The Jungle in the Manu National Park

Following the intense hiking on the Inka Trail, we went for a new experience: the jungle in the Manu National Park!

The Manu National Park is one of the most biodiverse areas in the planet. In our eight days trip we would reach the depths of the Amazonian jungle. The trip would include plenty of time spent in land and river transport. The secret of the beauty of Manu National Park is that it remains 100% virgin and primitive simply because it is so difficult to reach! Humans are extremely rare in the depths of the Manu jungle and in most of our day and night walks we were really the only humans in a radius of many kilometers.
But let’s see how our little adventure began.

The first day we meet with the rest of the group at 5am in Cusco. We get on board our “Special Jungle Vehicle” (which was simply an old van packed with passengers and supplies). We started our trip with the high Andes. There is almost no flora and fauna in this area and this is why it is often called “the Andean desert”. It is an altitude of 3,000 to 5,000 meters above sea level.

However, as we started descending towards 2,000m the vegetation started becoming a lot denser. We were entering the cloud forest. It is like a sea of clouds (from the mountains) and we had started “diving” there!

Manu is divided into two zones: the cultural zone and the reserved zone. The cultural zone is named as such because one can still see communities of humans there. In the reserved zone there is no trace of human civilization and the access is controlled by rangers. Of course these two zones are only about 20% of the Park. In the rest of the Park access is only granted to scientists who observe nature.

The first species that we had the opportunity to see was the “Cock of the Rock”. It is a species of green-red parrot: the male makes a special “dance” in order to attract the female when they mate. Then we escaped from the tropical rain in our jungle lodge and we took a rest in the beds, where the mosquito nets protected us from the numerous mosquitos and flying cockroaches which wondered around the area. :-S

The second day was the “adventure day”: rafting and zip-line were on the programme. We drove to the place where the rafting would start. We put on our swimming suits and we are ready to ride the streams of the Amazonian jungle!!! But before that the instructor calls the male population to carry (on our heads) the boat that was supposed to take 8 passengers! Really heavy, I mean! And as it usually happens with such things, it is always the taller one that carries most of it!

Well, after ten minutes “walk”, we arrive in the river and we get on our boat! We are about to tame the Amazon!! The route was full of fast streams and the surface of the river was forming various curves due to the speed of the water. It was a great experience and towards the end we were allowed to swim, because the river was much calmer. But we didn’t because our guides had confirmed the following fact: in the Amazon river there is a tiny fish, which is so tiny that it can enter one’s urethra. And it likes being there so much that, once it is inside, it extends the spikes on its skin and it practically “hooks” there. It can only be removed by an operation… We were not much in the mood for swimming after that…

Through rafting we arrive in the (river) port from where our trip would continue by boat only. There is no other way of reaching the deep jungle. We arrived in the lodge where we would do the zip-line activity. For those (like me) who have no idea what the zip-line is, it is a series of cables connecting the tops of very high trees and the sportsman is supposed to go from tree to tree using gravity (the cable is descending) at quite a high speed! It was amazing!

And mentioning “amazing”, there was a group of four Americans in their 50s and they were the loudest animals in the jungle! :-) And whatever they would see, they would go like: “Oh my Gosh” and “This is amazing!”. And we have to mention a funny story here: there was one of them from Texas who felt that she should impose on the animals what she thought was best for them. She sees some butterflies in a toilet and she ‘sets them free’, but the guide explained to her later that the butterflies were there because it was too cold outside! Plus she sees a baby deer and she took it in her arms to caress it! The baby deer was so scared that it shitted on her (she still had her raincoat on, fortunately for her!). It gave the rest of us a feeling of natural justice.

We slept in Erika Lodge and the next day we reached, after many hours of boat trip, the entrance of the reserved zone. We signed in and we entered the zone of total absence of human intervention. In the river there are many mantas and piranhas. On the shores we could often see river turtles as well as white caimans (species related to crocodiles and alligators), which reached 4m long. Occasionally we could also see black caimans, which reach 6m long!

We arrived in our lodge in the reserved zone. Needless to say that it was very basic, no electricity, no warm water, nothing! We walked to explore the nature around us. The area was full of sounds of birds, monkeys and insects! In the morning we would wake up with the songs of the toucan or with the calls of the ‘roaring monkey’ (the leader of the group makes a sound like a lion roaring!). By the end of our trip we wished we could kill them. The jungle is so loud!

We had the chance to see the ‘spider monkey’, which is called like that because it goes from tree to tree like a spider moves (without jumping) and the ‘squirrel monkeys’, which move in groups of hundreds and they jump from tree to tree. Walking further, we met the woollen monkeys which thought that they were under attack, so they started cutting branches of trees and throwing them at us! We moved away leaving them space to celebrate their victory!

We also had the opportunity to get on board of a wooden catamaran-style construction. From there we would approach (rowing) the ‘giant river otters’. There is a whole family in the Salvador lake, which is an oxbow lake. Oxbow lakes are formed by the water which is ‘abandoned’ when the river takes different routes. The Salvador Lake is a few kilometres long and due to its calm environment it hosts many caimans, piranhas, anacondas, bats, otters and other species. We went to approach a family of giant river otters. Because the babies had just been born we had to be completely quiet, otherwise the mother can get stressed and she stops producing milk and the babies die. We spotted them and we had the chance to see them catching fish and taking care of each other.

Anacondas? We didn’t see any. But given that those snakes can be up to 12m long, we were not exactly looking forward to it!

Later on in an afternoon walk in the shores of a nearby oxbow lake, we saw empty shells of turtles. There were around 7-8 shells in total. The guide explained us that these shells were the leftovers from the jaguar’s lunch on the same day! :-S Feeling not so reassured for our lives, we continued the walk... But we have to say that jaguars, anacondas and other predators are no real danger for a group of humans, (well, at least that’s what the guide kept on telling us!) They can be very dangerous for somebody walking alone in the jungle, but when there is a group of e.g. 6 people walking, these predators hear this group as a ‘giant worm’ moving in the jungle! And they wouldn’t attack something so big, and with so many mouths! ;-)

Another funny aspect of the jungle trip were the night walks! We would walk around in the jungle with our torches looking for nocturnal animals in complete darkness. It was funny during the first 10 min, but completely nerve breaking the rest of the time! The guide would tell to Ade every 5 minutes: “I can see you are suffering, girl” or “You are suffering aren’t you?” (“Ah really?, Jouer a colla maya avec des grosses bebêtes dans une jungle remplie de jaguars, boa, mygales, il a beau me repeter que c est pas dangereux mon cerveau a comme du mal a absorber l’information…). At a moment Ade thought something had come under her clothes and she really freaked out, it turned out that it was just a giant mosquito which had been able to reach her skin despite her three layers of clothes. Soon we got really fed up with the whole thing especially because the guide would stop every three meters to show us even insignificant things such as a grass hoper, a tree a leave and he would keep on repeating: “Look at that, oh it’s beautiful!!! oh how beautiful, oh it’s beautiful.” We were only thinking “just take us to the dam camp…AND FAST, trust us when you are in the dark with boas, spiders and more you really don’t care about why this tree leave is so special and why it has such a funny shape”. Moreover, mosquitoes were pitiless despite powerful insect repellents and were certainly the most unpleasant part of the experience. These guys will always get the millimetre square of you skin that you forgot to massage and they DO drive you to craziness, getting tears out of you at the worst.

We had a dynamo-torch so every 5 min the group would hear the “gnnnnnnnnn...” of our torch charging! (Ade: I was often using the torch noise in purpose as a trick to warn the big animals that we are coming and that they should go away, too scaring to face them! The only two guys of the group who maybe would not have minded making more “special encounters” were a 60 years-old couple from Luxembourg, always walking around with a Bacardi bottle in the hand…)

We surely had our moments of adventure though, like when we were passing in the dark some centimetres close to a wasp nest or to the web of a poisonous ‘tiger spider’ and a baby boa.

After some days full of “little adventures” of that kind we had to start our long trip of return. After several hours of boat trip (and avoiding a huge ‘tourbillion’ in the river), as well as passing a strange group (some people say they saw two dead bodies with their binoculars, but at the same time they were also the ones drinking Bacardi all the time, so the info should definitely be handled with care).

We reached the Erica lodge and there, we played football with the natives: Peru vs. the world. Peru won 4-1 the first match, but the world had not said its last word: the world won 4-0 in the second match. The field was very basic (i.e. there were two sticks for goals on each side and that was it) and it was on the mud of the Amazon (where your foot sinks 20cm easily), so we needed some serious washing afterwards. But after having felt like Che Guevara in the movie “Diarios de Motocicleta”, we could relax with cold beer and pop corn by the river, watch the sun setting and the moon rising in a beautiful synchronisation just in front of us.

A big and dusty land trip the next day and we were back to Cusco, ready for the next destination! Check out our jungle pictures and don’t hesitate to leave us your comments!

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Part of trip: DIARIOS DE AMERICA LATINA

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