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 day, I also attended a talk from my guide at Manu Expeditions, discussing what we will see on the trip and a detailed itinerary of where we were going. In general I liked Manu Expeditions. Their prices were very reasonable, their staff was friendly, and our guide was knowledgeable and knew a lot of the history and details of the area. My only complaint was the group was rather large at ten people. When traipsing through the jungle you really want the fewest people possible. Tour groups we saw from Inkanatura were smaller, but they did not offer the longer trip that I wanted. If I go there again someday, and I hope I do, I will likely hire a private guide.
Our first task was to get over the Andes mountains and stay the night at the Cock-of-the-Rock lodge in the cloud forests of the mountains. Below you can see the bus we took.
The bus was nice, but the roads were certainly very interesting. Not only could they get bumpy, but they were very narrow and I often wondered what would happen if we came across a vehicle coming the other way. Luckily, vehicles were very far between in the mountains. Few people there had them, and the handful we saw during the hours of driving were crammed full of people going from town to town – which themselves were quite distant from each other. It was an amazing experience – humbling for seeing the conditions in which the people lived. Children would follow the bus and wave as it came and old women stood by, hoping we would buy knitted alpaca goods they worked on.
On the way we stopped to see some burial chambers – calculated at approximately 2,000 years old.
The following is a shot of some of the locals. I stopped to buy some bracelets from the girls and was swarmed.
We stopped at one of the few towns along the way – actually the largest one for miles and one of the few with occasional health care (for most people though, care requires a long trip to Cuzco). One of the things I find most interesting when visiting other parts of the world are the strange fruits. We purchased a few to try them out for a few cents.
In the second picture, the fruits at the bottom were particularly interesting. You open up the hard outer shell and take out the “seeds”. You then suck on the seed and eat the pulp around it – an awful lot of work for a little bit of fruit.
One thing that many people are not familiar with this area is that jungles are not always warm. In particular, in Manu cold air sometimes can come down from the mountains and put the whole area into a big chill. The first two days we spent there were freezing. All of us know the effect humidity has when it’s hot, but when it’s cold humidity makes it even colder. Add in the rain and the speed of moving on the motorized canoes and we were quite cold. This parrot we found in the village says it all.
Eventually we made it over the mountains and began our descent into the jungle.
This is quite a poor picture, but at this point there were times when we could look straight down several thousand feet from the bus. It was a bit scary at times as it rained often and the narrow roads were muddy. Luckily the drivers were familiar with the area and knew how to drive these roads. This isn’t the area for rental cars – you need to know how to drive here.
Just before dark we arrived in the Cock-of-the-Rock lodge. The Cock-of-the-Rock lodge is named for the Cock-of-the-rock bird, which is the national bird of Peru. It is quite pretty and hangs out by leks for long periods of time, moving from perch to perch in the hopes of getting a mate. The males are the bright colored ones and move from perch to perch, trying to attract the females. Unfortunately I had a difficult time getting a good picture of one. You can find better ones on the Internet, but this was the best of my attempts.
We also had the chance to see a coral snake. Our guide believed this to be a false coral snake – meaning it was not poisonous. Unfortunately someone stepped on it before we got there, so this was the best view we got.
That night it rained like I had never heard before. Here in the Pacific Northwest we are known for our rain but the truth is when it rains it usually drizzles. Big downpours are rare here. Back in the East, where I grew up, storms could be heavy and strong. However, nothing prepared me for the deluge that can occur in the cloud forests along the Andes mountains. It literally felt like someone was dumping huge buckets of water on us. This leads me to digress to a useful principle of water I have noticed, particularly when spending summer days in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. I like to call it, the “Law of Wet”.
At some point, you can reach a point after which it is not possible to get any wetter. Once this stage has been reached, any additional water will not make you any wetter than you already are.
I made great use of the law of wet while in the jungles of Peru. While many of the other group members (particularly the Americans) dressed up in their rain coats and protective hats (which they had to fight from blowing away), there really wasn’t anything you could do to fight such a large degree of water. I wore no rain coat nor any water protective clothing while I was there. Instead, I wore quick drying shirts and pants. When the rain stopped, due to the climate there my clothes quickly dried while the others, with their jeans and heavy pants, were still soaked until they changed. I also wore a jungle hat to keep the water from my glasses as much as possible.
That morning we woke up to a nice open air breakfast full of the most hummingbirds I have ever seen in my life. Some of the hummingbirds were simply incredible. The following is my poor shot of one with my point and shoot.
A naturalist was there with a much better camera and explained that he specializes in hummingbirds and was there because this lodge was the best place in the world to see them. He had spent the last several weeks trying to get photographs of each one. He would focus at a flower and wait for the hummingbird to reach there. Only one hummingbird alluded him when we saw him – an amazing blue hummingbird with a long tail that seemed like a sparkling blue rainbow following it wherever it went. The beauty of the hummingbird stunned us and frustrated him – as he had spent the last several days trying to get a single shot of it.
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Tags: adventure, cock-of-the-rock, jungle, manu, peru, Travel