Jungle Boogie

My bag arrived! What luxary. Only took 4 days and arrived 2o minutes before we got on another flight to begin our jungle adventure. We flew to a little town in the middle of the jungle called Puerto Maldonada, the flight took 25 minutes in which time you go from temperatures of about -3 degrees to about 30 degrees and from an altuitude of 3500m to 290m. Massive change of environment then, I instantly started sweating buckets and Em starts to glow (as I´m told that women don´t sweat, apparently).

After a bit of luck and a relatively quick boat ride (3 hours) we arrived at Picaflor, which is basically these huts in the jungle in the middle of nowhere. Laurel´s intention (the PhD lady who ran the place) is to show the locals how to live self-sufficently in the jungle so they don´t have to go hunting all the monkeys/pigs/rats/giraffes/polar bears for there tea. She had a delightful 2 year old who continuely amused us. He literally will grow up to be Tarzan.

Everyday we had to donate 3 hours of our precious time to "volunteer" which basically involved me and Em spending nearly 2 weeks building a rabbit hutch, which I cleverly named "Starsky". The wit roles on. I know what you thinking, my carpentry skills are second-to-none, and yes it kicked ass. As well as carpentry we had to pump water up 25m everyday for ages out of a hole in the ground so that the whole place could live. Hard work in the heat and you could understand why Pico (Laurel´s husband) had the same physique as King Kong. He was proper stacked. And I am too now. Sort of. Well, maybe not.

Apart from high quality woodwork, we spent our time stomping round the rainforest looking in vain for wildlife, swinging on vines, singing songs with "jungle" in the title and macheteing things(is that a word?). I´m a dab hand at machetes now. Anyone need something chopped up indiscreetly? Then I´m your man. We also drank the water you find in bamboo after having given it some good choppin´. That´s what the locals do.

We got on well, the jungle and me.


The boat ride back from Picaflor took 5 hours and we must have picked about 40 locals and about 3,000,000 tons of bananas, as all the locals were taking their crops to town to sell at the weekend market. It was ludicrous. But all them were chirpy - they literally live, drink and poo in this river. One lad was having a wee off the side while another lad was filling his water-bottle up about 3 metres down stream. Haha. So much for hygiene.

So after two weeks of jungle fun, we emerge back to civilisation. Back in Cusco now. It´s chilly. Have met up with Marie-T and Leon, my friends from home who me and Em went vaguely round Europe with last summer. They´ve been scooting round the world for ages (6 months) going in the opposite direction to us, check out their blog if you like: http://leonandmarie.blogspot.com. They´re heading kind of in the direction we are so we´ll be together for a few weeks at least.

Next port o´call is the Salkantay Trail which lasts 5 days, finishing with a day at Machu Picchu. Its kinda of like the famous Inca Trail, but more hardcore and less loud tourists. Should be fun. Its only me and Em and a guide hiking at close to 5000 metres across some Peruvian mountains, so will be very hard work - they take oxygen bottles just in case we collapse.