Let me preface this with, it was not our intention to spend the night in the jungle with a tour guide and his machete.
Having said that, we survived our impromptu jungle adventure and returned safely to Lima with only a few dozen mosquito bites to show for.
My friend/former coworker, Sophia (the Dr. Tran from the great Cambodia escape...) and I spent the first part of her week in Lima listening in on meetings, going to Pampas of San Juan, drinking Starbucks, shopping, and listening to Cuban music at a local bar. We, without much thought, decided that a trip to the jungle was exactly what we needed to break up the week. We also wanted to see what kind of work was being done in Iquitos and used that as our excuse to spend 2 days in the jungle.
Before I start recounting the jungle tour, allow me to quickly explain Pampas. Pampas de San Juan is a shanty town of about 57,000 people. They settled in the outskirts of Lima after being driven out of the highlands by the terrorists years ago. Because there were so many of them, the Peruvian government allowed them to resettle and thus the community of Pampas began. Pampas is divided into 4 sections and each section becomes increasingly poorer as you go further up the hill. Some homes are surprisingly nice while others are hardly standing. Dogs are running wild everywhere, water is shared in communal wells where each family is assigned a time to retrieve their water, and garbage is scattered along all the streets. It's a very interesting community and because of the close proximity of the houses and thus the families living in the houses, the epidemiology of disease is mapped in various studies. So, we started working on a TB project where we are going to place skin tests on about 400 people to determine if the rates of TB infection have decreased over the past 15 years. Pampas is where I spent the remainder of my time in Lima.
Ok, back to the jungle. So, Sophia and I showed up in Iquitos on a Wednesday morning. We made our way to a very disappointing hotel (dirty, small, and expensive) and decided right away that we wanted to go on a single day jungle tour. By 10 am we had canceled our Iquitos hotel room and were getting on a "speed boat" to a jungle lodge 2 hours away (by boat) from Iquitos for an overnight jungle adventure.
We arrived at the jungle lodge, which was actually much nicer than our hotel room in Iquitos, and started our adventure with lunch and a walk through the jungle. With rubber boots and our guide Danny (equipped with a machete), we stared our walk through the dense jungle. Danny painted our faces with red stripes from a seed then created plant crowns to ward off mosquitoes (which didn't keep the mosquitoes away, but did make us look ridiculous). We swung from vines, trudged through muddy rivers, saw monkeys, birds and huge spiders.
The rest of our time was spent in good conversation, dolphin watching, piranha catching, jungle village exploring, and sunrise and bird watching. Yes, there are dolphins in the Amazon River (pink and gray ones!). We went piranha fishing and Danny caught a piranha which we ate it for breakfast (it was delicious!). We woke up at 5:30 am, got in a boat with holes in it, in which Danny and the boat driver had to constantly scoop water out to keep from sinking, and watched the sunrise over the Amazon River. We saw sloths, monkeys, iguanas, tarantulas, and every bird alive in the jungle (turns out Danny is an avid bird watcher and insisted on pointing out, naming and imitating their calls).
Somehow we made it back to Iquitos, had our little meeting with Sophia's old friend who is working in Iquitos, and made it back to Lima by 10 pm. I must admit that the jungle adventure was one of the highlights of my Peru trip. It was beautiful. However, on a side note, in speaking with Sophia's friend, we found out that under the beauty of the jungle is a major drug and sex trafficking industry. The jungle is an ideal spot for drug trafficking due to the inability to detect boats covered by the rain forest. But thankfully (in a way), because of the drug trafficking, the sex trafficking has decreased. The sex trafficking started out as something called "child gifting". The jungle people would "gift" children to other villages if the child's mother was unable to care for the baby. Usually this worked very well and the children were brought up in loving homes. But somewhere between the mother and the village receiving the baby, people began taking the children and trafficking them for sex. It's disgusting and something that should never happen to a child, but according to Sophia's friend (who has lived in Iquitos for 10 years), if you try to interfere with the sex industry, you not only risk your own life but also the lives of those around you.
This has been constantly on my mind since I heard about it and I can't seem to think of a solution or a way to put a stop to the trafficking of children. It's hidden under "child gifting" which in theory is good, and yet there are children being trafficked. But where do we draw the line? Do we risk our lives and the lives of our families and friends to save these children? Do we just ignore it? How do we bring justice to Iquitos?
Thanks again for all your support. Nate joined me in Lima two weeks ago and we are slowly winding down our trip to Cusco and Machu Picchu. Will write more about Cusco, Machu Picchu and the 100th anniversary celebration soon! Thanks for reading!
