to be inside Pacaya Samiria, one of the most pristine reserves in the Peruvian Amazon. About 600 people live in San Martín and I found it surprisingly modern. All the houses are made of wood with woven palm-frond roofs, there is no running water, and most of the town does not have electricity, but everyone there speaks Spanish (few people even know how to speak Cocama anymore) and wears modern clothes. The house I was staying in was filled with kids, with 10 people living there in all. At night, they would turn on their small diesel-powered generator to watch DVD music videos, and we would all dance to the latest reggaeton, merengue,and cumbia hits.

Life in San Martín was slow and very peaceful. I spent most of my time hanging out with the three teenage boys in the family: Sandro, Wilson, and Alex. There are no cars or motorcycles there, and the location is incredible. The whole town lies right along the river, which is the most beautiful river I have ever seen in my life. The Río Tipishca is a blackwater river and I had never seen anything like it. Apparently, the river gets its color from tannins that leech into the water from the trees. Because it is so dark and barely has a current, everything reflects perfectly off the surface of the water. Everything – the pink clouds in the sky, the amazing sunsets, the lush rainforest all around – were mirrored perfectly in the water. It was completely enchanting, being on that river, and every time we went out on a boat ride I was completely mesmerized by it. One afternoon, as the sun was setting the boys and I took the canoe out to the middle of the river. The entire sky above us was filled with a thin cottony layer of pink clouds, except for a broad stretch of clear blue sky that arced from one side of the river to the other side, where the sun was just dipping down below the trees. With the sun behind the trees, it looked as though a fierce inferno was raging on the other bank. Mirroring the fiery sunset, the river glimmered a brilliant orange, and the trees cast deep purple shadows onto the water. We dove off the canoe into the water and swam around for a bit in the middle of the river. When we got tired, we clambered back onto the canoe and listened to Sandro sing the latest “Kaliente” hit as darkness fell and sparkling stars appeared in the sky.

You can tell that these kids have grown up on the river. Everyone constantly jumps in and out of the river throughout the day, as casually as Americans might flop down on their couches in front of the TV several times a day. The whole time I was there though, I never saw a single swimsuit! People just jump into the river with all their clothes on, even if they are wearing thick jeans shorts or rubber boots! On my second day there, I realized that I was the only one using the shower in the house, which is just a tube connected to a small tank of water. When I asked one of the boys where everyone else bathes, he replied, “En el rio!” (In the river!) By the third day, I was bathing in the river too and jumping in and out of the river 3 or 4 times a day. The water was perfect – refreshing without being too cold – and its color made it seem a lot cleaner than swimming in the muddy brown river of the Amazon or the Río Madre de Dios by Piedras (and definitely cleaner than swimming in the Río Tambopata by Explorer’s Inn, since all the lodges dump all the waste straight into the water there). I spent many happy hours swimming in the Tipishca river at San Martín, floating on my back, feeling the water stretch on for miles and gazing up at the vast, uninterrupted expanse of sky. The sunsets were always incredible there, and at night, the stars were so bright and numerous. One night, I went for a swim alone in the dark just so I could float on my back and look at the stars from the water.

From January to March, everything in San Martín and the surrounding forests floods. In certain areas, the river rises 15 METERS during the wet season! We couldn’t even walk from the house into the center of town without ending up waist-deep in water! The only thing they can really grow well here is yucca, so I ate a lot of yucca frita (fried yucca) and masato (fermented yucca chicha). During my time there, I went on a few excursions into the surrounding rainforest but most of this too was flooded. One day, I went with Sandro’s uncle to cut down a wasaí palm to rebuild the walkway linking two parts of the house. (They are not allowed to cut down trees here to sell but can cut down a few trees for their own use). Parts of the forest around Iquitos had also been flooded while Nick and I were there, but it was nothing compared to this. For miles around San Martín, there were barely any patches of land that hadn’t been completely submerged in water. There was no way to hike through the flooded forest, so we bushwacked through the forest in a small dugout canoe. It was so different from my experiences down in Peru’s Southern Amazon. Here, the forest was just as thick and lush – or maybe even more so, because so many of the trees were draped in thick blankets of leafy vines. All of the trees – thick kapok trees (lupuna), gangly cecropias (seitiko), and giant buttress trees were reflected perfectly in the dark water. This made everything even more disorienting than normal for me, because I was seeing double of everything! After a while, I barely even knew which direction was up or down! I had no idea how the guys in the boat managed to navigate through the forest, as the “trail” was very narrow and wound its way around trees and giant bushes. At times, the guy in the front of the boat would have to bust out with his machete and hack at the branches and bushes in front of us. In certain areas, a very fine layer of vegetation formed a thin green carpet over the water, making everything seem even more lush and magical. Then, in the middle of our excursion, the sky opened up and started firing down bullets of rain so thick and heavy that they hurt! The rain created an incredible amount of noise; because there was water all around us, the sound of the rain was hugely amplified as the rain hit the surface of the water. It sounded like we were standing beneath a waterfall!
In all, I really enjoyed my time at San Martín. The pace of life there was so different from anything I had experienced before. My time there felt much longer than 10 days, but I think it was really good for me to slow down for a bit. I didn’t speak any English there the whole time (aside from my sporadic English lessons), and I think my Spanish improved quite a lot very quickly. I really loved spending so much time on (and in) the river, going on outings with the boys and joking around with them, and having long talks with Sandro’s uncle on Cocama culture and conservation. It was also quite challenging living there, but challenging in a good way. Even though the family was generally quite friendly, I often felt very aware of how much of an outsider I was. I also struggled with how to diplomatically turn down bushmeat, not because I think it’s too weird to eat but because I didn’t want to contribute to the trend of tourists eating bushmeat and impacting the forest even more than they actually do. I was very troubled by the general issue of how Western culture has impacted – and continues to impact – not only the environment but also the Cocama culture and their way of life. I was forced here to also confront my own impact on the environment and their culture. When I paid for my trip back in Iquitos, the president of Asiendes (the locally-run organization I would be volunteering with) asked me, “Cuantos litros de gasolina quieres para conocer un poco el río y la selva?” (i.e. How many liters of gasoline would you like for extra boat rides on the river?) Vast areas of the Amazon in Ecuador and Northern Peru have been destroyed by oil drilling and spills. It makes me feel quite hypocritical to think that I feel so passionately about the rainforest while simultaneously contributing towards further destruction by polluting the rivers with long boat rides and supporting the oil industry as a tourist (not to mention how much gas everyone in the U.S. – myself included – guzzle on a daily basis). Are these costs really offset by the hefty park entrance fee that I pay and my efforts to show the people there that at least some tourists are interested in understanding their culture? It’s difficult to say. Once you start thinking these things, it all starts feeling pretty hopeless quite quickly. What are the answers? Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there are really any clear-cut ones.