Evan's journal

A coral snake (Leptomicrurus scutiventris) that we found on the way to Alto Progreso. It was about the size of a night crawler. Coral snakes are related to cobras and are highly venomous, although, small ones such as this would have a very hard time opening their mouth wide enough to bite you. Jason, this must be the one you saw but we couldn't find despite demolishing half the station.





This is the waterfall everyone loved so much. It is nice, although to a Peruvian it is probably more like oasis.

















High elevation forest on a cloudy day.

It is a lot easier to write about stuff when you have stuff to write about. I guess you could say that this is the main reason I have been so awful at updating this thing. It has been fairly quiet and uneventful around here. I haven't been scaling any unexplored mountains or riding any jaguars - not yet at least!

Let's see...first I will pose the question: Why do people, and by people I mean Peruvian people, love waterfalls so much? Ok, big waterfalls are pretty sweet, like when the water is falling so far that it just freaks out and turns to rain. But the ones where it is just a river that happens to be flowing off a cliff...granted they are nice and all, but Peruvian people have an abnormal enthusiasm for them. I went up to a small village called Alto Progreso about a week ago with a few people from a local forest conservation NGO. On the way up, we came across a pretty big waterfall. Now don't get me wrong, I like falling water as much as the next guy, but the second Peruvians get anywhere near it the cameras come out like a group of Japanese tourists at the statue of liberty. This point is made clear if you look at any local tourist attraction map. For every town there is a picture of someone (usually a woman in a swimsuit, waving) standing in front of a waterfall, even if the waterfall might only be like 10 feet high. Anyways, after a photo session at waterfall #1, we were on our way to Alto Progreso. There really wasn't much reason to go there, after all, hardly anyone lives there. It is one of these strange villages that basically consist of a school in the middle of the woods. You get there and think 'where the hell does everyone live?' and the answer is, everywhere, all over the place, but nowhere near the school. Alto Progreso is more of a loose affiliation of scattered farms anywhere within a 3-hours walk from the school. We had a small meeting with the town about various forest-things. I have no idea how a town meeting is called, but it must be strange to see 50 people creep out of the woods all at once. We ourselves crept up to a house where we stayed the night. When we sat down to eat, I noticed that the floor was crawling with little guinea pigs, which were all chirping and scuttling around looking for food, oblivious to the fact that their cute existence would soon be ended with a machete splitting their head open. We did not eat cui (guinea pig) that night, although I can say that it is pretty tasty, despite the fact that even a cooked cui looks like it should belong in a coloring book rather than your dinner plate. I will try to get some photos, as they are of some anatomical interest - that is, if you want to know what a deep fried trachea looks like. Later, not having my tent, I slept on the floor to provide the mosquitoes with some much-needed food. Two other guys that came along were sleeping on the floor too, one of which was the governor or something of a local city. Everybody laid down to go to bed at about 9pm, but this guy firmly announced that he had no intention of actually sleeping until at least 11pm, meaning that he did not have any intention of letting anybody sleep until 11, since he talked loudly and without pause up until I started growling like a dog every time he opened his mouth. The next day we were on our way down, although a local farmer had mentioned the existence of another waterfall. At that, everyone's face lit up (except for mine). So after a 1-hour detour, we got to see more water falling off a ledge, although this one was pretty neat in that it formed a large pond at the bottom. I half expected to see a woman in a swimsuit waving to me.

Later that week I went down to the lowland town of Pongo de Cainarachi with a bunch of butterfly people. To go pretty much anywhere long distance around here you need to go to a paradero, which is basically a station full of pick up trucks and small cars with huge suspension. I have been to a couple different paraderos in Tarapoto (each major destination has a different one), but by far the best paradero is the one for Yurimaguas (Pongo uses this one too). I got there at about 7 am Thursday morning to get a truck to Pongo, and the second you pull into the station, people jump onto your motocar yelling “YURIMAGUAS!!!???” I had to actually push two Peruvians off the motocar, which was a first. One was grabbing for my backpack, thinking he would be doing me a favor by helping me unload my things before we even stopped. After that, while waiting for the truck I would be taking to leave, I saw something awesome that I had never seen before – a fight between Peruvians. Actually it wasn’t really a fight, more of a whopping blast to the face of some poor shmuck. A huge dude with a big tattoo and handlebar moustache was pushing and yelling at a pudgy motocar driver. For some reason, the driver got up off his motocar, even though it was obvious he had no intention to fight. Then, the huge guy wound up and upper-cut the guy with his left square on the driver’s mouth – and here is the best part – rather than falling to the ground in a disorganized manner, the driver went stiff and perfectly straight like you do when you attempt a pencil dive, and fell over directly backwards. Awesome!