Evan's journal

The trip to the 'mystery mountains' was a success! After a 2 hour car ride over some large mountains I arrived last Monday morning in the town of San Jose de Sisa, which, I regret to say, was a lot crappier than I had hoped. You hear a fair bit about Sisa around here, so I figured it would have some sort of redeeming qualities, but in fact it has none. For being a relatively large town, the actual town-part is only a few blocks in size, and here you will mostly find small stores selling cheap machetes and half-rotten fish. Arriving in Sisa was a bit overwhelming, because although I knew there were mountains close by, I couldn't see them from the town, and I of course had absolutely no idea how to get to them. Fortunately, some extremely old dude came up to me and wondered what on earth I was doing there, so I told him I was trying to get into the mountains, and he helped me get on the right track to finding some guides. So after my guides were aware of my brilliant plan (walk randomly uphill until we get to at least 500 m elevation), we decided it would be best to start early Tuesday morning, since there were varying opinions on how long this hike would take (1-12 hours). By the way, I was travelling like a true gringo grande - one of the guides was the mayor of a neighboring town. So after a 5 am breakfast, 30 minute ride in a moto-car (a moto-car is what you would have if a dirtbike and three-wheeler mated with horse-carriage), and an hour hike into the hills, I already started hearing the characteristic call of the frog I was looking for. The main point of this trip was to find this frog, since we knew what it looked like in the mountains to the north and to the south, but not from the mountains where I currently was. So after desecrating a good patch of forest, we were able to scrounge up three of these frogs (called Epipedobates bassleri). I was hoping for some crazy looking frog with flourescent blinking spots or purple zigzags, but it actually was about the exact same frog as the ones we know from the mountains to the north. But since it is one of the prettiest poison frogs in the region, this was not really bad news. Next up on the agenda was to find a couple crazy frogs the guides had been describing to me, but after about another 6 hours searching without luck, we ended up back in Sisa for a late lunch. Now, I thought the 2 hours was pretty good time from Tarapoto to Sisa, but the driver going back somehow managed to shave a full 30 minutes off the trip, although there were several times where I was certain we would die, and I think there was even one time where all four tires might have been off the ground. So it was a pretty good trip, and filled in a small gap in our frog knowledge, even though it was with a frog we already knew about. The good thing is, it sounds like there may be two new species waiting to be discovered there.

p.s Sorry for the long delay since the last post, but I needed to find a new place to access the internet, which is where I am now.