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!