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Published: March 24th 2010
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After over two months isolated in a few wooden buildings in the middle of the Amazon with the same group of researchers, you tend to get a little stir crazy (think “The Bowdoin Bubble” X 1000). Conveniently enough, the two month checkpoint coincided with the necessary pick-up of a caller monkey from Puerto Maldonado (more on that later), so we decided to go on the Amazonian version of spring break: a five day stay in a hotel in Puerto Maldonado. Needless to say, we were all pretty excited about our foray back into the real world and the sight of other non-CICRA-related individuals, though I was a bit concerned about my recently heightened levels of social awkwardness (resulting from extreme social isolation), sure to be compounded by a significant language barrier.
At any rate, Puerto offers some things that you really appreciate after two months in the Amazon. They include the following: ice cream, cake, meals that don’t include rice, cold beverages, a real mattress, television and, best of all, a fan! Obviously, the food was probably my favorite luxury item and I made sure to stock up on deliciousness galore while in Puerto. This included daily trips to consume slightly disturbing amounts of cake and/or ice cream, cookies and chocolate. On one such trip, Emma demonstrated a classic Spanish failure when she ordered a piece of “chocolate cat” at the restaurant. Of course, I can’t judge, as my means of ordering food involves pointing at the item on the menu and saying “Si,” one of the few words I know. Apart from the sweets, I thoroughly enjoyed all meals in which I could forego an absurdly large pile of rice. I was even lucky enough to find a place serving pesto pasta, an extremely rewarding meal as I had tragically forgotten the taste of pesto over the past couple of months, an experience one should never have to endure.
Venturing out to get meals pretty much exhausted me and resulted in dangerous amounts of sweat production, thereby justifying return to the hotel room for the remainder of the day. Now, as aforementioned, there were three particularly wonderful resources present in the room: a fan, a television and a real mattress. I managed to make use of all three at once. Given that I can feel the wooden planks underneath my “mattress” at CICRA and consequently suffer semi-severe back pains, I was overjoyed at the prospect of lying motionless on a thick, sturdy, comfortable mattress for extended periods of time. Unfortunately, I had to move my arm a little bit to find the rare English-speaking channels on the television with the remote, but it’s a price I was willing to pay for reruns of the original “90210.” Those kids had some serious issues. But I was also able to enjoy “The Big Bang Theory” (good show), “Felicity” (bad show) and the new series of “Melrose Place” (good enough show). Imagine how pleased I was when it was possible to have a cool breeze on me the whole time! Some days, I would even muster up the energy to walk the 20 meters to the corner shop to pick up a cold Inca Kola. I’m sure you can see why I had to be physically removed from the hotel room.
A couple of times during our stay in Puerto, we rallied the troops to explore some of the discotheques. The girls on the Primates Peru team went to the massive market in Puerto, selling everything from fruit to birthday piñatas to beauty products to clothing to plastic tupperwares to…etc ( you get the idea), where we bought some cheap sundresses to wear. After showering and putting on dresses (and feeling like a real semi-clean person again!) we ventured out to the discotheque with some of the other researchers and staff from CICRA. Early in the night, I made the mistake of ordering a Cuba Libre (aka rum and coke), after which Marco, one of the Peruvian staff members, proceeded to order refills for me the remainder of the night, long after I had surpassed the point at which I was able to consume alcohol while also being coherent. But I tried. Despite my consumption of absurd amounts of cuba libres, or perhaps as a result of it, the rest of the night turned out to be really fun, filled with lots of dancing. However, my truly pathetic moves and inability to move my hips, as well as my gringo status, received plenty of stares throughout the night.
Other highlights of the trip included having power and electricity 24 hours a day (I had forgotten the carefree sensation of using my laptop without obsessing over the consistently diminishing battery power indicator, which I’m doing right now), turning Settlers of Katan into a drinking game (look it up - perhaps one of the nerdiest board games ever created, a staple of life here at CICRA) and sort of making friends with the adorable older couple who own the corner store near the hotel in Puerto (at which I fondly made all my soda/cookie/chocolate purchases).
As the end of our trip neared, I found myself eager to return to CICRA. As I had briefly mentioned earlier, the purpose of our trip to Puerto was really to pick up the caller monkey that we had decided to use in an effort to trap more saddlebacks. This caller monkey is essentially a saddleback tamarin that is placed near the traps in the hopes of attracting other saddlebacks into the trap with his calls (hence the name). His name is Cheeky or CBG, short for Cheeky Bastard Guy, and quite succinctly sums up his personality. He’s a real character and will be the subject of my next blog post, so stay tuned!
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Nick
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Im glad you got to escape the jungle for a while and have some of the finer pleasures in life (chocolate, a nice bed, and booze) I am curious about the caller monkey and where they come from. Does someone just have callers in captivity somewhere that they loan out to everyone else, or are they special in some way? Im just wondering why you had to go all the way to the city to get a monkey that you then would take back into the jungle to attract more monkeys. It sounds like some equipment that you should have already had at camp or something. What about that little baby that you said the camp brought in recently? Would that work?