Day 2--Flight to Puerto Maldonado

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

The next morning (or later that morning), we id’d our first bird, an eared dove in the park opposite the hotel. Then, after a hasty complimentary breakfast of scrambled eggs, rolls, jam, and coffee, we took the hotel shuttle (this time a van) back to the airport at 6am to check our bags for the 8am flight to Puerto Maldonado.

This flight, which stopped for about an hour in Cusco, 11,500 feet high in the Andes, was uneventful. The Andes mountains out of Lima enroute to Puerto Maldonado were dry, devoid of any vegetation that could be seen from the air, deeply scarred on their flanks, and sharply defined with knife-edge arêtes (below).

But a bit further southeast they became the huge, snow capped Andes of picture books (above right).

Nearing Cusco, I could look from the plane and see some green and an occasional tiny village that I imagined  housed an indigenous people and their llamas and alpacas.

We spent about an hour in the Cusco airport while passengers disembarked and others boarded for the flight to Puerto Maldonado. Dean and I got out of our seats, stretched, and took pix from the open airplane door (below).

As we neared PuertoMaldonado, once again the terrain below changed. Now we were seeing a vast unbroken ocean of trees, snaked with coffee-and-cream colored rivers—the Madre de Dios (Mother of God), the Tambopata (which we would soon be boating on); the Rio Inambari, Rio de Los Amigos, Rio de Los Piedras, Rio Torre, Rio Malinowski, and others.

We deplaned in Puerto Maldonado—which sits at the junction of the Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers—to a wall of heat and humidity. On entering the small airport, we saw the Rainforest Expeditions office but found no one from Rainforest Expeditions waiting for us. It turned out they were in one of the RE buses in the parking lot and had already boarded some Earthwatchers.

Passengers debarking in Puerto Maldonado; the bus that would carry us to the "puerto" for our ride upriver

We lugged our luggage over and climbed aboard, quickly meeting five others: Alice Chuang, Joan Chatterton, Diana Foster, Sheila Champion, and our Rainforest Expedition guide, Richard Amable. Kathy Schroer was to meet us upriver at Posadas Amazonas Eco Lodge where we’d spend our first night. Rainforest Expeditions operates three award winning Amazon lodges: Posada Amazonas , (30 rooms), Refugio Amazonas (24 rooms), and Tambopata Research Center (18 rooms).

Our bus ride to RE Hdq. took about five minutes. At Hdq., we had a chance to meet our PI, South African Alan Lee, to go to the bathroom, and to have our last ice cream bar. We also gave our flight information to Yesmi Hualla (below), Rainforest Expeditions project liaison, and got better acquainted with the members of the team.

Alan and Dean getting acquainted at HDQ

L-Dean Bloodgood and Sheila Champion giving Yesmi their return flight information; R - Cold water, ice cream, a TV . . . all the comforts of home.

Yesmi Hualla,
Rainforest Expeditions
project liaison

Then we hung out for a bit and admired the tarantula on the ceiling. When the bus returned, we learned that the road had washed out between us and our river port of embarkation, so we needed to take a detour further down the river to another landing—euphemistically called a port.

Alan told us that this was the first sunny day in a week. The detour was a VERY rough and rutted, deeply potholed dirt track, which wended at first past shacks advertising themselves as bars or motels (our guides told us that these motels were the type that rented by the hour to jungle weary gold miners and explorers back in town for a bit of R&R) and over rickety makeshift bridges.

When, after about an hour, we got to the “port,” we walked a narrow trail through the jungle for a bit and came out on a bank high above the river with a little thatched hut on it. Here I took photos of two different cracker butterflies while we waited for the boat to arrive.

Then we walked down a flight of narrow wooden stairs to the Tambopata River and entered a long, canopied, blue canoe with wooden benches along each side. After donning the mandatory life vests, we settled in for the exciting two-hour ride upriver to Posada Amazonas, our binoculars and cameras at the ready. “What’s that?” always on our lips.

Hanging on the canopy posts were little yellow bags with Rainforest Expedition logos on them. These turned out to be snack bags and contained an orange or an apple, a packet of saltines, a packet of cookies, and a small square of chocolate. We were all ravenous so made short work of the snack bag contents. Then Richard passed back neatly wrapped leaf packets and a fork—our lunch. Yummy.