After leaving home at 6am on Friday, we were ensconced in the bar at our Lima hotel by 6 pm that night. Albeit the 15 hour time difference made it a 27 hour trip. We got straight into the Peruvian spirit by trying out a Pisco Sour each. This is a national drink made with a grape brandy, lime juice, syrup and egg white – very tasty and hit the spot after a long day.
The next morning we left the hotel at 7:30am for a one hour flight to Puerto Maldonado and finally arrived 7 hours later. Hanging around the airport for a few hours gave us a good chance to meet our group – 10 of us, 6 Americans, a couple of Canadians and us. A fairly mature group with our oldest couple high into their 80 s. All nice and engaging and easy to get on with.
On our arrival into PM, we jumped into a battered mini bus, forced open the windows for some air while our bags were loaded onto the roof. A quick trip thru town down to the port where we embarked on a motorized canoe for a 40 minute trip up the Madre de Dios River. Access to our lodge required a mixture of walking the plank, climbing some mud steps and finally some wooden steps, at times with no hand rail. Ok going up, but challenging on the way down again.
Although we didn’t realize it for a couple of days, we were at a different, and up market, lodge from that advised to us. Very nice although created some initial confusion about the changes to the excursion program until we realised we were at a different lodge.
Excursions mainly involved getting back down the steps, heading up or down the river and then walking through the jungle. A couple also included canoeing around inland lakes. Di and myself skipped the 2 night excursions, the first because it involved heading down the steps in the dark and the second because they were off to spot spiders and snakes. We also gave a treetop canopy walk a miss – 30 metres up steps with no rails followed by a series of swaying suspension bridges. Can’t imagine anything worse. High risk of trips and slips so we were being pretty careful. Unfortunately we had one incident where our nearing 90 year old Carol ( married to Ron) stumbled getting into a canoe and smacked her head against the railing. We had just finished a 45 minute hike through the jungle to get there, and a couple of us were commenting how impressive they were, and laughing because they were the first to line up to climb into the canoe. Luckily there was a French doctor with another tour group from our lodge nearby and he was straight there to treat her. Thankfully bruised and sore but otherwise ok. The doctor has been excellent – following through with her treatment a couple of times every day back at the lodge . Di had a good conversation with him on one of our boat trips and he gave her some good hints on managing altitude sickness if it becomes an issue at any time.
I had a “Hi Val” moment at the lodge – which in this case was a couple who used to work with Val and Anthony.
Departed the lodge this morning for flight back to Lima, very happy with my time in the Amazon. Weather was unexpectedly fantastic- sunny, low 20s and very modest humidity every day when I was anticipating hot and humid.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) we have only one other guy join us – so only 11 on the extended tour which is good.
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Round about 