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Published: July 17th 2008
He seemed unfazed by our canoe rounding one of the early bends of the Manu River. I am sure he had seen us before we spotted him. After taking a long, bored look at our gawking faces, he simply stretched, yawned, and then languidly rose to his feet to disappear into the jungle. A jaguar! And we had just begun our adventure in Peru's Amazonian headwaters...
With almost no turn around time, a subset of six from our Inka Trail group set forth on a very different adventure, an excursion into the Manu National Park in the Peruvian Amazon. Our legs still shaky from climbing around the Andes, we boarded a 12 seater bush plane and rose above the western Andean cordilla. Below us, glacier streaked mountains gave way to clouds pushing, unsuccessfully, at the preciptious slopes, inundating the hidden cloud forests with moisture. Then the clouds broke, revealing a seemingly endless expanse of dense jungle, only interrupted by snakes of muddy rivers. Here was the headwaters to the Amazon River. The utter flatness was unearthly after so many days in the highlands. Our "airport": a simple, grassy clearing in the tangle.
But this wasn't the end of our
journey. We hopped into a motorized canoe for a six hour trip upstream, almost as far into the national park as we were allowed to go. And about as far from "civilization" as you can imagine. Along the way we spotted half a dozen species of monkeys, including garrulous red howlers, dignified capuchins, gangly black spider monkeys, and sprightly squirrel monkeys. Logs turned out to be caymans, black and white. There were more birds than I could possibly keep track of: screamers, skimmers, herons, egrets, macaws, geese, and my favorite the prehistoric hoatzin. And the mammalian showstopper: the regal jaguar. We never imagined we'd be so lucky.
In our forest walks with our guide, Percy, our luck continued. We got to see lumbering tapirs at a clay lick just before darkness set in. Giant otters played in oxbow lakes. We saw ants galore - leafcutters, inch long "bullet" ants (named for the quality, ahem, of their sting), army ants - and spiders - including a bird-eating tarantula. Actually, I came to appreciate the smaller creatures of the jungle as much or more as the showier birds and large mammals (ok, the jaguar sighting was hard to beat!). Every inch
of the forest is inhabited by these beings. I also was amazed by the immense variety of the plantlife. Strangler figs that kill their hosts and grow to gargatuan size, their roots like flying buttresses. Orchids no bigger than the tip of a pencil. (My earlier interests in biology definitely were rekindled on this trip!)
At night, in our netted, lofted cabins, lit only by candlelight, we fell asleep to the sounds of birds and insects.
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k8
non-member comment
Wow!
Great pics! It looks like this has been a facinating adventure. btw, my niece said, "That's just wrong!! Why didn't he save them instead of eating them???"