What is the difference between a Donkey and a Mule?

Wilson had stomach issues and a lung infection on this trip (and still does) so he decided that perhaps my perspective on events may be a little more positive than his, hence I have once again been enlisted to write a blog..........sigh

Once again we decided to do another tour, despite our previous experiences. The Santa Cruz Trek is a famous and highly touristed 4 day trek near Hauraz, Peru. It includes a mountain pass of an altitude of 4800m (The highest Wilson and I have been whoop whoop!!) and tons of spectacular scenery. I think I will leave the pics to speak for themselves in this regard. We joined Morgan (Pom), Yo Yo (Germany), Adi (Israel) and our guide Cesar (Peru) for the trip.

We were glad to see at the start of the trek that this time it wasnt us being screwed over by the tour agency. A poor Canadian girl was stuck at the start of the track with her unlicenced guide unable to enter. She was luckily able to join us for the first day of the trek until her agency sorted their shit out (well, sort of). The guide snuck into the park after dark....


The trek took us up into the Andes and through a mountain pass. We camped out at high altitude below the snow line and as soon as the sun went down at night it became freezing. We ended up wearing all our clothes in our sleeping bags to stay warm at night! We took a detour on the second day to a beautiful glacial lake complete with icebergs fit to sink the titanic and avalanches crashing down to the water. The mountain pass itself led us up between jagged, spiking peaks that loomed graciously above us.


During the trip we were enlightened on many facts of life by our guide Cesar. One of the most interesting being the difference between a Donkey and a Mule. We were informed that a Mule is produced when a Donkey is mated with a Horse. A mule is much stronger than either a horse or a donkey, as it can carry 100kg as opposed to the maximum of 60kg that can be carried by a horse or donkey. The downside, however is that mules are both crazy and unable to bear offspring.

The best Mule is produced when the mother is a horse and the father is a donkey. When I asked Cesar how this functions, given that the horse is much taller than the donkey, he said that the donkey simply jumps on up.....I was envisaging that some kind of stool or platform would be required.

Shortly after this conversation Cesar explained to us that a similar phenomenon happens with people. When you mate a Peruvian with a Gringo you get tall, fat offspring. Interesting....there is so much to learn...

We all arrived, on the fourth day, at the end of the trek at midday to find that there was no transportation for the next 4 hours. The agency had organised nothing and we almost ended up paying a ridiculous amount of money to get out of there until I put my foot down. Damned incompetent Peruvian tour agencies!

To make up for this inconvenience the guide snuck us out of the park without paying our park entrance fee. He reinbursed us about a third of our money and in the process tripled the amount of money that he made guiding the trek, provided he doesn´t get caught by the park the next time he goes....

Rogue Chickens and Old Women

Ha! It´s all action on the blog front now! I´m assuming someone is still reading it.... Did I mention how much I love comments??

Our time in Tarapoto was unfortunately far from action packed due partly to the fact that I had come down with a mystery hand disease which caused my knuckles, thumbs and palms to break out in an itchy, painful rash. In fact, I wrote the blog about the jungle tour in the height of this affliction. This is how dedicated I am too you, the blog readers. We decided to visit a doctor (not the dentist) which made a good test of all of our spanish skills. While I sat there with my mouth open, looking like a dullard, Tessa managed to pick up that the doctor thought I had touched something toxic. While neither of us really believe this diagnosis, the rather expensive creams he prescribed seem to have done the trick and my hands (I´m sure you´ll be glad to know, if you´re still reading) are almost back to normal.


Anyway, back to something vaguely interesting. From Tarapoto we caught to bus to a wee town called Chachapoyas which is known for its preincan ruins and rather nice surrounding landscapes of enormous rolling hills interspersed with cloud forest. The bus ride was somewhat of a calamity (if you´re sensing a theme here... so am I). After we had stopped outside a small town after dark, a lady on the bus with her toddler in tow became upset that her mother, who was "loquita" (a little bit crazy) had locked herself in the toilet. A few passengers who called the driver to stop became frustrated as the driver refused as the road was too dangerous to stop. When we finally stopped half an hour later it was discovered that the old lady (who would have looked quite normal hurling screeching cats at passing strangers) had wandered off the bus in a daze! The whole bus waited and discussed the matter with typical south american intensity, while the daughter went off with the police in search of her vacant mother. You´ll be glad to know as we were, that the old lady was found and returned to the bus to an ovation from the passengers.

In Chachapoyas we soon realised that there were many more sights to see than we had anticipated and with the lure of the landscape, we decided that a tramping (or trekking for those non NZers) tour was in order. I was a little wary of taking another tour after our last debacle and perhaps I should have listened to that nagging inner voice! Overall the tour was a great experience, over five days we headed out to some small agricultural towns from where we trekked out to see ruins of ancient villages and burial sites; we trekked into the beautiful green Belen Valley complete with a glittering, snaking river and out through ambient cloud forest the next day; we rode horses up a steep mountain pass following cascading streams along the way; and visted the mighty ruins of Kuélap fortress, a bastion for the pre-incan Chachapoya people.

Unfortunately, following the seeming fashion of south american tourism, again there were a few issues that really brought the tour down a bit. Firstly the tour agent had promised the earth and had therefore jammed too many sights and activities into the five days which had us madly rushing around and missing many of the things we wanted to see. Secondly our guide was inexperienced and had really quite poor english and more generally poor communication skills (we had trouble enough getting information out of him when we spoke to him in spanish!). This had us on one occasion, after realising that he had forgotten the keys to our accomodation and spending hours in random towns trying to sort it out, wandering about through the marshy paddocks of Belen Valley in the dark convinced that our guide was completely lost! We made the most of these situations though, one of the random towns was having a festival for the patron saint so we joined the locals for some maize beer and watched the local version of the running of the bulls, which involved two panicked bulls being chased through the street by a small brass band!

Our guide had a frustrating habit that when he didn´t understand a question, he would take a wild guess at what you´d asked and just starting answering something completely off topic. While I wouldn´t normally tease someone for their lack of language skills, some of the results were quite funny....

ME "Can I get a towel?"

AGOSTO "You want to go out drinking?"

TESSA "The bags are there Agosto"

AGOSTO "No! Wait here please. I will ask the lady where the bags are!"

Other slips of the ol´english included:

"It makes me hungry to see rubbish on the side of the road"

"The native people are always angry!"

"Tonight we are having soup of kitten" - we were relieved to recieve rather bland chicken soup after this announcement!

The highlight of the trip was seeing hundreds of mummies, bundled and crushed up to the size of a child´s backpack in the museum in Leymebamba. The mummies were collected from a former settlement in the area and the mummies had been well preserved due to the local microclimate. It was a fairly gruesome sight which I'm not able to share as my camera battery ran out just as I was lining up the exposed teeth of the first grisely mummy. I did get a shot of a similar mummified baby in a jar later in a museum in Cajamarca which will give you an idea....

After the tour ended we stayed in the quiet wee town of Leymebamba, which like small towns everywhere was full of friendly people and good food cooked by someones grandma. We once again indulged our appetite for adventures "off that beautiful beaten trail" and jumped on the bus to Cajamarca, a short distance on the map, but equivalent in hours to going back the way we came, around the mountains to the coast and back up the the other side of the mountains! We spent the best part of 11 hours in first gear grinding over a goat track of a road and peering through the cloud and over the precipice below. The very peruvian highlight of this wee trip was when the bus stopped for lunch and a chicken escaped from its sack in the baggage hold. It took 20 peruvians about 15 minutes to catch the rogue chicken!

-> PERU REAL (Blog Signposting)

There is a new post but due to our collective computer incompetence it has appeared below the last one!


That is all. Read on.

Selva! Part Two - Interview with the Shaman

The long awaited second part. A story of how things can start well and end badly.

Our border formalities were taken care of at the small frontier towns of Nuevo Rocafuerte on the Ecuadorian side and Pantoja on the Peruvian side. The one thing these towns had in common aside from the obvious was an abundance of giant handsome chickens. We were led past delapidated machinery rusting into overgrown grass to the police station, with its smashed windows and peeled paint. A shirtless man inside awoke from his slumber as we approached and donning a not so fresh tee shirt labelled "Policia", he led us to a small office to run the paperwork. Pantoja on the other hand contains a Peruvian army base and as we approached the passport office we were overtaken by a troop of sixteen year old soldiers carrying heavy firearms, grenade launchers, logs and a small monkey.

In Pantoja we bid Adios to our qualified guides and jumped in the canoe with Fernando the dentist, which is where things started to go wrong. Fernando was really just a boat driver and was only concerned with getting us to where we needed to go which involved manycontinuous hours of sitting in his canoe watching the trees go by.

Next on the agenda was to stop at a shaman´s house for some magical displays, supposedly popular among tourists. When we arrived at the intended town the people told us that the shaman had died a year and a half ago. While we were trying to figure out what sort of plague could have wiped out all the local shamen, Fernando took us further downriver to a lone thatched roof hut. We entered the hut and, with not so much as an introduction, Fernando left us to unload the boat. As it was, the four of us were left there with the shaman and his family, none of us knowing what was going on and all of us staring at each other in silence. Different people deal with these situations in different ways and Buddy, keen to change out of his smelly jungle clothes, dropped trou and waved his bare ass at the shaman who, laughing to himself, put a little more distance between himself and Buddy´s ass. The situation having lightened a little by blatant nudity, I tried with my broken spanish to introduce myself and the shaman in his broken spanish tried to reply, as to make this little cultural exchange more difficult the family spoke mostly Quechua and not spanish.

To this day I´m dubious as to whether he was a real shaman as they just seemed like a really poor family living in the middle of nowhere. The shaman himself wore only pants with a broken zipper and he had only two plants which he claimed to cure everything. As we were staying there, when we asked about the toilet, we were told it was anywhere and Tessa watched as a baby peed on its mother who didn´t so much as care to wipe it up. As we feasted on our dinner of cold beans, cold sardines and rice (the food had gone downhill by this stage) the family sat in the other hut with no food. We watched the next morning as the son licked the remains from the sardine can he had fetched from the rubbish.

Despite the difficult scene, I was intrigued to know more about the shaman´s family and how they lived and survived but our guide was not up to the task to tell us anything about them. After a short shaman cleansing ritual we put up our tents inside the hut to keep the mozzies at bay, and for all I know showing the family that we considered ourselves too superior to sleep in their company. In the morning we packed up as quickly as possible and after gifting some of our remaining food to the family, we got the hell out of there. I only hope that Fernando paid them decently for our incursion into their lives.

After an uneventful journey downriver we arrived in Santa Clotilde, the last stop before Iquitos and this was the point where the tour went sour. We were to take a public boat the next day to Iquitos, however Fernando calmly told us that there was no boat and that we were to be stuck in Santa Clotilde for at least another day. This didn´t bode too well for Elias and Buddy who had both booked flights from Iquitos and it showed us that no planning had gone into this stage of the journeyby the tour agency. To make matters worse, when we pressed Fernando further, he claimed that his contract with the agency had finshed when he delivered us to Sta Clotilde and he had no responsibility, but he could take us for an extra $400!! A three hour arguement ensued which had us traipsing around looking for other boats, ringing the owner of the tour agency who claimed equally no responsibility and generally embarrassing ourselves in front of the easy going townsfolk! On top of this we had to pay all our own food and lodgings despite the fact we were still on the tour. We had pretty well been ditched by the tour agency, a days travel from our destination. We eventually bargained with the misely Fernando and in the morning set off again in his canoe for a very tense and awkward trip to Iquitos.

PERU REÁL

We are in Tarapoto, Peru and it´s soooo hot. My butt cheeks are sticking to the seat and my fingers to the keys (hmmm but that could be mandarin juice) and it´s 7 at night.

You may wonder why I am writing more of this blog, this is so out of character for me. This is a good question. Sorry Jean, but this time it is not because you asked. Actually Will had quite the tantrum the other day (he is taking this bog very seriously) and said I was being very ´difficult´ not helping and we were getting very far behind. So to keep our travelling situation amicable I am attempting to relieve some of this emmense pressure he is feeling.

We finally arrived in Iquitos, Peru after 4-5 days in canoe experiencing the natural elements the amazon has to offer (in other words getting drenched by tropical downpours). We arrived at this crazy port of floating houses and 4 x 2 boardwalks, across which we teetered with our bulging packs. It was a bit zoo meets pub meets market, with most people carrying 5 times the weight we were (and OSH was nowhere to be seen!!). We eventually made it to the street with only a few near misses of going in the ´drink´. Here's a couple of pics of what it was like:

We were struck suddenly, after 8 days of only the canoe engine and jungle sounds, by the deafening noise of 400,000 motorcycle-rickshaws (moto-carros) without mufflers. Apparently muffler-less-ness makes you cooler here too, much like the boy-racers back home. You couldn´t hear in the city without being within a foot of the person speaking (even at night). This made group conversations difficult and understanding spanish near impossible. The reason for all of the moto-carros and motorbikes is that Iquitos is only reachable by river or plane, hence getting cars to the city is a bit of an expensive debacle, although there are a few.


Iquitos is blessed with the area of Belén. When the river is high the stilt houses appear to float on the river and the locals reach their front doors by canoe rather than on foot. At this time of year I understand that it is quite and enchanting place, but when the river is not there to take the rubbish away it is another story altogether. The rubbish was a couple of feet thick in places, with the vultures swooping overhead and the areas without rubbish were compsed of a thick greenish mud, which I can only assume was bio-degrading effluent (it squelched between my toes at one stage). As you can probably imagine, the smells were interesting, the kind that make you lose your appetite.

We went to an animal refuge run by this German Hippie (you´d love her Jean, she definately didn´t shave her legs, no bra and she´s probably a vego to boot). We saw some pretty cool animals up close like a jaguar, anteater, sloth and loads of monkies that had been trained as thieves by the street kids in neighbouring towns.

To get from Iquitos to Peru we had to take a 3 day `Lancha` or slow boat down the river. The boat was packed full of people in hammocks and there is pretty much nowhere to go for 3 days. A little cabin fever to say the least. Food was cooked by gay chefs in the back by the toilets and was not the 5-star affair that I was expecting. We ended up chatting to this dude Juan Carlos a bit on the boat and managed to get this sexy pic of him.

Needless to say, we are glad to be off the boat and in Tarapoto!

Selva! Part One

The following blog is far too long and as such I have had to split it into two blogs. Two for the price of one, thats a good deal. It´ll save a bit of looking over the shoulder for those of you who read blogs at work when you shouldn´t be.

So it appears that both Tessa and I have romantic notions of travelling "off the beaten track" and having "unique experiences" during our adventures. As such we decided to throw in our lot with a tour agency offering a trip from Coca, Ecuador through the jungle and down the Rio Napo, to Iquitos, Peru. A trip that done solo, would take many weeks of agonising slow boat travel. Hence, after following the oil pipeline by bus from Quito, we arrived in the choking humid heat of Coca on Sunday 25th May, ready for our big adventure.

The trip began with a long boat ride, the type to which in the following weeks we would become well accustomed. As we slowly sauntered along the brown, muddy, wide river, a slowly changing vista unfolded of jungle forest occasionally interspersed with with banana plantations. Occasional but common sights of the river were; bamboo, thatched roofed houses; locals paddling dugout canoes; and lone children staring at us from the river bank. On the river I was struck by the immense scale of the jungle area we were passing through. Even the sky seemed somehow bigger and we were able to hear cacophanous thunder storms passing miles away. On occasion the storms would roll right over us and we would be pelted by intense rain usually for no more than 30 mintutes, after which it would continue past us. The highlight of this first twelve hour boat ride was, late in the trip, when the boat became stuck on a sand bar in the shallow river bed. After some deliberation it was decided that all the men ought to get out in the knee deep water and push. After more deliberation and general confusion as to which way we should push, which managed to shift the boat and we were on our way again. Small distractions on an otherwise uneventful trip.

I ought to stop at this stage for a short description of our crew. We were four tourists and in the beginning we were lucky enough to have three guides. We were joined by Buddy Levy from Idaho, a loud, brash and funny american whose running jokes kept us in good spirits. He is also an absolute gear head, the height of which was his Hennessey Hammock a perfect companion for the jungle explorer. http://hennessyhammock.com/ Buddy is a writer of "popular history" and was researching his next book on Francisco de Orellana who had taken the same route at the start of his famous descent of the Amazon. We were joined also by Elias, a well travelled Swiss man. As he was at the end of many months of travelling, he was keen to make the most of this final experience. As a tourism professional, he had some good advice about what to expect from travelling. Our guides were; Jose, a very knowledgable and humourous Quechua native who grew up in the area we visited; Sandro, the generally well organised master camp chef and boat driver and; Javier whose role was as translator for Buddy but as Jose spoke good english, this role was somewhat redundant. On the Peruvian side Jose and Sandro were unfortunately replaced by Fernando, the boat driving dentist...

Buddy: "Are you sure this Fernando guy knows what he´s doing?"

Jose: "Sure, he´s a dentist!"

Much of our four days in the jungle were spent in foraying missions in the canoe out on the lakes and rivers. We would set about trying to spot the numerous bird species endemic to the area, the highlight of which was an enormous blue heron breeding area where we were abused by hundreds of the birds for disturbing their mojo. During such trips we were lucky enough to see pink river dolphins, caimen (alligators) and a small group of fluffy Saki monkeys. As we visited in the rainy season, the waters were so high as to create a flooded forest so it was hard to tell where the river ended and the forest began. In one of these secluded forest/lake/bog inlets Sandro found an old dugout canoe. We were planning on swimming in the lake at the time but had been caught by a tropical downpour. We piled into the small dugout canoe, wearing only togs, as the pelting rain stung our skin and started to paddle around with our hands. The combination of heavy rain, our overzealous paddling and our fat asses caused the boat to sink right out from under us and left us to swim back to the other canoe.

We also went on several treks through the jungle which usually consisted of learning about the traditional uses of many plants, seeing an abundance of creepy crawlies and, at times, walking neck deep through flooded bogs that our guide assured us was perfect anaconda territory. Once we were on Terra Firma the jungle reminded me of the bush back in NZ except with thousands more plant species all battling to survive and dominate. As we pulled up in the canoe for the first of these treks, Jose spotting the danger of of the loose bark of a spiky palm as we passed, knocked off the bark. As it fell away, a small swarm of "banana spiders", with thick hairy legs and abdomen the size of squash balls were revealed inches from our faces. The look on Jose´s face was enough to tell us how poisonous they are. Another spot we visited on one of these treks was the former house of a shaman who, as legend has it, got too drunk one night and fell in the river.

To demonstrate the uses of some of the plants in the jungle our good guide got us to consume some wierd stuff. On the menu were lemon ants which live symbiotically in a particular small tree, the vine used for blowdart poison which at low concentrations is meant to be good for the stomach (which was not Tessa´s experience) and the hallucenogenic Ayahuasca vine. The latter is used by shamen to induce visions and cure basically everything and causes the patient to vomit and shake uncontrollably before seeing visions of wild animals, sometimes causing them to freak out and flee into the jungle. While for me, this didn´t sound like heaps of fun, and Tessa was still suffering from blowdart stomach problems, Elias and Javier indulged in Ayahuasca that night. Unfortunately the vine was young and the effects were limited to vomiting and feeling a bit drunk, leaving us all disappointed at the lack of entertainment. We made use of some small fruit, the juice of which is used for temporary tattoos. We spent the next few days looking real tough round the jungle with roughly drawn anaconda tattoos on our arms.

Our nights in the camp usually involved trying to avoid the mosquitos, talking a fair amount of smack and indulging in "Jungle Juice", a sort of mulled wine made with a red jungle vine, cane alcohol, herbs and honey. This indulgence culminated with some disaster on the last night as some of us had been hitting the juice since noon. That night while we trekked near the camp to spot some nocturnal creatures, Sandro was meant to meet us in the canoe further around the lake. Our path though, was blocked by a large bog and we turned back. Sandro, after a few too many and believing we were lost, crashed the canoe into the reeds, losing a paddle and then swam about trying to find us. Later Buddy, which attempting to show off his chef skills, sliced off half his fingernail. The night ended with Sandro, after sincerely asking Buddy if he loves Fidel Castro, fell asleep in a hammock with a cigarette in his hand.

With the short but torrential rains everyday, our camp quickly bacame a mud pit. Gumboots were compulsary fashion and on the third morning we had to quickly move our tents as the lake had risen sufficiently that we were about to get very wet!

Tres, Dos, Uno....

Ok - I have a lot of catching up to do. As promised, I´ll start with where we left off in Baños.

We left Cuenca last Tuesday after a somewhat unsuccessful stay and made our way to Baños which can be accurately described as the centre of Ecuador for the tourist. Everyone we met in our travels had either been to Baños or were planning to go. But Baños is a pretty switched on place, it´s easy to get around on rented bikes, there are plenty of outdoorsy things to do and there are little signs pointing out attractions or activities all through town. The town is also crammed with tourist agencies trying to sell trips to tourists wandering the street which got to the point of being downright annoying. We couldn´t walk around the corner without being harrassed by 3 guys all trying to sell us the same deal. We had plenty of things to do to fill our time here which was a welcomely stark contrast to sauntering about Cuenca.

On the Wednesday we hired bikes and rode out of town along the Ruta de las Cascadas (Route of Waterfalls) towards the town of Puyo. It´s a nice downhill road that winds through tunnels and follows the river past the hydrodam and many waterfalls plummetting from the hills above the river. The final and most spectacular waterfall was Pailón del Diablo and we were able to grab a bus back to town and continued our explorations there. It was a nice way to sightsee as we were free to go our own pace and stop wherever we pleased. After about an hours ride we came to another Baños attraction, a bridge swing, and I decided that I ought to take the plunge... ahem, sorry.

The bridge passed 20m above a rocky, roaring little river and as I was harnessed up I realised that I hadn´t really thought much about just how freaky it would be but as I stood on the bridge rail with traffic storming past behind me, I had to concentrate to stop my legs shaking me off the bridge. I knew I had to jump at the end of the countdown or I wouldn´t at all, and as I plummetted down towards the rocks the only clear thought in my head was that I had lost my mind. What a rush! It wasn´t until the rope had swung back twice that I was able to think about screaming. Needless to say I was buzzing for the rest of the day. Tessa took a bunch of photos but because she was so nervous they all came out blurry!

We spent the night soaking in the rather skodey public hot pools next to the Cascada de la Virgen. Noone seems to have told the Ecuadorians about not putting your head under the water in the hot pools, although by the browny green colour of the water, I´m surprised they don´t make the connection. It was a relaxing way to end the day though and we both managed to avoid contracting anything from the water.

We had organised a rafting trip for Thursday which was further down the same river towards Puyo. We had a solid team of 5 in our rafting comprised of us, our guide and an Alaskan couple who had come to Baños for an adventure get-away. After practicing some moves on shore that we never used, we hit the water. The river was quite high and wide so it was an easy trip but a lot of fun, our guide had a knack for angling the raft through rapids just right to make us as wet as possible. That night we hiked up the hill overlooking Baños to watch the sunset and were lucky enough to see the very nearby Volcano, Turungahua, spitting out sparks and clouds of ash. Baños has had a dificult time in the shadow of the volcano with eruptions in the past wiping out large chunks of the city.

We spent the next few uneventful days back in Quito organising things for our trip through the jungle which will have to be the next post...