Mishaps and foibles in the Jungle

We were greeted back at our hostel in Cusco at midnight by Juanita, some corn ships and a delicious chocolate truffle cause she’s good like that. She had stayed behind as she had done Machu Pichu some months before with her boyfriend and couldn’t spare that kind of money again. Luckily for her, in the four days we were gone, the people at our hostel offered her a volunteer position so she was living and eating for free and painting a new bar for them which are 3 things Juanita loves best.

It was definitely time for bed (we had been at Machu Pichu that morning) and we went into our dorm to get our toothbrushes. In the dorm we heard a girl making the craziest noises I had ever heard anyone make in their sleep. I concluded she was having the maddest of dreams and we went to brush our teeth. When we returned, we realized it was not simply dreams that was causing the mad noises but something to do with an exorbitant amount of alcohol. The girl was lurching in her sleep and throwing up all over herself. The room smelled like a glorious mix of wine and vomit and so we quickly woke up the girl and took her outside with a bucket so she could vomit quickly and cleaned up the mad mess she had made in, on and under her bed. Oh it was disgusting and to be honest I more assisted than helped with my squeamishness and Juanita did most of the caring as she seems to handle all of these situations. She was crying and muttering about some boy and after she had vomited herself out Juanita took her to the bathroom to shower her and she gave her some of her clean clothes. Anyway exhaustively we finally made our way to bed once he we were sure the girl wasn’t going to choke on her vomit and the room didn’t smell so awful.

The next day we woke up to see the girl awake and talking to her boyfriend who had left her to go partying all night. He said thank you a million times but the girl didn’t seem too perturbed about us having to clean after her and shower her and give her our clothes. Anyway with that out of the way we spent some days in Cusco hanging around, we helped the hostel with the painting and soon it was time for Juanita to leave South America and go to England to get some money. She needed to take a bus to Lima and we were ready to do some volunteering up North so we decided to go with her to Lima and then continue North to the farm we were to volunteer at in the Amazon. We hopped on a bus which consisted of 22 hours of MAD curves and the night was sleepless with our bodies jolted against each other and bashed against the side of the bus repeatedly… When the sun rose we saw ourselves in an endless desert of nothingness and the bus winding like mad on the steepest of roads. The amount of times I thought of the bus falling off the road and thus down the mountain was too much and in the end, again, I had to remember that this was not in my hands and thus worrying was futile.

We arrived in Lima, found a rad hostel named Friend’s House with a Kitchen!Juanita left the next day at 6am and Roman and I looked at each other, and, not ready to get on a bus yet, we decided to tackle the waves of Lima and go surfing. It was pretty fun, though the waves were weird and it was kind of expensive for an hour and half. We stayed another night and then went for a long mission to find the bus company that will take us to this particular jungle town named La Merced. We found the bus, bought a ticket and went on a big mission to find Roman a Charango which is a 10 stringed instrument (like a mandolin, with 5 different notes) that Peruvians play. After hours of searching for the best one with the lowest price we left a shop, satisfied  (I had also bought a pan flute) and made our way to the hostel to collect our thigns and then to the bus to catch our 10pm bus.

We arrived in La Merced at the glorious hour of 7am and immediately asked for the trucks that would take us another 8 hours to Puerto Bermudez where this farm was meant to be. We found the cheapest 
deal with us sitting on the back of this bakkie on wooden boards with 5 other people and not very much leg room. This would have been fine had it not have been the maddest, baddest dirt road I had ever seen. It was a jolt and bump every second, no position was vaguely comfortable for a little snooze and a moment of comfort was followed by pain as your body was slammed against the bars around us. Oh but the scenery was spectacular. Green treess, and colourful villages we passed, incredible rivers and little waterfalls and a constant sound of natural life surrounded us on this long jungle road. After hours and lots of pain we finaly arrived ust before Puerto Bermudez at the place where we were meant to be. Roman went in to speak to the woman as I got our bags off the truck. From where I was standing at a distance watching their body language, I knew the story before it was told to me. We could not stay there and we had traveled all this way for nothing. Strangely, I didn’t feel any disappointment as I feel a part of me seemed to know this was going to happen.

Our truck driver said some nonsensical stuff to us in Spanish and we supposed he intended to take us somewhere. Which he did, he took us to Alberge Humboldt owned by a crazy chain-smoking Spaniard (from Spain). It was a lovely little hotel attached to a poor village and a surprise in this place and still I do not know why he has this little hotel in this middle of nowhere place but we were happy for a clean bed, hammocks and an open air house full of interesting art all over. Two young German girls were also staying there and it turned out they had the same story. Apparently what had happened to all of us was that we were emailing the son of the couple who said we could come there anytime but apparently he wasn’t even there, he was in Mexico and the husband was in Lima and the woman said she was sick and thus couldn’t have any people there. They evidently didn’t have a phone or email to communicate this, or maybe they did and they just weren't concerned. Regardless, we had transported ourselves to death to be in the jungle without anything to do and a long way from Lima.

Our crazy Spnaiard said we could stay one night in a room but the next night the mayor of Oxampampa and all his people were coming for a meeting and they would stay at the hotel and thus we could sleep on the hammocks. He also said that when Mayor goes home the day after they will hopefully give us a free lift back to La Merced. We spent the following day messing around the town and walking up the river and going for a swim and watching the people. As no tourists were ever there the people constantly watched us but never seemed to offer a smile or a kind look. But it was saturday and when we were passing a bar after our swim, 2 men hailed us and told us we had to sit and drink beer with them. With nothing better to do we acquiesced  and ended up drinking a lot of beer with them and soon we were invited to go to one of the men’s house to drink more beer. As still we had nothing better to do we went along with him to his nice clean house with his nice wife who was a teacher and he spoke to us for a long time and we nodded and nodded, not really understanding but happy to listen and nod and drink his beer.

After maybe too much beer we were ready to finally get some lunch at 5pm and we went into a restaurant where a blonde boy was sitting inside. He shouted, “Mama!” and out of the kitchen came a white girl about our age and she spoke to us in English. We were so surprised and asked her a million question and it turned out she was from the Ukraine and had moved there because that was where her husband was from. When I asked how she had met her husband she said “Let us say God brought us together” which Roman said later meant she was a mail order bride. I couldn’t imagine a Peruvian in little Puerto Bermudez having the money or the need for a mail order bride, but of course anything is a possibility and Roman sounded so sure.

Anyway that night the Mayor and his friends drank loudly for hours and we ended up sleeping on the floor in the lounge upstairs. Tiredly we woke up and were told the Mayor would give us a lift back to La Merced about 2pm. We went back to the restaurant and met our Ukrainian's husband, James, who could also speak English and was a young and very good looking guy. So we decided maybe God brought them together in a more salubrious fashion and friendly James took us down to the river in his tuk tuk to see if he could get us a 5 soles boat ride down the river. He found out that he could but we would have to stay down the river for 2 days wich was 2 days we didn’t have. Apparently

this happened to an English guy who was there and he only made it back in 3 days. We declined the offer but instead they organized us a tuk tuk down the road to this lovely clean river to swim in. The water was crystal clear and we decided to ignore all the rubbish that surrounded it (Peruvians have NO concept of not littering) and enjoyed our time.

It was time to return to see if the mayor was ready to take us back and went back to the hotel. And we waited, and waited and waited until 7pm when finally they arrived and put us in the back of their truck and then we waited longer and then we were traversing through the glorious jungle air. Roman felt ill with all the mad lurching and thus we swapped spots, him lieing at the end of the bakkie and me uncomfortably curled around some miscellaneous items beneath me. It was to be a painful journey but I couldn’t help glorying in the spectacular show given to me by the smells, the towering trees, and the stars above me. And then, the stars left us and it was covered by a strange mist, and then the fog descended and I enjoyed the mysterious sounds and low visibility yet soon I realized 2 things, if I couldn’t see much then the person driving at a ridiculous speed on this dangerous road couldn’t see much and secondly, and more importantly, it looked like rain. Now it had rained a bunch on our way to Puerto Bermudez, strong 10 minute rains and then a nice warmth had followed it. Everything within my being hoped that this would be how the rain would fall. We could handle a 10 minute pour with our sleeping bags over our heads.

A light rain began and I enjoyed the feeling on my face as my body lay dry and warm under my sleeping bag. Then the rain became a little harder and I got a little worried yet decided not to think of it and thus not encourage it. And then it began to come down, and come down and come down, Roman was already completely covered with his sleeping bag and I hid under mine too and I heard such loud rain banging on my sleeping bad which I was so grateful was still dry and warm. And then, suddenly the water came through  and dripped onto my stomach, then to my thigh, then to my calf and the water kept on coming and coming. We kept driving through the storm, the men inside didn’t seem perturbed by our condition and drove like mad for another hour or 2 hours or whatever hours, I don’t know. I was so miserable it was unbearable until I decided it was time to think of all the millions of things I am grateful for. “I am grateful to be in the Amazon, I am grateful that at least this lift is free, I am grateful that I do not feel sick, I am grateful that at some point this will end, I am grateful for Roman, I am grateful for my family, I am grateful for….” I named my favourite friends, I dreamt of Wilderness and I went on for ages until the rain subsided a tiny bit, enough for me to check if Roman was ok and to play the game with him. We did for a bit until the rain came back in full force and we hid under our sleeping bags, not that they were more than soggy masses now. I had been thankful for so many things I went back into negative thought patterns for what seemed like FOREVER until we stopped in the middle of nowhere next to a building.

We jumped out of the van and one of the men did too and they knocked and called until finally a grumpy woman came out and opened up her shop for us. Like drenched dogs we asked her if he had a room and she grumpily shouted back something incomprehensible to us. So we waited around as she served everyone else and more and more truckloads of people came from who knows where and it would have been festive had we not been so desperately wet. Finally she gave us a tiny key with an extremely big wooden key ring and showed us our room which was a single bed in a wooden room barely bigger than a single bed, there was no light or windows and if there HAD been, there may have been a lot of things that we wouldn’t want to see so we searched in the deep centre of our bags for the only dry-ish clothes we had, put them on, and found some sleep.

The next day we awoke up to loud knocking on our door and some people shouting “VAMOS!”. It was 6am so we decided to ignore it but when it had happened three times we supposed this was wake up and leave time so we got up and prepared to leave. The rain had not stopped and everyone seemed to have vacated the property except for the woman and her dirty baby. We asked for breakfast which consisted of white rice with an egg on top. We asked how much we had to pay for our bed, she replied “3 soles” which is the equivalents of R10 or $1,5. And that was for both of us. So we waited by the door for some sort of vehicle to come along and I played ukulele while Roman wrote in his journal for an hour or so and we played a little with the dirty baby until a minibus showed up, we hailed it and got inside and continued our bumpy mad journey towards La Merced, this time warm and dry yet still, incredibly uncomfortable.

Finally, we got there, booked on a bus for Lima for 10pm, went to a huge coffee bean place where they sold all sorts of things to do with coffee and jams and gave us a MILLION tasters yet the one thing they didn’t sell was ACTUAL coffee. The sad thing about Peruvian coffee is that in general everywhere you go the coffee is instant and not real because it is too expensive for the Peruvians and mostly exported. We then went for a little wade in the river, had some dinner, drank some wine and and the time had come. We got on the bus to make a full circle of our mission and went back to Lima and hopefully, to a more fruitful adventure.