Field Report 14:
Peru - May 7, 1999

By Jeff Bell
 

¡Buenos dias, amigos! Jeffrey aqui. Me gusta mucho este pais, Peru. La tierra y las muchachas especialmente son muy lidas. ¡Bueno, bueno!

Ya Yanquis, gringos. I'm in Cuzco, at altitude, perhaps you can tell.

If there's a letdown to the traveling circuit, it's having a conversation with fellow travelers and getting the yawning version of "oh, yeh, I went there last month." Instantly depressing, I guess it's understandable on some level. Lots of people out there who've been most everywhere. On reflection though it seems to be a fine example of how humans often speak with "brain not in gear". What are they tossing up to their listener? Do they mean to say that they were numb to whatever magic was there, or do some people find it easiest to reduce the marvelous to something more manageable, something on a level of importance of carpet dust.

Not that I've run into to this phenomena (yet) in Cusco, (in fact I just had dinner with a great group of New Zealanders who I instantly liked, who have gratefully lived in some manner as to avoid this sort of bromidity) I only bring this up as a preamble, because I know I'm not the first one to visit or expound the wonders of Inca Cuzco, but I have been taken with this place. I was instantly and still am. Its magic seems to ooze out of the ground on every street, up and over the buildings, up to the surrounding mountains and then finally the beautiful high altitude sky. And the people have a physical dark beauty and mystery that literally sends shots of something wonderful up your spine. If anything, I have to walk the Indian walk and pretend that I'm only marginally aware of the people I make eye contact with, my inclination would be to stare, long and hard, to try to uncover the mysteries and the depth of the beauty in and behind the faces.

Now I've spent just over a week, most of my time so far, in the rainforest, the Amazon basin, on the white and black water rivers. To put this in perspective, this is not an experience I'd recommend to hard-working people who feel that they need to get away and unwound a bit. If anything, you pay, like I did, with the week long sickness that I'm just now recovering from, putting up with ant bites, the threat of jungle diseases, uncomfortable heat and humidity.

But in the age of global ecological awareness, a trip to the Amazon is a pilgrimage to Mecca, a journey to the heart of the matter, a visitation to the part of Mother Earth that's a gigantic magma flow of raw living stuff, where modern man is a trespasser, the place of the showdown of all showdowns between the will of man and Mother Nature.

It's strange, I didn't see a ton of wildlife, most of the birds where a good distance away, and it seemed like I saw a few varieties of each insect type. But what incredible amount of fauna that I missed, I KNEW was out there, and the diversity of flora was overwhelming. How can you describe the way the rainforest is so vastly different, diverse, immense, primevel, beautiful, tranquil, dynamic, inhospitable? AAAAAHHHH! It can't be done. It's like boating, which I know very little about. I do know that the more time you spend on a boat, the more a boating story means to you. I only had about a week in the great Amazon, you could spend years becoming familiar with its many sides. I don't see myself doing that, but those soldiers, seekers that do it, especially for the benefit of science, deserve ...well, more than a "hip-hip, hooray".

A few impressions—The waters were still, no wind, a fast running glassy surface that our boat was always in the process of temporarily destroying. Rainbows, rainbows, rainbows, over pinks at sunset, reflected perfectly in the water. The long,long tails of a pair of macaws in flight, only for a few seconds, directly overhead, finally, on the last day. First, the brilliant colors of the blue and yellow macaw pair, then the red and purple macaw pair. The spiny walking palm trunk, the deep mud, the wings of the buttresses of the 700 year old straggler fig tree, like some rocketship. The flooded Amazon with no banks, only trees set in still waters. The most beautiful creatures of all, the beautiful Indian girls, their perfect white teeth, perfect creamy brown complexion, their innocent, soft manner. (I was embarrassed and, well, blessed to be followed twice, yes twice, by a group of girls, once in one village and then in another town. I knew just enough Spanish to keep them from running away too quickly, I thought I had died and went to heaven, came back to Earth, and then died again and went to heaven again, within just a few days!) Swimming in the tea-like stained black waters of a remote lake. Chatting with a 22-yr old American girl on a Fullbright scholarship, bounding with energy and love for the work she was doing, living with and studying the habits of a group of 10 Amazonian fisherman. The zesty way the British botanist knew and took enjoyment in pronouncing the cryptic names of the flora. The dugout canoes that began to feel as much a part of the landscape as the trees or the birds. The strange pink dolphins living in the coffee and cream colored brown waters.

Coincidence alert! The person I was talking to one evening on the riverboat was the mother of a fellow RAAMer, the indomintable Muffy Ritz! Muffy, I really liked your mom!

Ciao, there's so much more I want to tell you. I hope to fill in lots later down the line!

Bye for now,
Jeff
 

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