© Allan and Amanda 2008
At last the day arrives! After a restless couple of hours in bed I finally got up around 1am for the journey to Bristol Airport. It was an easy run up the motorway; very little traffic and the weather cool and dry… Arrived at the airport not long after 3am, no check in facilities open so we waited until about 4.15am when the staff turned up and said goodbye to our bags… I hope we see them again!
We used the ‘ Fly – Thru’ security facility which was quite good and probably very good when the airport is really busy. A mediocre breakfast followed before we boarded our plane to Amsterdam – the first leg of our trip.
Pretty uneventful flight over to Schipol although the plane looked completely full. Flight time around 50 minutes… We had about 1½ hours at Schipol; just enough time to have a wander without being too bored.
The flight to Lima left about 10 – 15 minutes late, but weather conditions meant we’d make up that time en-route. The plane was a Boeing 777-200 with approx. 300 people on board and it looked full! We were given centre row seats, which were pretty cramped, but just about OK. Quite a good flight which lasted nearly 13 hours! We were both very tired after missing out on a night’s sleep and we could only snatch short naps now and again.
There appeared to be an endless supply of drinks, snacks and meals and they even remembered Amanda’s veggie option although they shouldn’t have bothered; it looked thrown together and the portions were quite small. It was ironic that the main/normal option generally had a meal without meat anyway!
Had fun for a while playing Spanish language games on the IFE and I watched ‘I Am Legend’ the Will Smith film which was quite entertaining. The music selection was very good and surprisingly the day passed reasonably quickly. We arrived in Lima on time, about 4.20pm in the afternoon (the next day).
Amanda had befriended an old lady travelling on her own out to Peru to meet up with a group she hadn’t yet met for an onward journey to Machu Picchu…75 years old she was and very adventurous…good for her! I helped her with her cases and we went out into the arrivals hall…we were officially in Peru! We were met by our tour representative who then drove us through a very busy Lima to the Hotel Maria Angola in the Miraflores district of the city.
Lima appeared as a grubby sprawl of low-rise buildings, many half finished, most in a poor state of repair. Small, cheap cars and trucks filled the roads along with countless buses and coaches. It was rush hour and the place was manic. The streets were full of people, lots of hawkers peddling their wares, trying to scrape a living. The overall impression was of a poor impoverished population. Quite depressing but fascinating all the same…
The Hotel was clean and modern in a smart area, seemingly at odds with the rest of the city.
We were both feeling shattered and after a brief meeting with our tour company contact, we had a meal and drink in the hotel café. I had beef strips, onions, rice & fries. Amanda had grilled fish with prawn sauce, scallops, cheese and potatoes. We had complimentary Pisco Sour cocktails and I also had a glass of wine – got white wine although we had tried to ask for red… we must improve our Spanish! All in all a very good meal and with a total cost of only £ 11, very good value too.
Our room was quite comfortable, if a little noisy. Amanda was very pleased to find that Andy Murray was on live TV, playing in the US Open! Great !?!
Got to bed early, around 9pm, in preparation for a 4.30am alarm call. Slept OK, lots of alarms and sirens sounding through the night, sounds of the city world wide I guess…
We were picked up at 5.30am by the same guide as the previous evening. It had been raining in the night; a rare occurrence apparently, and the streets were awash. The journey to the airport was slow through the puddles and the fact that our driver was obviously not used to driving in the rain and had problems with the screen misting up…why she didn’t use the fan and heater I don’t know !! Amanda had an impromptu shower when a passing car threw water through the half open window, supposedly ‘drenching’ her… a bit dramatic, but she did look a little damp!
Once at the airport, we were ushered in by our tour guide passing through the queues and on to departure to catch the internal flight to Puerto Maldonado, via Cusco.
The flight was about 30 minutes late, due to a ‘technical fault’ (ominous) but we eventually took off around 8.30am. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a window seat, but what views we could see of the Andes, looked truly spectacular! Sadly Amanda’s headache got the better of her and she was ill as we landed at Cusco; not enough to completely fill the bag, but she wasn’t feeling or looking great!
At Cusco, we stopped for about 20/30 minutes whilst passengers got off and new travellers boarded. During the break our fellow seat row passenger appeared to get off, so I took his seat to get the window view. Then to our surprise he returned; don’t really know where he had been, but I kept his seat anyway…
Whilst still on the ground at Cusco, Amanda took the opportunity to seek fresh air at the top of the rear steps by the open door and she was given coca tea by a steward to help relieve her nausea. I tried a sip and decided that I would have to be pretty ill before I tried it again! The weather at Cusco was very clear, sunny and warm; apparently about 60 degrees, but it looked a lot warmer.
Soon the plane filled up with passengers for the onward leg to Puerto Maldonado and we were quickly ‘up and away’. The flight took about 40 minutes but didn’t give any relief for poor Amanda… more sick bags!
Puerto Maldonado airport resembled a bus station, which just happened to have a runway outside. We were the only plane there and the arrivals hall was just an open, thatched, roof shed! All very tropical, and it gave a real feeling of the rain forest.
There was some confusion trying to find our guide, not helped by the fact that we were the last one’s off the plane and the last one’s out of the hall as Amanda had decided to lay out on the floor at people’s feet wishing the world would end!
We finally found our guide and felt very privileged when we jumped into a smart 4x4, whilst all the other tourists were being herded on to buses and coaches; we were getting very special treatment on this trip!
Within ten minutes we were at the edge of the mighty Rio Madre de Dios for our journey up river and deep in to the rainforest. We were told by Juan, our guide, that we would be the only two passengers, but when we saw the boat, it seemed quite full already. It then became apparent that the other ‘passengers’ were our cook, our cleaner, our boatman, crew and they had even brought their families with them as well. It seems that they were all embarking on this trip just to be at our service! Very different, very special, very privileged but not something that I was totally comfortable with I must say…
Very soon we joined the smaller Las Piedros river and began our journey to Tipishca Lodge for an overnight stop, the distance to our final destination at the Amazon Rain Forest Conservation Centre (ARCC) was simply too far up river to cover in one day.
The sheer size and scale of the rivers and rainforest is breathtaking. Although only one of literally thousands of Amazon tributaries, the Las Piedros river was pretty big; averaging 100-150 yards across, and reaching over 200 yards in some places!
The riverbanks were strewn with fallen trees sent crashing when the yearly wet season floods, inundates and undermines the banks and tree roots. Large tree trunks jutted menacingly out of the water and all around the constant chatter and calls of birds helped us on our way.
Even though it was about midday when we left the dockside, there was still an amazing abundance of fantastic exotic birds and wildlife. Countless kingfishers, egrets, swallows, martins, terns, lapwings, flycatchers, parrots, and parakeets kept us amused. There were lots of vultures and the occasional macaw. We saw horned screamers and hoatzins, tanagers and sun bitterns. We probably saw over 50 species of birds just on that single trip…as many different species as we get in our garden at home during a whole year! We were also lucky enough to see a small caiman quietly slipping into the river.
The journey up river was long, and at times quite hazardous. We repeatedly ran aground on hidden snags and sandbanks and on several occasions the boatman had to get in to the river and manhandle the boat free. The rest of the time a very careful course was skilfully plotted around the obstacles. In spite of the fact that the river spanned over 200 yards in places, it was in parts only a couple of feet deep!
During the trip we were served a delightful chicken salad lunch as we motored along in this jungle paradise…quite surreal.
We eventually got to Tipishca some time after 5pm and walked the ½ mile or so to the lodge. Our walk was interrupted by a herd of peccaries, over 50 of them in total, crossing our path, no more than 50 yards in front of us…fantastic sight!… but not a great smell!
Tipishca lodge was situated on a small ox-bow lake, had about half a dozen small chalets/huts and a central dining hall all traditionally made from local hardwood complete with roofs thatched with palm leaves. Our accommodation was simple and basic but quite adequate for the one night we were staying there, and in the sweltering heat even the cold shower was tolerable.
Back on the boat we had another 5 hours of tricky navigating ahead and to help ensure a safe passage we picked up a native Indian from a nearby settlement who apparently knew the river well.
Again, lots of different birds enroute including a pack of 40-50 vultures feeding on a dead body of some poor animal by the side of the river. We also saw a capybara calming walking along the bank, which in daylight was quite unexpected. The highlight of the journey however, was seeing between 50 & 100 red-and-green macaws gathering at a clay lick high up on the riverbank. Truly exotic and some spectacle!
