Blogs from Madre de Dios, Peru, South America

600 breakfast leave 630. Today we had an excursion to some lake. We took the boat 10-15 minutes then the walk was 2 km. It took about an hour and a half with stops. We split into 2 groups. I stayed with Julio. Julio found a suspected tarantula hole and got a small plant to make vibrations and lure it out. He put us all in position and told us to stay still. No moving, no screaming. He got it out and one of the girls screamed and jumped so it ran back in. He tried again and got it out but again but it only came out very quickly before running back into its hole. Long enough for everyone to get a good look but not long enough for anyone to get good photos. Todays ... read more

This morning was the first time we were allowed a lie in - we didn't have to get up until 7:00. We headed up river close to Puerto Maldonado to a site illustrating local subsistence farming techniques. The family own 25has and farm 18has on a rotation. I was reminded that most of the nutrient in the rainforest is in the vegetation so that after burning and clearing an area and then planting crops it is left to regenerate. The speed of regeneration is very rapid - we were shown a balsa tree, perhaps 5m high that had grown that high in 3 months. The trees have long horizontal roots because all the nutrient is in the top of the soil. After an introduction to the medicinal properties of local plants and Brazil nuts we took ... read more

The alarm went off at 5:00 again this morning, breakfast at 5:30 and off at 6:00. Breakfast is just my sort of thing - a chance to select a variety of fresh fruit, pineapple, papaya and water melon with different grains, raisins and this morning dried bananas. The latter were sticky and sweet. A short boat trip took us down river to Tambopata National Reserve. We then walked along a muddy track for about 3km. We passed an entrance hut with a map of nature reserves and national parks in Peru which I felt obliged to take a picture of. We are in the bottom right hand corner. We passed an impressive termite mound and eventually came to a collection of long canoes. The lake is the remnant of an oxbow lake from the main river ... read more

Human Impact on the Amazon Basin, Gold Mining. Puerto Maldonado is a large town on the confluence of the Madre de Dios and the Tambatoto rivers in the Peruvian rainforest. The headwaters of these rivers are in the Andes, near the famous Inca capital, Cusco. When the Spanish arrived in Cusco they found temples lined in gold plate and a massive number of gold statues, ornaments.This gold came from the surrounding mountains and over millions of years much of it has been eroded and transported down to the flood plains of these rivers. Sand bars on the rivers, and the forested flood plains, contain the sediment that has been deposited from the mountains, and in it there is gold. This gold is extracted by washing massive quantities of sediment over wooden ramps, the heavier sediments get ... read more

The next country for us to explore was Peru, and first home base was Iquitos. Iquitos is home to over 500,000 people, is well known as the tourist gateway to the Peruvian Amazon, and due to the river systems surrounding it, it is one of the few major cities that doesn't have road access, only being accessible by boat or air. Due to this difficulty, there are very few cars in Iquitos, but many thousands of Motocars, and these are the form of taxi’s so more commonly known as moto-taxis. If you don't know what at a Moto-Taxi is, it is a single wheel and motorbike motor at the front (with accompanying handlebars for steering), and a covered, double bench seat at the back. It's the mullet of motor vehicles. (get it, business at the front, ... read more