Amazon - Otorongo

Otogongo Expeditions Lodge was our destination on the Amazon. Here is a link to their site. Check it out. Tells all about where we stayed, interesting posts about the Amazon and with much better pictures. otorongoexpeditions (Otorongo is the jungle name in Peru for jaguar. It is an Indian word that means beast.)

There actually is a jaguar around that they catch on a camera from time to time at night.  Maybe it's fortunate we didn't see it.

This is the grounds around the resort. They refer it as the "garden" since is cleared and maintained so you walk around. Outside this little area, it really is the deep dark jungle. The large building is the kitchen and dining room.

This is the path we took to get to our accommodation.

The resort has a main lodge with several small rooms that share a common bath, etc. Fortunately, we did not stay there, but were able to get in the "honey moon" lodge, a separate, stand-alone lodge on the edge of the resort. Very quiet in the sense that you didn't hear any other guests, but with all the animals, bugs, birds, trees, rain and wind the Amazon is not really a quiet place.

Evie resting in the "day room" in our lodge. (If you look closely at Evie you will see that she is sweaty and exhausted from one of our adventures.)  I particularly enjoyed the hammock.  (Please note that Mike did not get nearly as sweaty and exhausted as Evie did.)

The bedroom with the mosquito netting. Services are very basic. A nice bathroom but no hot water. There is no electricity, but with solar panels and batteries there is enough power for a few LED lights and a place to recharge cell phones. 

We ate together in this common dining room. The food was very good, although you ate whatever they cooked that day. It wasn't a restaurant where you order from a menu. Most of the food, chicken, fish, fruits and vegetables were local, fresh and very good. (Sorry, I was too busy eating to think to take a picture of the food)

Some of our friends at the lodge.

 At one time there were three or four macaws around quarreling among the themselves until the lodge owner finally came out to bring some order.

I saw two of these Macaws flying just above me, with their wings fully spread. It was one of the most colorful, beautiful things I've ever seen, although on the ground around the lodge they can be a little annoying after awhile.

This duck was fairly protective of her ducklings and with good reason. There are lots of things in the jungle for baby ducks and their mother to be worried about.

Lodge fashion. We wore these rubber boots everywhere. Thinking about what there is in the jungle, water, mud, snakes, ants, bugs, poison frogs, etc., this is the footwear of choice.

Amazon-On the River

This is the Amazon. Our adventure (i.e. resort) was a little over 50 miles downstream on this boat -- about a 2-3 hour trip. The boat was referred to as a "speed boat" (bote rapido) to distinguish it from almost every other boat on the river.

The morning of our trip down river was stormy and windy and a little foreboding.  This is a big river, about a mile and half wide. The waves were driven by the wind, like in the ocean or a large lake, not the river current. The waves are larger than they appear in the photo! Also, in the boat we were seated just inches above the water level. Although they are remarkably stable in the water, these boats are long, narrow and flat bottomed (-trigger warning to some -and seemed to me like canoes that tip over). Despite the brutal pounding of the waves against the hull and the wind and rain, we had a largely uneventful trip down the river, although we did have to stop once to allow the storm to pass and the waters to calm before it was safe to continue.

We are passing one of the several towns along the river.

While I wasn't sure what to expect on the river, I was not expecting to see an oil tanker. According to the guide, the tanker brings oil down the Napo River from Ecuador. The vessel was anchored near the confluence of the Napo and the Amazon. There is an oil refinery downstream from Iquitos, which refines gas and diesel, largely for distribution to communities along the Amazon.

Tow boats and oil and gas barges were docked on the river. From the perspective of mine reclamation in the arid Southwest, the Amazon basin seems very resilient. If you disturbed some land in the Amazon, within days, if not hours, something would be growing again, and the land would naturally reclaim itself, unlike the slow growing deserts of the Southwest where it would be years, if ever, before something grew. However, this perceived resilience is a little deceptive. The Amazon is also a highly evolved, interdependent ecosystem. For example, a relatively small amount of oil pollution in the river affecting only a few fish or species, nevertheless could cause larger problems in the intricately interconnected "food chain" -- a bit like throwing a very small spec of sand into a very large and complicated but delicate set of gears. In any event, the river pollution was clearly a concern to our guide.

Leaving the Amazon and heading up a small tributary to the lodge. For some reason, I kept thinking  of the Congo and entering Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

This is the Amazon equivalent of the family car, every family has one or more. It is how you get around (as cars would be useless since there are no roads). Narrow, wood carved boats like this have been used here for hundreds of years, and it would be hard to improve on the design. What modern technology has added, however, is the long shaft "peke peke" motors. Visualize a basic weed whacker with a propeller, instead of a cutting blade or string, at the end. They work much better than an ordinary outboard motor and are an amazingly versatile way of navigating around the Amazon and its shallow tributaries.

The boat we toured around in was aluminum and wider (safer for clumsy quests) than the wooden boats, but was flat bottomed and powered by the same kind of motor. Here, the shaft was pulled from the water while we maneuvered around some logs.

This is along one of the streams off the Amazon. The boats are those of workers in the fields in the higher ground (what they call a plantation). 

The floating plastic bottles mark the location of fishing nets placed in the river.  Many of the people who live along the Amazon and its tributaries are still dependent on the River and the jungle for their subsistence.

This is another small stream off the Amazon. Think about Tarzan and whether the limb hanging down is a tree branch or a tree boa (snake) and whether the root on the ground is really an anaconda (ground snake)!

Seated in the front of our boat is our guide taking us through what seems to be grasslands but really is the river covered with floating plants. 

The Amazon has defined wet and dry seasons. The river peaks in May with the lowest level typically in September.  The difference in the water level between the wet and dry seasons is about 50 feet. We were there in the dry or low water season. 

In the dry season large amounts of land are exposed as in the picture above. This fertile land can be farmed, mostly for rice and beans. It's not that unlike farming up north, where as soon as spring comes and the snow is gone, you hurry to plant in hopes of being able to harvest before freezing winter, and the snow comes again. Here you plant in the dry season when the sand bars are exposed in hopes you can harvest before the wet season comes, and it is all covered again with water.

An activity we requested from our guide was canoeing (unguided). I was hoping for one of those sleek wooden boats all the locals use. Instead we got this aluminum tank. I think the resort considered this safer for bigger (and clumsier) North Americans. In any event, we enjoyed paddling along a calm stream off the Amazon on our own.

Returning across the Amazon to the lodge at the end of the day. These sticks are often used to mark land boundaries (that the locals intend to farm when the water level drops).

This part of Amazon river is where we saw the pink river dolphins, although not this particular one. We saw a lot of them jumping and around the boat, but never could get a picture. It really was exciting them suddenly show up swimming and jumping around the boat. The resort offers an activity of swimming in the river where the dolphins appear. We chose to enjoy them from the boat. The river dolphin is a little smaller than its ocean counterpart.

Sister Hyer at sunset on the Amazon

On the far left is our guide and the right the boat driver. We spent a lot of time with them and enjoyed it all. We got fairly well acquainted with the guide, learned about his family and had to opportunity to speak with him about the Church. The driver is a local fisherman who just recently started with the resort. He was very good with the boat and spotting wildlife.

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Iquitos: Motos and More

Iquitos, Peru

Iquitos is a large, thriving city in  the Peruvian part of the Amazon and is only accessible by boat (a four day trip from Pucallpa) or by plane. We chose an airplane. We were told that the government is planning a highway that will provide overland access.  However, the government has been promising that since the mid 19th century.

Traffic is dominated by moto-taxis and motorcycles. Cars are rarely seen, although buses and trucks navigate their way through the mass of motos. This is a link to a video of Iquitos traffic, which is about how we experienced it. Although the traffic may not have been as crowded, it certainly moved faster.Iquitos traffic

This is a short, clever video which provides a sense of the city from a mototaxi. The latter part shows the park along the river in front of our hotel. We went to Church Sunday morning and the city as shown in the video seemed much like the relatively quiet, easy going city we saw that Sunday morning.Iquitos Sunday Morning. Check it out.

As if there weren't enough already, here is a truck full of additional motos for the streets.

Evie in front of the fountains at the Plaza de Armas.

Just off the plaza was a popular ice cream and sandwich shop, attracting a lot of the locals and street musicians playing for tips. These guys were really pretty good.

During the Rubber Boom days, this was the river dock for the steamboats and is right in front of our hotels.  (Back when the hotels were homes, the Rubber Baron could see his boats and rubber come and go from his window.) Some years later the river was re-routed.  Also, we were there when the river was low. This steamboat was not just abandoned, but has been turned into a very interesting museum.

The city has several other museums, including this museum of indigenous Amazon cultures, which we also visited. These cultures were much more diverse and sophisticated than I had thought and what remains today.  There is evidence of large, powerful and sophisticated ancient cultures in the Amazon.

The hotel had a long staircase with a mirror at the bottom, perfect for selfies.

Iquitos: A Frenchman meets an Indian boy playing with a rubber ball (and guess happens)

Hotel Casa Morey

Hotel Epoca

These are pictures of the hotels we stayed in during our visit to Iquitos in the Amazon and this post is really a just an explanation of the reason for their architecture. That is why they look like turn of the century French European style homes and not like the traditional Spanish colonial architecture normally seen in Peru or the wood homes used by natives. The history of places is often as interesting as the pictures. We have some great pictures of Iquitos and the Amazon too, but those are for the next post. First some history.

Remember Charles-Marie de La Condamine of the team of French explorers who went to South America in 1735 to locate the equator? see La Mitad del Mundo.

Lacking money to return to France any other way, Condamine decided to try his luck floating down the Amazon and was among the first scientists to actually do so. On the trip down the Amazon he saw some Indian children (more correctly indigenous people) playing with a rubber ball -- something he had never seen before.

Investigating further, he determined that the rubber came from the sap of the Para tree and, intrigued by its properties, he took some back to France. Condamine was not the first European to discover this substance and its properties, but was one of the first to try to figure out something useful to do with it. While the rubber from latex from the tree proved useful for flexible tubing, erasers, clothing accessories (garters) and other uses, the rubber had problem. When cold it became hard and brittle, but when warm it became stretchy and sticky, a particular problem for the “clothing accessories.” Fortunately, in 1939, an American, Charles Goodyear, perfected the process of “vulcanization” (treating rubber with sulfur), which solved this problem. 

Meanwhile, with the invention and growing popularity of bicycles and the automobile there was a growing demand for rubber tires.  Despite a wide variety of rubber trees, the highest quality rubber came from the Para tree that grew only in the Amazon.

However, the exploitation of any resources of the Amazon area, including rubber, had been impossible. The area was impassible by land and, while numerous groups had descended the Amazon River, there was no way for commercial size vessels to travel up the Amazon; that is until the steamboat, which began navigating the Amazon in the 1850's. 

Lastly, having finally settled a border dispute with Brazil, Peru decided to build a port on the Amazon to secure its claim over the territory. After a review of potential sites, they decided on the Village of Iquitos, a small Indian fishing village with a population of less than 200. On January 5, 1864, three steamships of the Peruvian Navy:  the Pastaza, the Próspero and the Morona, arrived in the Village of Iquitos, and a modern port was soon constructed in the heart of the Amazon.

 The Boom

The inevitable result of these contemporaneous events was a “rubber boom” with Iquitos at the commercial epicenter. Beginning in the late 1870's Iquitos became a boom town drawing Europeans speculators and merchants to a city where fortunes were made in days.

For the next 30 years or so the Amazon Basin controlled the rubber trade. Although isolated and only accessible by steamboat, Iquitos became a prosperous, dynamic city of ostentatious "nouveau riche" rubber barons, who built beautiful European style homes and buildings in a city in the middle of the jungle.

Dastardly British Colonial Biopiracy – the Bust

A “bust” is the inevitable result of boom, and the bust of the rubber boom has an especially nefarious cause. That all this rubber wealth was outside the economically powerful British empire was, shall we say, something of a disappointment to the British. In what was the world´s greatest act of biopiracy, the British sent a botanist named Henry Wickman on a secret mission to the Amazon to find and steal seeds of the Para tree.

Hacking his way into the heart of the Amazon, Wickham found the Para trees and collected some 70,000 seeds. Listing them as scientific field specimens, he managed to secretly ship them down the Amazon and across the ocean. The future of the Amazonian rubber industry and all these fortunes were then doomed, although they would not know that until years later.

The seeds of the Para tree are large and quite pretty

England planted Wickham’s seeds in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. It would take 35 years of trial-and-error planting, but by 1913, the rubber trade belonged to the British. In 1913, the rubber from the seeds smuggled from the Amazon and planted in Britain’s Asian plantations flooded the market, ruining the trade in the more expensive “wild” rubber from the Amazon. The Amazon rubber industry never recovered. In 1900, the Amazon region produced 95 percent of the world’s rubber. By 1928, the Amazon produced barely 2.3 percent of it. Fortunes were lost, lives ruined, beautiful homes deserted and steamboats left abandoned in the river. A sad time.

Another Part of the Story

When tapped, rubber trees weep a milky latex that is the base form of natural rubber. The Para tree in the Amazon produced “hevea,” the most sought-after raw material for rubber. The Para trees, however, grew in relative isolation, spread across millions of acres, and are not easy to find. For that reason, “tappers,” the men contracted by merchants to collect the sap, used the local indigenous tribes to actually find the trees and tap the sap. 

The latex sap was "cooked" to create large cylindrical balls of rubber balls for ease of handling and transportation 

While many rubber merchants and tappers treated the indigenous people fairly and the tapping provided important economic benefits for these people, this was not always the case. 

Slavery and systematic brutality were also widespread with severe punishment meted out to indigenous communities and people who failed to bring in the requisite amount of latex. In some areas, 90% of the Indian population was wiped out by disease and the brutality. One of the most notorious operations was the Peruvian Amazon Company run by Julio Cesar Arana. He even recruited large, machete wielding African Americans from Barbados, known as the “muchachos.” Using the most brutal means imaginable, they were responsible for assuring that the natives collected the required latex.  Arana and the PAC were eventually investigated by the British Parliament and condemned for its practices. PAC was dissolved and, although never criminally prosecuted, the once all-powerful rubber baron Arana died penniless in Lima. It is recognized in Peruvian history books as one of the saddest parts of Peruvian history (including the atrocities of the Spanish conquistadors).

Uncontacted Tribes (Voluntarily isolated communities)

From time to time we read accounts of primitive indigenous tribes in the Amazon who live without any contact with the outside world. When I was younger I naively thought that this was because the Amazon was so large and the jungle so dense that these people had never been found by outsiders. Actually, that is not quite true. Many of these groups are descendants of the natives who had decided that the only way to survive the brutality of the rubber barons was to flee deeper into the Amazon jungle, forming "voluntary isolated communities." Their experience remains seared in the collective memories and traditions of their descendants. In their view of the world, any contact with the outside will only lead to slavery, brutality, disease and death. 

Fortunes are usually accompanied by ostentatious displays ofwealth and so it was in Iquitos. The wealthiest Europeans built great mansions made with expensive imported Italian and Portuguese tiles, some of which still survive, including the Casa Morey, built by a wealthy rubber baron, Luis Morey in 1913.  The Casa Morey has been restored as a hotel with its original Victorian and Amazonian motifs, and is the reason our hotel looked like this:

All of this, including Peru's decision to locate its Amazon outpost in Iquitos, the Para tree, the rubber boom,  the beautiful old homes and the voluntarily isolated indigenous communities, set the historical backdrop for our visit to Iquitos and the Peruvian Amazon.