Amazon adventures

Mosquito netting around my bed wouldn’t stop the jaguar about to charge
through my room in Peru’s jungle in the middle of August.

Or so I thought just before first light.

Turned out the gigantic sounds belonged to red howler monkeys, and they
never left their trees, but at the first hint of morning my first night in a
lodge in the dense forest, what did I know about animal sounds?

Very little. That continued to be the case for three nights and four days —
didn’t know much and generally drew the wrong conclusions if I didn’t wait
for accurate information from the guide.

Seemed like a really good idea not to venture out on any of the 15 jungle
trails surrounding the Posada Amazonas Lodge without him, even though I’ve
solo hiked for years.

It takes a little doing to get yourself into this jungle close to Peru’s
southern border with Bolivia. This is not a place to stumble across, but an
intentional holiday.

Fly to Lima, then Cusco and then Puerto Maldonado. LAN Peru is a pleasant
airline showing hilarious film clips of people doing wacky things so you
laugh out loud most of the way.

A sense of humor is helpful on this adventure, along with admiration for the
people eking a living out of these dense woods for centuries, and the ones
sharing their community with visitors today.

After a half hour dusty-road, open-window van ride past scattered homes, a
school and lots of palm and banana trees, I reached the Tambopata River
port, a casual place, to climb aboard a 20-foot roofed canoe for the
45-minute trip toward the lodge.

Lunch is served: a rice mixture in a banana leaf. Recycling starts right
then because it’s OK to toss the leaf plate overboard when you’re finished.

The boatman kept my empty glass juice bottle for recycling. This Lodge is
committed to the Amazon environment.

Two journeys still remain when the boat stops — climb 152 steep steps
leading to the lodge (fewer if you go in rainy season when the river is
higher) and then take the first hike in the jungle. It’s shorter than the
ones I tackled day and night the rest of my vacation here.

Plenty of time on arrival for fresh squeezed local juice, a look at your
digs and a brief swing in the hammock before heading out for the first of
many walks to experience the creatures and the greenery of this incredible

Climbing the scaffolding of the 120-foot tower to oversee the canopy of this
primary forest required pauses for breathing, and then two hours of hiking
the trail that leads to an enormous kapok — also called ceiba — built
anticipation for seeing a tree to rival California’s redwoods.

This one’s different; instead of the tall, straight majesty of those
redwoods, the Amazon Basin kapok tree reaches to the sky and extends wide
wings like huge billowy curtains all around its base, twice as tall as I and
forming spaces to hide, meditate, commune with nature.

Posada Amazonas has enough trails to hike before and after every meal, and
after dark without ever retracing your steps or bumping into other little
tour groups.

Working with the local communities, the Lodge also extends invitations to
visit a family farm to see bananas, star fruit, avocados, yucca, plantains
and mangoes growing.

I like growing fruits and vegetables too and I’m newly thankful that my
husband and I don’t have to prepare the ground with a machete as this farm
couple does.

No tillers, mules or oxen in this part of the world.

People here live their lives in the ways they have known for generations,
embracing the economic influx of tourism in careful ways.

Nobody measures money as income earned, but rather as cash spent. Steady
salaries have never existed in their subsistence experience. $90 a month is
the average a family spends each month, according to Rainforest Expeditions
headquartered in Lima.

The Lodge where I stayed shares the profits: 60 percent to the community and
40 percent to the company. When the 20-year contract runs out in 2016, the
community makes the call what happens next. Joint ownership for another
time period or sole community ownership?

Decisions are shared too, with a 10-resident council making sure experiences
for travelers respect local culture.

I was happy they felt good about visits to the seven medicinal gardens at
Centro Nape where Shaman Onorato Mishaja extends healthcare to the
400-person community.

He knows his trees, shrubs and flowers, and he knows what ancient tradition
teaches about how each one helps heal scores of ailments.

My bird-calling guide Fino and two other guides took turns interpreting for
the shaman as we walked the paths and learned how to treat headaches,
digestive disorders, coughs, colds, fever and love life issues.

The shaman shares the recipes so I know helpful tips now like boiling the
vine of the una de gato only 15 minutes; longer might cause blindness
instead of treating cancer.

I can easily picture him sitting in the folds of the big kapok tree,
in touch with wisdom of the ages.

Picture yourself in this jungle. Once you get up those steps from the
river, you can pick and choose which experiences to engage in. I’m not very
skilled at skipping anything, but it’s possible here to choose some extra
hammock swinging time watching the Tamarind and Red Howler monkeys in the
trees if that suits you better than another hike.