Saturday, September 5, 2009

Peru Vol. 4

8/22/09 10:30pm:
            So we’ve gotten back into a bit of a groove after changing our plans around. Unfortunately that groove includes waking up 5 am to do our bio-inventories—but hey, what’s good science if not mundane, repetitive tasks at uncomfortable hours? At least that’s the one time of day it’s cool out. When it was bad a few days ago I was still sweating, at rest, until about midnight.
            Our time in Puerto has also given a chance to get more of the local color. For instance we wound up being coerced into sharing several beers with a nice, but very aggressive, Peruvian woman, who then proceeded to show us rather racy pictures of her daughter, an adolescent professional dancer (who was present at the time) on her cell phone. Alex had mentioned the warnings he’d gotten in the past about the girls here latching on to guys as a ticket out of Puerto Maldonado, which is the Peruvian equivalent of a small, agricultural city in the US, but this was the first time I’d seen it in action. Alex says I just haven’t been in the right bars on a Saturday yet.


8/26/09 6:13pm: Obelisco
            This afternoon we went to the Obelisco, a cool observation tower in the center of town and arguably Puerto’s biggest tourist destination. It’s about 70 ft tall, which as far as observation towers go isn’t remarkable, but it is easily the tallest building in Puerto by 30 ft. At the top of the obelisk you get an interesting perspective of how limited the town is. At street level the town feels like more or less like any other in the developing world, but from the tower you realize the entire developed area fits neatly into a square a few kilometers in diameter with well defined edges that abruptly transition into dense rainforest. You also don’t think of it from the ground, but the Amazon basin appears incredibly flat once you’re far enough above the canopy, almost to an unnatural degree. Joel accurately commented it seemed a lot like we were inside a game of Sim City.  We got there just at sunset too, and the clouds were incredibly diverse along the sky line, creating an incredibly beautiful and dynamic scene as the colors shifted with time.
            While we were up there we also saw a local marathon, or at least some sort of street race. It was confusing at first though because they hadn’t blocked off the streets. Our only initial hint was a motorcycle policeman with his lights and siren going, but only driving about 10 km/hr. At first we thought it was Peru’s slowest car chase, but then we saw the runners behind him. The whole time we were up there though, about 30 min, we probably only saw a maximum of 20 runners, which made us wonder why they did it at all. But then again, despite the police escorts, traffic just weaved between the runners the whole time, so I guess it really wasn’t much of a burden on the public. The guy in had last place had to feel a little embarrassed though considering the race had created enough congestion to stack up a couple dozen cars and moto-taxis behind him.
            It also turns out we may have missed the chance to get to know an up and coming Peruvian star. Before we went to the Obelisco, we cruised through the market to pick up some maracuyás and platanitos, and while we were there we casually cruised through the DVD section. As we were about to leave, I took one last look at one of the booths, and to my astonishment, found a Peruvian dance movie with none other than the racy picture of the girl we met at the bar on the cover.
            Tomorrow we head out to the Sachavacayoc Center for a few days to meet up with the other Stanford students and the Fauna Forever team working there. I haven’t been there yet, but I’ve heard good things about it and I’m looking forward to going.


8/29/09 6:45pm: Sachavacayoc
            Our time here at Sacha has been absolutely fantastic, and it’s hard to believe it’s over already. Compared with the other lodges it’s a lot simpler. There aren’t any tourists so we have the whole station to ourselves and our relationship with the staff is much less strained because of it. The food is good, the beds are comfortable and the company is good. Alex’s brother Ian and his friend Kelsey are here studying dung beetles (which I’ll simply say involves some rather unsavory practices to bait the traps), and the most of the Herpetology team is still here. There’s even a guitar here, and I’ve managed to relearn the first half of “Green Sleeves”, which I had learned just before I left.
            The wildlife here has also apparently been great with people seeing tapirs, herds of peccary and the Herp team even catching a rainbow boa. We haven’t had much time to get out, but on the walks I’ve been on we’ve seen some great tarantulas and wolf spiders almost the size of your hand, white caiman, a coral snake and a tamandua, which is basically a really cute, small anteater that whistles and climbs around in trees. There are also these small beetles that have glowing, neon green spots behind their heads, which glow bright orange when they fly, and when you hold them, they snap themselves as a defense mechanism that makes it feel like you’re being shocked.
            Yesterday we also got to take an overnight trip to Lake Sachavacayoc. It was about a 5 km hike to the lake where they have a thatched, open-air platform on with pads to sleep on and ropes to hang mosquito nets from. Joel and I got there at just before sunset, and we took one of the old, wooden canoes out from the dock to meet up with the other group members who were already on the lake watching the sunset. Needless to say, the sunset was gorgeous, and in total our group probably took a couple hundred photos of it.
This was in large part because of Joel’s recent discovery of a photography technique called High Dynamic Range (HDR), where you take three pictures of something at various exposures. Then you apply software that takes out the underexposed portions of the properly exposed picture—say the dark, backlit trees in the sunset—and replaces them with the corresponding portions from overexposed picture–in this case, the adequately lit trees from the overexposed sunset picture. The result is a more vibrant picture that much better captures what it was like to actually be there. This is because a camera can’t capture in a single photograph the same range of color and contrast as the human eye. You can also take things even further by tweaking the software to make the pictures have an absolutely stunning, surreal quality to them. Unfortunately when applied to people, however, it just highlights all your flaws and basically predicts what you would look like in 20 years if you dedicated yourself to a career sweeping chimneys around Chernobyl.  Definitely a technique worth looking into though, if you’re into photography.
We stayed out on the lake well after sunset and enjoyed the stars and the moonlight on the lake. Our expectations weren’t very high, but Joel tried taking some long exposure shots, as in 5-30 seconds, with the camera resting on the boat, while I tried as hard as I could to lie perfectly still. Surprisingly, they actually turned out remarkably well and in one of the 30 second exposures I’m virtually completely illuminated by the moon. It was also surprising how much red you could still pick up in the sky when you left the shutter open so long—or at least so Joel told me. Since the boat was slightly rocking, the picture also has a cool a contrast between me who was in focus rocking with the camera, and the sky which became slightly blurred. It was incredible how still the lake was though since it had virtually no flow in or out. This is actually fairly common though for oxbow lakes, which are old sections of river, named for their shape, that have broken off as the river has slowly changed course.
            The next morning we woke up at 5 am so we could eat our breakfast of crackers, bread, marmalade and manjar (i.e. caramel made from condensed milk) as we watched the sunrise. For those of you who have tried to wake me up in the morning, it will be no surprise to you that I was the last one down to the docks, and that I pointed out repeatedly that we had at least another half hour before you could actually see the sun above the tree line. It, in fact, took about 50 min. Never the less, it was quite beautiful, and afterwards we took the two canoes around the lake before napping again and then walking back to Sacha.
            Once we were back, the group decided to take a swim in the quebrada, which, unlike the lake, was relatively caiman-free. It had been higher before we came, and people had been jumping in off the bridge, a drop of about 25 ft.  It was much too low when we got there though, but we still had a great time crawling up the rapids, tossing around the frisbee and sharing a couple beers as we tried (with only moderate success) to avoid dashing ourselves on the jagged rocks hidden below the exceptionally murky water.




9/1/09 10:35pm:
We’ve just said goodbye to Joel and Jane who left today. To send them off last night we took one last stroll through the plaza near our hostel. There is a really cool landscape painter who works in the plaza at night, and what’s really impressive is that he only uses spray paint. He has a myriad of different techniques using sponges, newspaper, cardboard and a razor, and it is truly remarkable how precisely he can fade, smudge and blot the paint around the canvas. And just to make it even more of a show, he routinely lights his paints and canvas on fire to dry the paint faster.
Shortly after watching the painter we were looking at a couple comedians, one of who was in drag, who had gathered quite a crowd around them lip-syncing. Within a minute one of them sees Alex and Joel wearing their somewhat conspicuous Peruvian soccer jerseys and drags first Alex, and then also Joel, into the circle. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to follow exactly what he was saying, but Jane translated for us as best she could. The performers weren’t particularly clever, and most of the humor was simply derived from a couple gringos being put on the spot, with a dash of lewd humor to keep Alex and Joel uncomfortable. All things considered Alex and Joel handled it very well, and escaped relatively unscathed, though Alex now gives the crowds a comfortable berth when we walk through the plaza.
Alex’s mom, Pat, is also here now and we’ve been hanging out in her room at Cabana Quinta as much as we can since it has AC. She’s also a pathologist so naturally we got around to talking about all the diseases we can get here and we’ve come to the conclusion we almost definitely have giardia. The symptoms have been very mild for me and only lasted a couple days a while back, so I may have already cleared it, but I could just be asymptomatic. Alex has had it worse, and one of the members of the Herp team was also diagnosed with it though so it’s pretty likely we all got it somewhere. We looked up the recommended treatments on the CDC website and then visited a pharmacy here to see if we could find anything. We actually got really lucky and they had our top choice, Nitazoxanide, since it didn’t have any mentioned side effects and it was really cheap too. We also met a guy who had been bitten a bat at one of the research stations and now had to get the rabies vaccine series, which is apparently brutal and takes a week, so we definitely felt like we got off easy. However, we did discover our meds did, in fact, have the side effect of turning your urine an alarmingly dark, neon yellow.




9/5/09 5:38 pm
            And thus our great trip is coming to a close. We’ve just gotten back from TRC where we saw those of the team that were still here and got one last hurrah in the jungle. The boat ride up was absolutely spectacular. While it was still light we saw an entire family of half a dozen Capybara, but we had gotten a late start and so later we wound up driving straight into another particularly beautiful sunset on the river. And as if this weren’t enough, as the light from the sunset faded, the almost full moon was rising in the sky to our left as an enormous lightning storm started flashing behind us. It was far enough away that we couldn’t hear the thunder, but it must have been several miles wide, and the strikes were absolutely incessant, brilliantly lighting up the hazy thunderheads every second or two. Eventually another storm cropped up in front us, and our boat was surrounded on all four sides by the moon glinting off the river, the dimming glow of the sunset and the luminous bursts from the storms.
            Once we got off the boat, however, we had the herculean task of hauling 12 people’s backpacks and equipment the mile or so to the lodge (which was built so far back to avoid the sand flies near the river which carry leishmaniasis, a flesh eating parasite that is exceptionally difficult to treat) with a single cart. The result was (in retrospect) a rather comical scene of us strapped with bags on every limb trying to keep the equipment from falling off the cart as we hauled it was best we could through the jungle.
            Fortunately the food this time around at TRC was far better than last time. Perhaps they were better prepared for us this time, or now they simply weren’t running out of food, but it made things much more pleasant. Plus they let us eat in the dining area with the tourists, and even made cakes for Dennis’s and then Alex’s consecutive birthdays. My present to Alex was a Spanish pocket guide to diseases of the digestive track.
            It was sad to leave the rest of the team at TRC. By now it’s happened quite a few times in my life, but it still gives me quite a peculiar feeling to realize I’ll likely never see these people I’ve become friends with again. I’m glad to be going home though. There are certain things I’ve simply been away from for too long: hot showers, dry air, meals that don’t get half their caloric value from white rice. The trip has certainly been spectacular though, and I certainly hope to come back one day.