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  Next Post: A Trip to the Manu Biosphere Part II

A trip to the Manu Biosphere Part I

Taking inspiration from Scienceguy288’s blog on amazing travel destinations, I decided to blog about some of the favorite places I have been, with photographs. Rather than leave the best for last, I decided to start with my favorite vacation – the Manu biosphere in Peru. While this was clearly the most exhilarating adventure I have ever taken, I must warn you that the pictures are quite poor because at the time I only had a point and shoot camera. I will also save you from my description of an encounter with a jaguar there and my favorite photo from the trip.

For my birthday, my wife gave me the ultimate gift – a vacation to anywhere in the world within a reasonable expense. I quickly made a list of all the possible places to go. Africa and the Galapagos were some of my first thoughts, but the trips worked out to be too expensive. I have long wanted to take three wildlife trips in the world – the Galapagos, Africa, and the Amazon. Therefore I focused my search on the Amazon. My first attempt was to look at Ecuador – as it was already on my mind from the Galapagos. In particular I looked into the Kapawi tribe. After some research, though, I removed Ecuador entirely because the tribes still hunt animals there (meaning they are more scared of humans) and the oil interests have severely hurt the environment. The decision proved to be wise as several other travelers I met in Peru mentioned they could see the fires from the oil factories from the lodge (though they went to a different one than Kapawi).

I then turned my attention to Peru and quickly learned about the Manu Wildlife Center. Most of the posts on the bulletin boards had glowing praise for it – so I decided to make my trip there.

The slight problem with the Manu reserve is it’s not the easiest place to get to. There are two ways to get there – by small plane or by vehicle. Taking the small plane meant flying over the Andes. If you have good weather, the flight takes off and lands without issue. However, if the weather isn’t decent – then the flights are cancelled. Taking the vehicle meant a hair-raising drive over the Andes Mountains, where vehicles have been known to “disappear” due to poor roads and several thousand foot sheer drops. I liked the idea of the plane, but I was worried I would go all that way to have the trip cancelled due to bad weather. I chose to drive rather than fly over the Andes.

Getting over the Andes is just one step in getting to the Manu biosphere. The problem is – the road will take you only so far. Eventually the road ends and you must canoe the rest of the way. The entire trip from Cuzco takes several days. Therefore I decided to take a nine day trip in the jungle and fly back from Manu to Cuzco. To compensate for the possibility of a cancelled flight, I left a day at the end of the trip as a spare. I then booked a trip to Machu Picchu for that day in case the flight did take off and land as I hoped.

Finally with the trip booked, I departed in early September. Of course, getting to Cuzco itself was a chore. Getting to Lima was easy – with a short connection in Houston. However I had to spend the night in the airport in Lima. My flight arrived there at 10 PM and my flight to Cuzco departed at 5:30 AM. I was quite tired upon arriving in Cuzco.

Cuzco is an amazing city and definitely has that “You’re not in Kansas anymore” look. It is quite an old city, with many buildings built on Inca foundations.

Interestingly, during the last several earthquakes the Inca buildings survived while the Spanish buildings collapsed. The Inca were very aware of the volatility of the land where they lived and did a number of things to reduce the impact of earthquakes, such as building windows and doors in trapezoid shapes instead of the rectangles we are used to.

The Inca also made foundations consisting of thousands of small pebbles underneath their buildings. This enabled the entire building to move with the force of the earthquake, rather than be ripped apart by it. Notice the precision that they used for this – in particular how the windows line up. Also note that no mortar was used in their buildings.

I cannot imagine how much chiseling it took to get these blocks right.

Getting back to Cuzco, within a short time of arriving there it is almost impossible not to notice one thing – it is really high. Denver likes to call itself the “Mile High City” and boasts an elevation of 5,280 feet. Denver, though, has nothing on Cuzco – which has an elevation of 10,860 feet! This really gets to you – and when you first arrive it is difficult to accomplish anything. I saw very little my first day there and spent a good deal of time drinking coca tea and having coca leaves spread on my face – which actually did help. For those of you who are not aware, coca is a medicinal plant prized by the Peruvians and Bolivians for a number of reasons – one of which is to help with the low altitude. They are also used to create a little powder called “cocaine”. Actually, it’s a shame that coca leaves are prohibited here because they do have a number of health benefits and significant amounts of them are required to make even a tiny portion of cocaine. On the way to Manu, we had the chance to see a coca plantation.

The guide claimed that the leaves on this field were not used to produce cocaine. However I could not help noticing that we were not let out of the bus and the engine was kept running.

Well, my four year old is requesting that I lay with him so he falls asleep right now, so I will have to end today’s post. Tomorrow I will continue the adventure, beginning with the journey through the Andes mountains and the descent into the jungle…

Related posts:

1. A Trip to the Manu Biosphere Part II In my previous post, I discussed planning my trip to Manu and arriving and exploring Cuzco. I didn’t spend very much time in Cuzco – taking the first day to acclimate to the altitude and the second to explore some of the Inca sites around the city. On the second...
2. A Trip to the Manu Biosphere Part III I find it somewhat amusing that I meant to write a single post on my trip to Manu, but I am currently on my third one and I’m not sure if I’ll finish up in this post. From yesterday’s post, we were just departing from the Cock-of-the-Rock lodge and descending...
3. A Trip to the Manu Biosphere Part IV I think it has become quite obvious how much I enjoyed my trip to Manu based on the length of this series of posts. Today, I will try to wrap up this series. I will start today with the biggest mystery of the trip – some form of creature that...
4. Let’s take a trip to Singapore! While recently going through my photos, I noticed that I never posted anything about our trip to Singapore several years back.  The likely reason for this is I had a P&S at the time and the photos suck, but it still was an interesting travel destination. At the time, Eitan...
5. A trip to the Museum of Flight For some strange reason, we never bothered to take Eitan and Nathan to the Museum of Flight.  While figuring out what to do one weekend, we decided it was time to take them. Of course, I couldn’t resist taking my camera and decided to be a bit creative with the...

Tags: adventure, cuzco, inca, jungle, manu, peru, Travel