Cañon de Cotahuasi - Deepest Canyon in the World

Kara, Jess, and I at 13,000 feet, El Bosque de Piedras, Cañon de Cotahuasí

MONDAY

In the latest version of Lonely PLanet Peru, there are two or three pages devoted to Cañon de Colca, one of the deepest canyons in the world, the second deepest to be exact. What to do, where to stay and eat, and all the prices. They make it easy not to get lost...which is most of the fun. Just to enter the canyon, you need to pay a boleto tourismo, or a "tourism ticket," of S60 or S70 (roughly $28). That´s 3x our budget per person per day of ten dollars each. Ouch. All the tour agencies in Arequipa try to sell tourists and backpackers on the Colca Canyon and most foreigners and Peruvians alike take a tour or at least go solo to experience the canyon. I´m sure it´s amazing and it should be considering the cost to visit it. Peru is very good at realizing what gringos want to see and making them pay for it. It´s Capitalism! The canyon´s location, a three hour ride from Arequipa, makes it easily accessible as well.

There is another canyon mentioned in Lonely Planet, with only half a page devoted to it. El Cañon de Cotahuasí, the deepest canyon in the world. Twice the depth of the Grand Canyon. The book says a twelve hour, bumpy and uncomfortable overnight bus will get you there and only a handful of adventurous travelers go. Say No More. No boleto tourismo (not yet at least) and the traditional canyon culture that is untainted by mass tourism. We caught an overnight bus for S32, fairly comfortable until halfway through when the bus crests a high Andean pass upwards of 4,000 meters (around 13,000 feet above sea level). Dark, in the middle of the night, the bouncing bus felt like the moon rover. At one point, we hit a huge bump on the right side of the bus, immediately followed by a crater and bump on the left side sending the bus hurtling from side to side nearly tipping over, a few Peruanos screaming towards the front for the driver to take it easy, tranquilo. When locals scream and yell as the bus tips from side to side, you know it´s bad. I look out, as best I can, each side of the bus to see if there´s surrounding land or if we´re on the side of a mountain. I figure if there´s land, we can survive a tipped bus with only minor injuries. But if we´re on the side of the mountain, one of these craters could send us flying to a certain death. I think I saw land on both sides. 

TUESDAY

We arrived in Cotahuasi before dawn and found a hostal to check into and go back to sleep. Most places with tourists, if you try to check-in before dawn, even one hour, they will charge you for an extra night. In Cotahuasi, we asked before agreeing to a room and the owner said, un regalo, "a gift." Untainted canyon hospitality. We fell asleep quickly, making up for the lack of sleep on the bus. 

It´s always interesting and a surprise to arrive somewhere at night, not sure what´s surrounding you. It is kind of like waking up on Christmas as a child to find a foot of snow where green grass had been the day before. I woke up and went to the sink on the roof of the hostal to fill our water bottles. Holy Mary, Mother of Jesus! We were in it. Huge green mountains surrounded the tiny town. Waterfalls cascaded from the unseen heavens above. Blue sky and sunshine lit the peaks miles in every direction. We are in the Temple of God, I thought to myself. Pachamamma, the heart of Mother Earth. Kara and Jess came up and we all began laughing. Look at where we are! This is our life right now. Every cell in my body is breathing, vibrating, smiling. We are alive, to the true meaning of the word. What have I done to deserve such blessedness? What have I done to deserve the woman next to me, beautiful and so full of love? I am overwhelmed by love and joy. 

We contain our excitement enough to wander the town, snapping photos off every five seconds. We find a tourist information office and stop in to ask about how to go about visiting the Catarata de Sipia, a waterfall, los pueblos de Velinga, Pampamarca, and the hot springs. We get maps and bus times and decide to take the 6:30 AM bus the next morning to the Sipia falls, then trek for three hours through the canyon to the village of Velinga and stay the night. For the rest of the day, we wander, catch a delicious lunch of rocotto relleno con pastel de papas, stuffed hot pepper with scalloped potatoes, a typical dish of the region. We make arrangements with our hostal to leave most of our stuff so we don´t have to hike with unnecessary gear. We will be back in a couple days. Again, in places where there´s hardly any tourism, you do not have to worry about people stealing you belongings. 

WEDNESDAY

The hour or so ride to the trail head of the waterfall is the most beautiful drive I´ve ever experienced. Weaving back and forth down switchbacks on a dirt road, the canyon stretching out in front of you around every bend. Small fincas growing vegetables and fruit on terraced fields and plateaus using the same landscape and irrigation techniques used by the Incas 500 years ago. The road passes over over the Cotahuasi river twice before arriving at the trail head. The bus, full of vibrantly dressed women in the traditional high Andes clothing with straw hats or bowler hats, colorful pieces of fabric on their backs to carry fruit and supplies or babies or both. Dark, furrowed creases through their faces, each one silently telling a different story of hard work and family in the canyon. We get off at the trail head, the bus continuing on, the men and women returning to their pueblos and fincas to continue working the Earth with stiff hands, smiles and missing teeth. 

The trail to the waterfall is easy and not far. The rushing water gets squeezed through a tight bottleneck in the  canyon and takes a violent drop throwing mist up through the lower canyon, a rainbow refracting in the rays of sunshine. We get trigger happy with our cameras, pictures from a distance, then close up, trying not to slip on the wet, smooth rocks to a quick death. When we hike back to the dirt road, Kara and I stop occasionally searching for rocks to bring back to our niece and nephew, rocks from the DEEPEST CANYON IN THE WORLD!

Deep in the canyon, the environment is desert. The towering peaks rising 10,000 feet around us turn from burnt orange and red to green the higher your eyes follow. Some waterfalls pour down the sides of the canyon, eroding away the path of least resistance, creating green veins of life in the middle of the red and orange cliffs with cactus clinging to any resemblance of flat ground. We hike down the same road that the bus travels, slowly winding and rising away from the river below. As we hike further up, the river takes on its    classic snake feature, meandering back and forth, looking effortless, yet one of the most powerful forces on Earth, carving out mountains, sanding stones smooth. 

Along the way, we pass through a couple of small fincas of tunas, a red fruit growing on cactus, maize morado, the purple sweet corn used to brew chicha, the sweet fermented drink common throughout Peru. Oranges, guayaba, chirimoya, and palta (avocados). Although the environment is desert canyon, waterfalls from the high fertile green peaks pours down the sides of the rock faces used for irrigating the orchards and fields. Not much has changed here since Inca times and before. Same fruit, same day to day work, even nearly the same buildings, created and put together from the canyon´s own stone. 

Past the fincas, we trek through el Bosque de Cactus Judiopampa, a forest of long spined cacti reaching fifteen to twenty feet in height. The road ends at a turn around where the bus goes no further. There are a couple of shacks with women cooking for people coming from and going to Velinga. We were told, at the end of the road there is a trail that leads to Velinga. We were not told that the trail descends precipitously down a cliff then precipitously back up another steep cliff. We had begun chewing coca leaves throughout  the three hour trek to help curb the effects of altitude sickness and fatigue. Coca leaves, contrary to the stance of the United States of America government, are not cocaine. Nothing close to it. The people of the high Andes have been chewing coca leaves for thousands of years. There is no "high" from chewing the leaves, only a reduction of high altitude symptoms and fatigue. To take coca leaves and produce the narcotic, cocaine, the leaves need to be soaked in kerosene until they turn into a brown mush, then they are mixed and soaked with sulfuric acids and petroleum or something similar. I can promise those who believe that the plant equals the drug, that I could take basil or daisies and soak them in kerosene, sulfuric acid and gasoline and create something that you could put up your nose and feel high, though I wouldn´t and 

wouldn´t recommend it. The U.S. government and the D.E.A. believe the best way to combat drugs, specifically cocaine, is to spray poisoness chemicals in the pristine high Andes of South America, specifically Bolivia, to eradicate the cultivation of the plant completely. Never mind that it´s considered sacred by the people, part of their cultural heritage, offered in ceremonies to Pachamamma, the Earth Goddess. None of this goes into consideration when a "developed" nation has a drug problem. Why don´t we combat the use of prescription drugs to mask the problems of a culture of consumption. We don´t exercise...so we take pills to lose weight. We can´t sleep or we´re depressed from genetic engineered plants or hormone induced meat, so we take pills. Pharmaceutical companies make millions of dollars making the general public believe they NEED this or that, never mind the side effects which are often more dangerous that the original problem. I´ve been through this before. We, as Americans, have our own cultural heritage and we would be damned if a foreign government came around and said guess what, we don´t want you doing this or that. It´s absurd. 

So...from the end of the road, we started down the steep trail, crossing the tributary heading towards el río Cotahuasi, then back up the steep switchbacks to the pueblo. My right knee had been flaring up in a bit of pain during our hike down from Kuélap near Chachapoyas a month ago, and it was flaring up again after three hours of trekking. It´s nothing serious I´m sure, just that we have not been doing that many long treks on this trip and my muscles have been tight from so many long bus rides. What it comes down to is that I need to stretch more. Period. After an hour hiking up the cliff face we reached the pueblo of Velinga, wondering if we were in the right place of if we´d stumbled upon the ruins of an ancient village. Not a soul seemed to be around. The stone buildings had no roofs and weeds and trees and maïze were growing from their sunlit centers. Finally we saw a man bringing his donkeys down the mountain and asked where the Hostal Velinga was. He told us to head to the center of town. 

We found the hostal and were greeted by the wife of Ignacio. She showed us our room where we quickly collapsed onto the beds (surprisingly the bed was one of the most comfortable beds and pillows our whole trip). Starving, after only eating a banana and some bread during our four hour trek, we asked if there was lunch (this was around 2:30 PM). She said no (even though they knew we were coming), but dinner would be around 5 PM. Sleep it is! We all took a nap for a couple hours until dinner was ready. It was a delicious hot soup with quinoa and locally grown potatoes, carrots, squash, and peas with a hock of beef made the same way as it´s always been since Inca times. Our plate was rice with a squash based stew. My body needed it. A cup of hot tea to finish dinner off and we were feeling alive again. I asked Ignacio how old the village was and he said it´s been around since well before the Spanish colonized Perú. A few of the homes had solar panels for light and Ignacio´s home/hostal had the only satellite powered phone, the only contact with outside Perú in the village. Other than these two modern advances, the village has largely been untouched and unchanged in 500 years. Spanish is their second language as well as ours. Quechúa, the language of the Incas is their first and still spoken throughout Perú, Bolivia, and Ecuador in indigenous populations. They cook over an open fire. They work in the same terraced fields as their Inca ancestors did before them. We stayed up for a bit chatting away with Ignacio and his wife about tourism in el cañon de Cotahuasi, the good and bad effects of it. He loves the simple life of Velinga. Most people live simply off what they grow, selling any surplus fruit and veggies in Cotahuasi when they can. "Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!" as Thoreau put it so wisely in Walden. (Ignacio is in the 2010 Perú Lonely Planet. Backpackers and trekkers can rent a gas stove from him and camp down by the river for S10 a night. The hostal has been up and coming since the last edition was published) 

THURSDAY

We woke up around 7 to the sun lighting up the canyon like Nature´s cathedral. We thanked Ignacio and his wife and they gave us some avocados, guayabas, and chirimoyas as gifts for our hike back to where the road begins. We snacked on the fruit while waiting for the bus back to Cotahuasi. Two and a half hours later, we were back, laughing and smiling and overjoyed by the beauty that surrounded us. 

At 4 PM we took the two hour bus to Pampamarca, a town tucked on a plateau higher in the canyon. From Pampamarca, we could take a trek up some more steep switchback trails to 13,000 ft to see el Bosque de Piedras Hulto, a series of eroded rock formations overlooking the canyon which locals have likened to mystical figures. We arrived in Pampamarca after dark, found a room and made guacamole sandwiches and spent some time in our freezing cold room writing in our journals before bed. 

FRIDAY

My alarm rang on my watch at 4:50 AM. Our plan was to leave around 5 for the two hour, mas o menus, hike to the rock forest in the hope of seeing Andean Condors around 7 or 8 when the sun hits the canyon and creates thermals for the condors to make their rise. We packed our bags with water, coca leaves, bread, avocados, binoculars (Thank you German guy who accidentally left his nice binocs in Iquitos, which I found) and of course our battery-charged cameras. Out the door just after five, it was dark for our first hour or so before the still cloudy skies turned from black to dark blue. We walked up the road until a sign post marked the beginning of the trail. It said, El Bosque de Piedras, 3km, max altuda 4000 meters asl (+13,000 ft). This would be the highest hike I´ve ever done. From the trail, there is a split and we stayed to the right thanks to some information from a French girl who we met the night before. There is no mark to stay right and the real trail is thinner and looks less used. Had we not met the backpacking chica we would have stayed on the larger trail, never reached the rock forest or ruins and hiked for seven hours. (A guy from Poland we met did just that, seven hours to nowhere)

pottery fragments inside ruins near El Bosque de Piedras

Up, and further up we strode. The sun´s rays lit the tops of our mountain but the clouds lingered if not grew in the area of sky they covered. Maybe the skies wouldn´t clear. Near the top, Jessica spotted a pile of rocks with an opening, the rocks clearly placed by humans precariously on the side of a cliff. Inside to our amazement were human bones. This was an ancient burial mound! The bones spread out, no longer in their proper alignment had at least two sets of human remains, two skulls with their craniums cracked open, either from their death (possible sacrifice to Pachamamma) or from the rocky grave collapsing throughout time. This was amazing. Another mound up the trail had a crushed skull in it as well, weeds of tall grass growing from the open crater. The trail split, left going up to the rock forest, right to what looked like more ruins. We explored the ruins, stone circles which once must have been dwellings. How old must these have been?! High grasses and bushes obscured most of the ancient village on the side of the cliff. Who lived here? When? We found pottery shards, red and broken. None that we found bore markings of advanced civilizations. I found an intact handle of a clay vessel. I felt like Indiana Jones (Kara is laughing when she´ll read this). I wish I had the means of carbon dating the pottery or the bones. What secrets lie beneath these stones? Above 12,500 feet and the energy of this place was surging through my blood. Sure, others had been here before but not many. It felt like it was our discovery. 

From the ruins, we hit the main trail again and climbed the last leg to the sandy rock forest. The rocks, eroded pointed cones, dominated the upper portion of the mountain. By 8 in the morning, the sun´s power burnt away the clouds and we had a million dollar view. Fertile green fields terraced the steep slopes of the valley and canyon below. Along the southern horizon, the top layer of the deepest canyon in the world was lined with snow capped volcanoes and mountains, topping out about 6000 meters. We were the only people there. It was as if the entire canyon was our personal playground. My camera kept saying its battery was dead but I knew if was just the cold and the altitude. A little time in a warm pocket and it was full again. We had breakfast at 13,000 feet of bread and avocados. Nothing could make this morning any better. 

We were wrong. Looking down the trail towards the ruins we had just explored, three condors rose from the canyon beyond, wings spread, rising on the morning thermals as the rocks heated and warmed in the sun. Camera in one hand, binoculars in the other. This was our dream come true. These birds are sacred to the indigenous of the Andes, their feathers used by shamans and healers in traditional ceremonies. What the jaguar is in spiritual power to the people of the Amazon, the condor is to the high Andes. One of the majestic birds took a turn on his wings and flew right over my head, not 10 feet above me. I could feel the air pass over its wings. My camera clicked at the perfect moment and I had my picture. All around us was pure, untainted beauty. Sacred. I could cry describing it. No picture will do it justice (especially from my camera). I am at peace. 

We hiked back down, much quicker and easier on the lungs. Returning to our hostal (i.e. a woman´s house) we ate a huge lunch, so filling, so delicious, afterwards taking a nice three hour nap. We deserved it. Outside our hospedaje, there´s a volleyball net set up. The woman who runs the hospedaje/hostal asked us at lunch if we wanted to play later. We said of course, thinking it was going to be a friendly game of back and forth. After our nap, Rufina, the woman, knocks on our door and says Vamos a jugar volley! We head outside and it´s Kara, Jess, myself, and a local teenager against two men, a woman, and our cute hostal owner. She asks what we´re playing for? A bottle of soda? They wanted to make stakes for the game! We said we´d just play for fun. One of the women had clearly played organized ball before. She´s spiking and serving hard. They weren´t screwing around! Ha! So we play a match of three games and end up winning the second and third to take the match. By the second game, the rain had started and we were getting wet in the only clothes we brought and it´s FREEZING in the evening and at night. Everything else was in Cotahuasi. But the game was an unexpected competitive volleyball, a wonderful surprise. I loved it. 

SATURDAY

It´s bitterly cold here at night. I don´t know what temperature it may be but it rains in the afternoon and evening so it can´t be below freezing but it´s awful close. Even when it is warm and sunny outside, it´s cold and dark indoors. Kara and I are splitting a single bed. S10 per bed (not per head) the way it should be makes this the cheapest place we´ve stayed yet, slightly less than $2 per person. But being frugal has its ups and downs, strikes and gutters, as the Dude says. The bed is small....and cold. I move a lot in my sleep, roll from side to side, normally not a problem...when it´s warmer. But the wool blankets tend to move with me pulling them (accidentally!!) from Kara. We both haven´t slept well here. 

Sleep or no sleep, or bad sleep, hasn´t thwarted us from rising early to get a head start on a beautiful hike or trek. This morning we left at 7 to hike down to some thermal baths flowing from the depths of the mountain. we asked some locals for directions (there´s two ways of getting there) and everyone seems to give the longer, harder and safer way of getting there. The faster, easier way is supposed to be very narrow at points, on the side of a cliff, and dangerous. Faster AND dangerous you say?! We´ll take that one! We were supposed to take the trail towards el Mirador de Oskune, a lookout over a beautiful waterfall. Where the trail splits, we should stay left and follow (i.e. find your way from there). Something about a canal, then down, down, down. So we head out down the trail and find what seems to be the split in the trail on the left. We start up this narrow rarely used trail bushwhacking through the brush and avoiding cacti. This doesn´t seem to be right but someone told us something along the likes of "up and over." This must be the up. We eventually reached a stone road. Not so much a road you could put a truck on (you couldn´t) but enough for a family and four donkeys hauling concrete bags to their fields to build a stone shelter or terraced wall. We had inadvertently 1: not found the right split in the trail and 2: somehow bushwhacked our way up a steep hill to the harder, longer way to the hot springs. Oh well. The hike down into the canyon was beautiful none the less. Every hillside had new or ancient terraced fields. Wildflowers of every color dotted the landscape and wouldn´t you know it, another condor walking from its cold slumber flew right over our heads! 

 

We kept heading down and more down until we could see the thermal pools below along side the río Pampamarca. We could see the steam rising from the confluence of the hot spring water hitting the raging river. Down the last set of switchbacks and we arrived to find a boy of nine years named Ricardo already soaking and swimming in the warm thermal water. We chatted and found out that Ricardo is from Pampamarca and he usually comes down to the springs every Saturday. Nine years old! Down a canyon 1-2 hours on his own. Can you imagine this in the States? We´ve become very conservative about the level of independence we give our children. I can remember taking my bike with my brother and best friend Jimmy on weekends down into the woods behind our housing development to explore the creek., the old snapping turtle pond with the rope swing and the abandoned farm house with the broken windows and a hole in the floor between the kitchen and the master bedroom (Of course we went in!). We would just tell our parents that we were heading into the woods. No cell phones, no parent-teacher chaperon. As long as we were home for dinner with our hands washed, all was O.K. It´s not the same now. At least here in Perú, in the deepest canyon in the world, that nine year old independence still thrives. 

The water was not as hot as we expected. It was more like a warm bath. But I hadn´t showered since Arequipa, at least a week ago (the shower water in the canyon is mind numbing!) and this seemed like heaven. We massaged our aching muscles and my aching knee (it´s getting better). Ricardo told us that the spring is heated from a volcano further up and beyond the rock forest where we were the day before. The distance through the mountain gives the water some time to cool down a bit. We spent a couple hours relaxing in the water, complacent with the fact that we would not be making it back to Pampamarca for the noon bus back to Cotahuasi. One more night it is! We snacked on some cookies and Ricardo pulled out a bag of tostadas, toasted corn kernels (delicious) and was generous to share some with the group of gringos. We promised him when we get back to town we´d buy him a couple snacks at the tienda. 

We headed out, slightly cleaner than we had arrived, Ricardo as our guide taking us back the easier, faster, more dangerous way. We passed through fertile and vivid green terraced fields before hugging rocks on the side of a cliff (the dangerous part) next to the amazing and impressive irrigation canal bringing water from streams and waterfalls further up the mountain down and around the cliffs to the fields below. You read about ancient irrigation techniques of the Incas at Macchu Picchu, or the Chachapoyas at Kuélap but you SEE it here. It´s honestly amazing. Reading about it does no justice. 

Our trail led us almost right to the lookout of Oskuné waterfall, only one more incredibly beautiful landscape scene in the most beautiful place I´ve ever experienced. We made it back to Pampamarca and had a typical dish of chicken, boiled potatoes, choclo corn on the cob, a larger kernel of corn commonly used as a base for ceviché, and some beans in a pod. We planned on catching the 6:30 AM bus the following morning back to Cotahuasi to see if we could bargain the price of renting horses for the day to take us to some other hot springs of Luicho and Lucha, upriver from Cotahuasi near the pueblos of Tomepampa and Alca. But first, one more freezing night. 

SUNDAY

Best sleep in Pampamarca! I managed to 1: not have to pee in the middle of the night (a freezing endeavour) and 2: managed to keep the two wool blankets on all night, keeping me in a warm bubble of dead air. I woke up and ordered us three cups of coffee from Rufina before the 7 o´clock bus back to Cotahuasi. Rufina, who if I didn´t mention before is the cutest indigenous Peruvian woman on the planet, was also heading to the hot springs of Lucha. There are two thermal pools very near each other. One is Luicho, popular among locals and the other is Lucha, rarely used and as it turns out for us, FREE! Luicho has an entrance fee of S2 as of 2010´s Lonely Planet. 

We caught a colectivo (van) to Lucha for S2.50 which was constantly stopping to pick up more locals from the small pueblos and fincas along the way heading to Luicho for a nice Sunday soak. We got out at Lucha and hiked down to the thermal pools adjacent to the river. Snow capped mountains hung on the horizon like a tapestry on a wall. Though there was a gate to get in (it was open), no one was there or seemed to be there to take money to enter. Maybe just Sunday´s are free? There were two pools, but one was empty. The full one had hot water pouring into it from the mountain slope. So crystal clear you would think it was treated with chlorine. On the side facing the river, an exit pipe directed the flow towards the cold mountain flow. The pool was large enough that the pool temperature was slightly warm, with only the hot spot being while you sat just in front of the source of the pool. Even though the sun was out, you realized we´re still fairly high in altitude when you´d get out of the water and the air was COLD. 

We had lunch of sweet bread, similar to English muffins, and avocados, with the rest of our time spent sun bathing and thawing after three freezing nights in Pampamarca. We caught a bus back to Cotahuasi and took steaming hot showers! What a luxury. My first real wash in over ten days (again, don´t judge). We had dinner at our favorite old lady in town who always comes by our table afterwards and talks to us about the canyon, her life, or what type of dish we just ate. This night she explained the green thick soup with cheese we just had, a very common taste around here for pastas, soups, or a sauce for meat and veggies. 

Exhausted, we were in bed by 7:30, asleep by nine. 

Our last day in Cañon de Cotahuasí, sad to leave, we took an overnight bus back to Arequipa, 12 hours, then the first bus we could catch to Puno, Perú, sitting on Lake Titicaca. Puno is the border city with Bolivia. We were saddened to leave such a beautiful and magical place and unfortunately would miss the festival de Cotahuasi at the beginning of May featuring bullfights, traditional dancing and music and local artists, all the while partying all week. If we had more time, we could have spent a month easy in the canyon but we don´t so we can´t. 

Cañon de Cotahuasí, you are forever in my heart.

Rumbling Through Peru

Though our adventure through the Amazon is through, our adventure from a broader perspective is far from over regardless of the days trickling down, less than three months as I write. We set sail once again on a passenger/cargo ship from Iquitos heading up the Amazon river to its headwaters. Even the headwaters of the Amazon are rivers not to be taken lightly. Our second cargo ship was far better than the floating conglomerate of rust we took from the border of Ecuador to Iquitos. The Gilmer V. was bigger, stronger, and much cleaner. No animals, but still stocked full with cars, motorcycles, tuk-tuk mototaxis we've come to love, and roughly 350 people. You had the option of paying for a general ticket which allowed you 3 meals a day and a first come first choose where to set up your hammock though this boat had two levels for hammock sleeping and a lot more space. The more expensive option was a private room which in truth was a converted locker stuffed with two bunk beds and a steel door with no window. Sounding too hot and sweaty with no ventilation we opted for the cheaper option (would you expect less of us?) and set up our hammocks on the third level of the ship. The trip to Yurimaguas, lasting two and a half days, passed with much less excitement as cows committing suicide or water buffalo trying to ka-bob anyone in front of him. Our excitement on our second cargo ship voyage passed with incredibly clear nights watching the stars of the southern hemisphere roll through the sky, and the Milky Way, the Amazon of the night sky, flowing through space and time. South America, Peru in particular, is famous for alien conspiracies and UFO sightings and I thought to myself, what better spot to see a UFO zipping through the Amazonian sky but alas none showed for the occasion. We did have a nice run in with some shallow water. Kara and I were sitting on a bench in the front of the boat cruising along upstream when the boat lurched forward, people in their hammocks floating effortlessly forward by the momentum as we hit a shallow beach in the middle of the river. These boats are designed for this though, flat on the bottom so that they can take almost anything the river has to offer. With a little reverse and detour we were moving again with zero casualties, the memory behind us. On a separate occasion, our small but powerful wake knocked over a canoe with a man and a few young children in it, sinking their canoe and motor in the shallow flooded water of the edge of the river. Some passengers witnessed it, and screamed for the captain to stop the boat and help. A john boat with a motor was put in the water and some of the deck hands zipped back to rescue the children and get the canoe afloat again and bailed out. Again, no casualties, just a hint of excitement. We spent most of our time reading and catching up writing in our journals before we made it to Yurimaguas on the morning of our third day.

Yurimaguas is connected to the rest of Peru by roads, something we'd been without for over a month. Although cars were found on the streets of Iquitos (the streets didn't go anywhere other than throughout the city) we hadn't seen many since we left Coca, Ecuador. We wandered the streets of Yurimaguas with our five year old Lonely Planet Peru Edition searching out an ATM machine. The ATM didn't work (they rarely do but as long as I get my card back I'll consider it a successful trip in Peru) so we caught a mototaxi to the bus terminal heading towards Tarapoto, the gateway to the jungle if you're coming from the rest of connected Peru. We didn't need to see the jungle around Tarapoto so we immediately caught a bus from Tarapoto to Chachapoyas, a city situated at 7600 ft above sea level in the Andes mountains. Named after the fierce people who once dominated the region, The Chachapoyas, meaning "People of the Clouds" battled fiercely against the Incas before being conquered. They left behind the lost city of Kuélap, a stone fortress on top of a mountain 9000 ft surrounded by an impressive stone wall sixty feet high. The entrances into the fortress were ingeniously engineered as narrow passageways to make any invading force enter in single file, thus much easier to defeat from the inside. The stone structure of the citadel is so impressive, some archaeologists have theorized that engineers from Kuélap helped design Macchu Picchu.

To get to Kuélap, we had to wake up at catch a van at 4 AM to take us the 2.5 hrs to Kuélap, but they don´t stick around. We were the only people at the ruins making the experience that much more amazing. Thinking about all the times I´ve been somewhere full of beauty, wanting that ONE picture untainted, uninterrupted by that person in the corner with their camera in the air too. That wasn´t a problem here. It was ours. We brought bread, avocados, tomatoes, and some funky cheese to make sandwiches for lunch before making the long journey back to Chachapoyas. From Kuélap, we had to hike downhill about 3,000 ft in elevation on a steep switchback path full of deep, wet, heavy clay mud requiring us to wear our rubber boots, then the trail switches to hard packed rock which the boots are horrible for. It didn´t help that my size 13 feet barely (and I mean barely) fit into my rubber boots, so after 3,000 ft down steep trail for 3 hrs, my toes were killing me, as well as my knee. We finally reached the town at the river in the valley below and waited on the side of the road, snacking on fruit, toasted corn, and any other junk the ladies were hawking to passing cars and trucks, for another 3 hrs for a bus heading back to the city. The aches and pains of the hike were well worth the experience. Kuélap will remain one of the highlights of the trip.

After a day of recovering from our battle wounds from our Kuélap hike, we caught a 5 AM bus from Chachapoyas through the high Andean passes over a potholed, riveted dirt road for 13 hrs to Cajamarca. The road there reminded us of the road we took from Macas, Colombia through the Andes towards the Ecuadorian border. Bolivia may hold the rights to ¨the world´s most dangerous road¨ but this road wasn´t too far behind. No guardrail, no room to pass oncoming traffic, and the slightest mistake would throw the bus down a 6,000 ft mountain slope never to be found again. But God was it beautiful.

Cajamarca, 8,900 ft above sea level, but drier and sunnier than Chachapoyas, is a busy, bustling city, famous for it´s rich history between the Spanish conquistadors and the beginning of the end of the Inca empire. In 1532, the Inca king, Atahualpa stopped at Cajamarca to bath in the famous ¨baños del Inca,¨a set of thermal hot baths engineered by the Incas just outside of the Inca city. Francisco Pizarro and his band of 168 soldiers decked out on horses and armor massacred the thousands of Inca civilians and soldiers wielding simpler weapons and captured the Inca king. Atahualpa offered the Spanish a ransom for his freedom, a room filled with gold and two rooms of silver. Gold from as far as Cuzco was sent for the ransom but alas our ancestors from glorious Europe under the banner of heaven (read sarcasm here) executed the king instead of releasing him once the ransom was paid. El Cuarto del Rescate, or ¨the ransom room¨is the only Inca building still standing in Cajamarca although the room itself is supposedly the cell in which Atahualpa was held and discussed the ransom, not the actual room of gold itself.

While visiting this amazing piece of Inca history as well as other beautiful buildings and museums throughout the city, our highlight in Cajamarca had to be the cheese. Seriously. The region surrounding the city is well know for its dairy products, something we´ve been lacking for 5 months. Sure, Colombia and Ecuador have cheese, technically, but it´s all queso campesino, a locally made cheese that can taste ¨good¨at times, while at others it can taste like dirty socks that fell in the toilet. But in Cajamarca, they have cheddar. They have edam. Gouda. Swiss. AND THEY LET YOU TRY IT...FREE. What more could three welfare travelers want out of life?! So we made our way from cheese store to cheese store, acting interested (we were) and as if we might buy some (we would not) trying the cheeses. I lied, we did buy some. One of our nights we bought a cheap bottle of wine (the wine is really sweet in Peru) and bought some smoked mozzarella and some other type as well as some bread and that was our dinner. It was marvelous. The cheddar was by far my favorite, making my knees weak, but was too expensive for us to enjoy a whole block of it. Ah! How I miss cheese (read here: Mom when we get back I hope there´s a lot of cheese in the house).

From Cajamarca, we headed on an overnight bus to Trujillo, our first time in Peru´s coastal desert. We didn´t stay in the city though, instead catching a local transport bus to Huanchaco, 12 km outside the city on the beach. Although an attractive beach town, the influence of tourism is evident on every street. Hostels, hotels, and guesthouses (they are actually ALL THE SAME), Surf shacks selling lessons and restaurants selling ceviche six times what you can find it for in the market lined most streets. No beach town will compare to our experience in Canoa, Ecuador. Tiny, quiet and cheap where you feel like a local after two weeks. I´m sure though if we return to Ecuador some day a few years down the road, it will have succumbed to the same fate as Huanchaco. We stayed for a few days, using the beach town as our base to check out surrounding ruins and historical sites of Chan Chan and Huaca de la Luna y Sol.

Chan Chan, the largest Pre-Columbian city in South America was constructed by the Chimu kingdom around A.D. 850 and lasted until they were conquered by the Incas around 1470. The city of Chan Chan covers around 12 square miles and once housed over 30,000 people. Situated on the coast of Peru but in the desert climate, the city is entirely constructed from adobe. As with most museums and ruins throughout Peru, there is a price to enter, and an opportunity to hire a multi-lingual guide. On our budget however we cannot afford guides as well as the required tip at the end. But as luck would have it at Chan Chan, there was a group of European tourists in front of us (I would guess German) but the tours are either in Spanish or English and their second language was English. So as we made our way throughout the ruins of Chan Chan, one of the three of us would semi-hover around the tour group acting as if we were looking at some interesting piece of the adobe city while focusing our energy on hearing what the tour guide was explaining to the tourists. Then as they would move on to the next part of the ruins, we would gather together and the spy would explain to the other two what was important about this or that certain area of the ruins. In the center of the ruins was a plaza where the royal Chimu would gather for ceremonies and there was a man, dressed in a Chimu costume acting like the Chimu king posing for pictures. When we passed (he must have heard us speaking English) and we asked Como esta? he responded with (I´m not lying about this), ¨Same fucking shit everyday mang!¨(in perfect English he said this...if you consider mang perfect English). We laughed because it was hilarious and asked him where he learned English. He said he was from Trujillo but lives in Kansas, U.S.A. (weird) He has his own plumbing company but came back to Peru for his father´s funeral. We didn´t want to pry into his personal life but found it humorous that he has his family and work back in the states and (as sad as it is his reason for coming back) he´s passing the time working part time dressing like the Chimu king of Chan Chan for pictures from tourists. He told us maybe he´d see us out at the bar in Huanchaco and we headed off to find the next ruin and museum.

The next day, we visited Huaca de la Luna (¨Temple/Shrine of the Moon¨). It is a large adobe brick pyramid build by the Moché culture before the rise of the Chimu empire. We were required to have a guide at this ruin (it was worth it, he was informative and pretty funny). Covered by the sands of the desert over centuries, the excavation and studying of the Temple of the Moon only began 21 years ago in 1991 and is ongoing today. The Huaca would have been an amazing site to behold after its construction. It was decorated with murals of black, bright red, sky blue, white and yellow. Many of these murals have been faded and or completely erased by the sun, wind, and friction from the blowing sands over hundreds of years. Fortunately, some murals can still be seen and are being conserved, not restored which means they´re being recreated. Many of the murals depict the Moché deity known as Ayapec, a pre-Inca word translating as all knowing. Many of the bricks used to build the pyramid show one of over 100 different markings, like signatures of the family name responsible for producing the bricks, as an accounting measure for the quota of each household. Many of the ceramics found amid the pyramid depict two warriors fighting until one is captured. The captured warrior would then be given a tea of the san pedro cactus which has psychedelic properties before the warrior would be sacrificed to the Gods. The Huaca, next to Kuélap, was one of the more amazing ruins to visit.

After our nerd-out of archaeology and ancient ruins of northern Peru, we caught a bus south on the cheapest bus to Lima we could find, only to find out post-purchase that our bus line is known for accidents (cross your fingers). But we´re still here and we made it to Lima without incident and found our good friend Michael at his student housing near the Catholica Universidad. Michael is good friend from Germany who we met back in Ecuador in Canoa. We chilled around the beach with him and found out he was studying in Lima towards his Masters degree in Anthropology. Jessica has her B.S. in Anthropology and they quickly fell into deep intellectual discussions. Michael´s laid back attitude and similar interests made him feel like an old friend within a couple of beers down the hatch. Our second week in Canoa, when we were selling macramé bracelets for Eden´s Rose Foundation (http://www.edensrose.org) Michael helped sell a few pieces to some German tourists whose English was shaky. Good dude. He said that when we get to Lima, we were welcome to stay at his house for free. Awesome. So we took him up on his offer and he put us up for our week in Lima which worked out great because one, Lima is expensive to stay and two, our week there was the week before Easter or Semana de Santa, the biggest holiday in Peru making bus tickets, hostel prices, and food triple in price. His house was beautiful, the nicest student housing I´ve ever experienced. A huge kitchen, dining room, open courtyard with a pool table, and a great rooftop deck for relaxing or lounging in the sun. Lima for us, staying at Michael´s was like being back home for a week. A major supermarket down the road where you can buy just about anything you desire (we couldn´t afford those things) and REAL COFFEE. Tangent off the subject: South America is renowned for it´s coffee and yet each country´s culture prefers instant Nescafé coffee to the rich, organic, fresh coffee that is grown there making the search for a good cup of coffee exasperating. End of tangent. So for a week, we made cup after cup of dark, rich, organic coffee, and cooked like a family with Michael and a couple of his roommates from France. One night, the french cooked a typical french dish of potatoes and cheese (from France! sent by his mother) another night we cooked eggplant parmasean (my stomach is growling as I type). We didn´t visit much in Lima, we didn´t visit anything actually. We will be flying out of Lima in June and will be staying with Michael again and just figure it will give us something to do before we leave. By the end of the week, Michael´s landlord kicked us out (for no reason other than he wanted us to pay to stay so we peaced) and we headed south down the coast to Chincha and El Carmen, the Afro-Peruvian capital of Peru.

In El Carmen, outside Chincha, we spent an afternoon walking around listening to kids play the typical cajon, a wooden box with a hole in it used as a percussion since the times when the plantation owners outlawed the use of drums for the slaves. Young kids or teenagers would walk around and play the cajon and dance for S1 each (about 40 cents) for a minute or two. In town we stumbled upon a family run restaurant (meaning two tables set up in front of a family´s door selling lunch) and ordered the pescado encetomatado off the set menú for S5 ($2). It was the most delicious meal we´ve experience our entire journey from Colombia to Peru. It was amazing. This plate in the U.S. would be worth $25 easy at a decent seafood restaurant. It was a nice cut of fish cooked with onions, tomatoes, and peppers, with corn, baby clams, baby shrimp, squid, seaweed, and yucca. The flavor was mind-numbing. I couldn´t get over it. The chef and father of the house came out to ask how it was (unusual for Peru) and we expressed our deepest appreciation. He spoke English (many Peruvians we´ve met have spoken English well) and we discovered that he lived in Dallas for a number of years at a warehouse (he should have been running his own Peruvian restaurant). Pescado encetomatado is on my growing list of Peruvian dished to learn how to cook when we return to the states.

From Chincha to Nazca, famous for the mysterious lines running kilometers through the desert of southern Peru. The Nazca Lines have been on my bucket list of things to see in life. Unfortunately, the best way to see them is from a small aircraft from above, but due to the high demand of tourism and the unsavory safety record of some of the air crafts, the price has skyrocketed over the last few years and a 40 minute tour by air costs around $150. Welfare travelers will have nothing of it. Fortunately (always top a bad with a good), there is a mirador, or ¨lookout¨ where the more budgeted (read: poor) traveler (read: not a tourist) can view two of the lines. Oohh a lookout you say?! I´m thinking a viewpoint from on top of one of the surrounding mountains but come to find out it´s nothing more than a watch tower, 30 or 40 feet high on the side of the pan-american highway. From the top you can see at a wide angle el Arbol (the tree) and los Manos (the hands) for S3 (barely more than $1). There used to be another line, the lizard, but the pan-american highway was built smack through its tail and the years of traffic, dust, and trauma has made it vanish. In Nazca, we met up with our French amigos, Tristan, Amandine, and Alex who we met way back in Pantoja waiting for the cargo boat to Iquitos. We´ve been traveling the same route, mas o menus, a day or two ahead of the others since hitting Iquitos and keep bumping into each other every place we visit. Chachapoyas, Cajamarca, Huanchaco, Nazca, and Arequipa (haven´t gotten there yet in the blog). In Nazca we found a hostel that let us sleep on the floor in the courtyard for S6! (Travels and Bojanglin on a Welfare Budget to hit bookstores in 2013) Heading out of Nazca we caught a bus to Chala, a small fishing village on the coast that has sprawled into a large fishing and tourist town during the warm sunny months. We caught it at the beginning of the endless fog season where we had the entire beach and the ice cold Pacific ocean to ourselves, except for the people dumping their trash behind us.Boo.

From Chala, we caught an overnight bus to Arequipa, the second largest city in Peru. Surrounded by towering snow capped active volcanoes, we spent a week wandering around, searching for cheap knit gloves since our next two months will be spent upwards and above 10,000 ft and COLD. We´re going to wait until Bolivia for hats and scarves, and alpaca sweaters and other trinkets. As you get higher in the Andes, the soups keep getting better and better. We visited a few museums, ate the best soft serve ice cream we´ve had on the trip (just about everyday), drank lots of coffee, had a couple Arequipeña cervezas one night, and spent our time meandering the cobbled streets of a beautiful city.

It´s interesting, as you continue to travel, you expect things to stop being so amazing, for a near norm to set in. As we´ve made our way from Colombia to Peru, we´ve seen and experienced things that I´ve thought, ¨This is it. The best place we will see or experience.¨ I´ve since learned to stop putting tags on the intangible. I am a student of the Earth, always with eyes, ears, and mind open. I will never cease to be amazed to the point of tears. From Arequipa, we´re heading into el Cañon de Cotahuasi, the deepest canyon in the world, twice the depth of the Grand Canyon. Surely it will hold experiences that will shake the bones, rattle the DNA, slap the stillness from our minds saying ¨Wake Up! You´re alive and part of the Earth.¨

Respect the Amazon Jungle

Just like every other city, town, and village we´ve arrived at along this journey, we didn´t look up or reserve a room or beds in a hostal in Iquitos. You could say we didn't do this because we didn't know when we'd be arriving and for two weeks stranded in Pantoja, we had no phone or internet access but the truth is we never reserve room. Let life happen.

Walking down the streets of Iquitos towards the center of the city, my pack felt heavier than I'd remembered. This was most likely the result of my muscles beginning the process of atrophy from three weeks of sitting, laying in my hammock, and endless waiting. Our group, arriving from the cargo in Iquitos was now nine people deep, including the three of us, Tristan and Amandine, Paddy and Louisa from England, Alex from France, and Javy, a soldier from Spain. We happened upon a guy in the street who told us he'd show us a cheap hostal for around 8 soles ($3) a night. A little shady? Perhaps, but at that point we wanted to get our bags off our backs, shower, and get some food and beer.

We arrived at an adventure outfitter office a block or so from the Plaza de Armas called Maniti Expeditions (http://www.manitiexpeditions.com). The office had a couple tents on the ground with other travelers sleeping, and two dorm rooms with beds separated like office cubicles by thin paneling. Only one bathroom though so we decided to haggle the price down from 10 soles (the guy was lying when we met him) to 7 soles per person per night. We dropped our packs, downed some water, and took turns washing the filth of the past few days off our bodies. That cold shower felt amazing. By the time we headed out as a group to eat, it was past midnight. We found a fast food burger/chicken place and promptly devoured our plates. On to the beer! To be honest, most of us were so beat and ready for bed but one beer would be O.K. We found a bar with large bottles of beer for 5 soles each ($2), pricey for us but it was the only place around open. One beer turned into a few and by 4:30am half of us decided to call it a night.

The following day, we slept in then headed to the market for lunch, a little internet time to tell family we actually were alive and not killed by lightning, anacondas, rebels, or the river in general. The manager of the expedition company, Guido, told me that our English friends, Paddy and Louisa, were taking a 3 day/2 night jungle tour leaving the next morning and he would give the three of us a good discount if we wanted in as well. After tossing the idea around with the girls we decided it was worth a shot if and only if we could get it CHEAP. We talked over a price, about 25% of what is listed online (people who book tours like this ahead of time from the internet are suckers) but promised not to disclose what we actually were paying. I don't think this counts. We asked him specifically, "What do we need to bring?" He said the company provides everything, from water, to food, to boots, to mosquito nets. "Just bring a small day pack with some clothes, towel and toiletries, as well as cameras and whatnot."

Us: "Should we bring our hammocks with mosquito nets?"

Guido: "You can if you want to but no need because we have everything you need."

Us: "Where will we sleep?"

Guido: "The first night will be in our jungle lodge down the Amazon river, the second will be in OUR tree house (he said his tree house like it was the company's) in the deep jungle."

Us: "Wow! A tree house. Will there be mosquito nets and beds?"

Guido: "Absolutely."

Awesome, finally we were heading into the old growth Amazon rain forest. No more puny edge growth or secondary forest. We were ready for the real thing. We left the next morning with small packs. I brought jeans, my swim shorts, tank top and long sleeve shirt from REI, towel, rain jacket, bandanna, head lamp, rubber boots, flip flops, and toiletries (toothbrush, sunscreen, bugspray). Kara and Jess did the same. Kara brought her hammock but not her net for it just to lounge around in at the lodge. In the morning we met our guide, Carlos, a polite 29 year old from Iquitos who spoke English well and was very knowledgable about the jungle. A van picked us up in the rain and took us to the docks where we boarded our boat. Here we go.

On the way to the lodge, down the Amazon river, we stopped to watch pink and gray river dolphins near the confluence of the Amazon with one of its tributary rivers. High fish populations where the rivers meet attracts the dolphins to feed. Freshwater dolphins, thousands of miles from the Atlantic ocean...How did they adapt to live here? It's incredible. Further down river we stopped to observe some fishing birds who make their dwellings in the mud cliffs banking the sides of the river. Their colors reminded me of the Belted Kingfisher, one of my favorite birds back home. Onward we passed two decommissioned passanger river cruise ships moored to the side of the river and growing rust. Carlos told us that two years ago, the Peruvian police with the help of the F.B.I. and D.E.A. found over 200 kilos (400 lbs) of cocaine on each ship. Wow. Later on, we turned off the Amazon and winded our way through the flooded forests to an indigenous Yagua village. A touristy chill came over us. Then men, women, and children were all dressed in traditional clothes made of grass thatched skirts, headdresses, and droopy grass necklaces that the women wore to cover their breasts. Each man, woman, and child stood in front of a booth of trinkets made for tourists. They were playing dress up for us. It felt fake, forced. If you googled "Yagua, Amazon" you would most likely find pictures from this village. All the tours stop here. The chief welcomed us though didn't seem that genuine, it was like a speech given over and over. He painted our faces with achote (the red fruit used for pigment we used in Nantar) giving different designs for those who were single and those who were married. Then they showed us a demonstration of their expertise using long blowguns, used traditionally to hunt birds. Carlos said they accept tips. Ugh. Semi-forced tipping feels so awkward. The blowgun demonstration was cool to see and he offered us a go at it for free with the expectation of a tip. I get it. These people are working for eco-tourism now. Every trinket bought, ever tip given most likely keeps a tree alive in the jungle (selling wood is most villages primary source of cash income. Most of their food though, they grow themselves). And this is great for tourists coming just to Iquitos to get a taste of the Amazon then comfortably flying back to Lima in an hour, staying in a nice hotel with good food, but for true travelers, people seeking the essence of a culture, this isn't it. Spending two weeks with the indigenous Shuar who opened their doors and hearts to us, volunteering teaching English and working in the fields, living amongst the community was real, was the essence of the Shuar culture. This just felt awkward. They didn't wear their traditional clothes when tourists weren't around. We didn't know we'd be going there and didn't bring money to tip. Sorry.

We left the Yagua village and continued on to the lodge. The boat pulled off the Amazon once again and passed a flooded house on stilts with an old dude rocking out in the flood water up to his thighs with no pants on. No Pants Pete is the watchman, making sure people don't enter the lodge when no one's there. We get out and climb the steps into the lodge. Decent, rustic, tranquillo, the lodge has a screened in room with hammocks hanging from the beams, a screened in dining room next to the kitchen with two picnic tables, a raised wooden walkway leading to the few cabins or rooms. The rooms are simple and nice with screened walls but no mosquito nets over the beds. Yeah, the room is screened but the blood suckers can still get in when you open the door. There's at least 50 in there when we arrive. We'll figure something out.

We ate lunch, which was delicious, and set out on a hike through the flooded forest learning about medicinal plants, exotic fruit, and looking for birds. Mostly we just saw the black and yellow-tailed pendulum-nest birds common thoughout the amazonia region. We walked into the town of Fatima, nothing exciting, a smaller Pantoja, and through some edge forest where fields and orchards battle with the secondary forest over sunlight and space. Kara, Jess, and I were getting ancy to get into the thick of it. Old growth. Primary forest.

"Where's the primary forest, Carlos?" This is a nice hike but we don't need a guide to walk on a cement side walk through the village. Our guide said that the virgin forest is not far but we'll save it for tomorrow. We head back to the lodge and wait for dinner. After dinner and coffee (free coffee all the time was a highlight) we headed outside for a night hike through ankle deep flood water looking for caimen, frogs, and snakes. Not ten seconds after walking out the door, Carlos pointed out a snake, about two feet long, swimming under the water. Brown with red markings, it was of the poisoness variety. Everything in the Amazon is. Every creature poisoness or not needs some sort of serious defense mechanism. From the trees living in symbiosis with ants who attack anything that touches it, or the spines and thorns that grow on just about every plant. Nothing is nice in the jungle. Beautiful but dangerous. For the most part though, dangerous or poisoness creatures see humans as predators and not prey and the snake did its best to stay away from us. But it was a reality check that if you don't respect this environment, if you are careless, you can find yourself in deep shit. As we walked along, our headlamps first on our foreheads then in our hands (the swarms of mosquitos at night in the flooded forest are insane in the light) moved back and forth in front of us cautious of each step. Next to a marsh, Carlos stopped and listened. He imitated a caimen call, a deep throatal noise similar to a bull frog, but nothing returned to call. The same marsh on our return, Carlos spotted the head of a yellow anaconda, juvenile, probably five feet long but it disappeared into the water and marsh grass. Anacondas are constrictors, hunters in the water and on land, who bite their prey, wrap them up and wait for the last exhale of breath when the lungs constrict and shrink and then they squeeze. If they're close to the water and it's a big prey they're drag them under water and drown them. Some anacondas can grow to around 15 meters (over 45 ft). Keep you eyes open. I've never experienced mosquitos like at night in the Amazon. It's probably one reason why tourist season is not when the river is swollen and flooding the forest. A couple of frogs and a tarantula, and our night hike was through. Back to the lodge to nurse our battle wounds and get ready for bed. We asked the manager of the lodge and Carlos for a mosquito net for our bed and they kind of laughed and said the room is screened. There are no mosquitos inside. They bid us goodnight. The fact was that there were loads of mosquitos in our room and Kara's blood is like candy to them. If there's one, she gets chewed to shit. If they didn't have any mosquito nets, I would prefer the truth. Forty minutes we spent hunting down every last mosquito in our room before getting into bed. Even Kara, my beautiful, life-loving, woman of the Earth found her inner predator. Kill or be killed.

The following morning, we took a canoe for a ride through the surrounding swamps...there was no dry land. We spotted a couple of different species of birds, their names in Spanish going in one ear and out the other. Maybe when I get home, I'll look them up in a common birds of the Amazon book or online. Carlos was a wonderful guide paddling us around the swamp even though two hours into the trip we were starving, excited to get back and eat breakfast but we were lost in the swamp. Even the pros get turned around in this place. When Carlos was here two weeks ago, the swamp was two feet lower. Trees or plants that were markers of where we were or which way was home were submerged or looked different with different water levels. But we gave him some time and he found the way.

After breakfast, we took the boat further down river to "Monkey Island," where rescued animals from the Iquitos black market could be brought to be rehabilitated and released into the wild. Although it seems to be more of a tourist petting zoo than a rehab. Animals are constantly handled and fed by hand. I don't see many of these being successfully rereleased into the wild. The first creature to greet us was a capuchen monkey who clearly was habituated to humans. He'd climb up on your shoulders for a photo and take mango slices out of a worker's hands with no hesitation. There were other capuchen's in the canopy of the nearby trees that were more wild and weary of humans. A female spider monkey named Suzie stayed at the top of a tree for most of the time gracefully flowing from one tree to the next. Two macaws, one red/orange and the other blue/yellow waddled around on the ground, their wings probably clipped before they were rescued from the market. Another mammal, related to the ant-eater but smaller who looked like a mix between a racoon, ant-eater, and tasmanian devil would climb the trees and run around on the ground oblivious to the cameras flashing around them. On another tree, only a meter from the ground was the ever-so-slow, ever-so-adorable three toed sloth. With a perpetual smile across its face that was contagious, he just chilled moving at a snail's pace up and down the tree. This sloth was also handled by the workers and less likely to be released. It was a zoo, without the cages. Except for the three anacondas, the animals could go as they pleased. The anacondas were each a different species, one a yellow, one a black, and one a patterned land anaconda whose name escapes me. The snakes would be picked up for pictures with tourists.

As fun as it was to see all these beautiful animals up close, this didn't feel like the jungle adventure we wanted either. We wanted WILD. Before we left, we were given a taste of a medicinal drink called "seven roots" traditionally used to cure common colds, flu, or just taken each day to stay healthy.

One of the roots used is "Uña de gato" or "Cat's claw," a common medicinal herb from the amazon used for thousands of years to treat everything from mild illnesses to cancer and leukemia. Steeped in boiling water as a tea, the uña de gato repairs damaged DNA to reboot the biological apoptosis or "cell death" killing mutated cancer cells where the cell's apoptosis has ceased to function. There is a growing interest from "developed countries" for alternative therapies to treating cancer. From teas using uña de gato to suppliments of amazonian tumeric spice (also repairs DNA) to ayahuasca. Cat's claw is in clinical trials in the U.S. in different hospitals, I'm sure closely monitored by pharmaceutical companies, to take something that has no lethal dosage, and change it, manipulate it, and mix it with other drugs that the average American's health care won't cover while making a fortune selling the drug to hospitals. All the while a $500 plane ticket will get you to the door of the real thing, practically free. Silly.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Monkey Island (they wanted tips too). We left and returned to the lodge for lunch and to pack our stuff for our second night, our night in the thick of it, in the tree house in the jungle. We take the boat back to the village of Fatima but waste 45 minutes waiting to sign our names to enter the reserve when there was no one to open the door where the log was kept. We didn't even know there was a reserve, we just thought it was the jungle.

Us: "So Maniti Expeditions has a tree house in the reserve?"

Carlos: "No. It's a watchtower, not a tree house, used for spotting herons in the swamp. It's not Maniti's. It belongs to the reserve."

Us: "So...it's a watchtower, not a tree house owned by the expedition company. O.K. But there are beds or mats there to sleep on, right?"

Carlos: "No. We will sleep on the floor. I brought mosquito nets. But, the villagers are saying the swamp is flooded and we cannot reach the tower without hiking through waist deep swamp for 30 minutes."

Us: "Is that safe?"

Carlos: "Eh. There are black anacondas, poisoness spiders, and electric eels. We could just make a jungle camp instead using plastic tarps and dry grass without going into the swamp."

We were hesitant about trying to go. Someone in the village said a different expedition company was using the tower even though we had paid to spend our second night there. And we couldn't go back to the lodge because it was full with another group of jungle travelers. We were irritated and didn't feel like we were getting the truth or that we were getting the run around. Either another group was using the tower so they were exagerating about the swamp OR the swamp really was dangerous to go through and they said there were others using the tower to make it seem like we couldn't go anyway. "Well. Fuck it, let's go see if it's that bad then we'll make a decision."

After 30 minutes of hiking on dry land, we arrived at the black, dark, swamp water. No one really discussed it, we just began walking. We all had shin high rubber boots on and the water wasn't that deep. This was O.K. But slowly, the black water rose on our boots until the moment came when water crested the top of the boot and flowed down our legs and feet, soaking our pants. No turning back. Deeper we forged. Knee high, thigh high. Someone would step in a hole underwater and be soaked to their hip. Keep moving. Don't think about what lies beneath. A huge spider crawled up Louisa's back. Paddy didn't say a word and just knocked it off her. Better she doesn't know. Finally we reach a bench, nearly submerged in the swamp with a dugout canoe chained to it. 30 minutes by canoe to the watchtower. We climb in, carefully. Someone blinked and a little water crested the canoe. We were barely afloat. Carlos began paddling from the front. The canoe only had one paddle. We bumped into a tree covered in ants. One of the girls got bit by the angry ants falling into our canoe, but the bite feels like a wasp sting. Carlos was up front using his machete to clear a path. A waterlogged and half sunken canoe sat ominously off to our left. Was that the group that was supposed to be here? We could be in a horror movie. Carlos is trying to be a good guide. He says this is Amazon swamp, primary, untouched. It's deep. There are large anacondas here, caimen, alligators, electric eel. No one's blinking. Louisa wants to turn back but the sun is nearly down. It's safer to keep going, get to the tower. She starts to hyperventilate and having an anxiety attack. Carlos spotted an alligator hiding in the vegetation growing on top of the water. Louisa and Paddy ask him to quit being a Naturalist and get us to dry land. Twenty minutes later we arrive at the basic, simple watchtower. No other group was there. Three stories above water with leaf-thatched roof. We were happy to be out of the canoe but there was a new problem. Ants.

Hundreds of ants were crawling all over the tower. Most were the size of large ants in the states. Interspersed were soldier ants, monsters, three times the size of the others with mandibles (pinchers) visible from six feet away. We made it to the top floor but they followed. Carlos said they're jumping ants. Great. Some of them were in the thatched roof and fell on us and began biting. Their bites are painful! Their pinchers grab on to you so you cannot just brush them off then they dig in and bite. We were thinking if they keep coming up to the top, one of us is going to end up in the hospital in Iquitos. "How are we going to sleep here?!" The sun sank over the Amazon to the west, a beautiful and brief moment of wonder for us then it was back to the ants. Adding to the shit, swarms of mosquitos. O.K. Focus on the basics. Carlos brought a couple sheets, blankets and mosquito nets. Paddy began setting up a net. Kara began hanging her hammock but she didn't bring her nice net that goes with it because Guido is Iquitos said they have everything we would need. His "tree house" my ass. We started killing the ants but that only attracted more ants to eat the dead ants. So kill and sweep, kill and sweep. If the guy in Iquitos had just said, "Hey, the watchtower is pretty rustic. Bring your hammocks with mosquito nets," then it wouldn't have been an issue. We camp all the time. We know to be prepared but his assurance before leaving Iquitos screwed us. Meanwhile, Carlos is down below trying to make a fire to boil swamp water for tea because we had no water (How he managed to find dry wood in the swamp escapes me). We brought our liter bottles with us but expected there to be water at the "tree house" so we didn't conserve it during the hike. Carlos comes up the tower and begins to burn our toilet paper supply to deter the ants. They don't like the ash. Good thinking. They began to keep away from our floor. We all climb underneath the one mosquito net set up at this point to escape the mosquitos for a few. They're covering the net searching for some gringo blood (Carlos doesn't get bothered by them). He calls us down to eat dinner, hard boiled eggs and bread. The fire from beneath the tower is keeping some of the mosquitos away.

Then the last thing I want happens. I have to take a shit...in the swamp, at night. I'd changed into my bathing suit at that point because my jeans were soaked. I climb down the tower and wade through ankle deep swamp water looking for a patch of dry land. Got one. Then, sweeping my light back and forth looking for snakes and spiders nearby. A tarantula-like spider the size of my hand glows in the light of my head lamp a few feet away. "You stay where you are!" I squat and turn off the light to keep the mosquitos away from my exposed ass cheeks. "Please God, make this a quick one," I prayed. I wipe and leave the tp on a log to retrieve in the AM to burn if it's not already consumed by an insect of the jungle and high tail it back to the watchtower. Success!

Our nerves calmed down. The ants seemed to be leaving us alone. We talked about getting drunk when we get back to Iquitos and laugh about our night in the swamp. The stars came out, a clear night. Beauty in the Amazon rain forest. I set up a mosquito net for myself after a failed attempt to put Kara and myself in her hammock. Kara jerry-rigs a mosquito net over her hammock (it didn't work well). The boards beneath me felt like rocks against my hips and knees. I killed all the mosquitos who had found their way beneath my net while setting it up and we all doze off telling funny stories from the past. The chorus of frogs singing to us. We were in the Amazon jungle.

We woke up around 6AM to take the canoe through the swamp two people at a time through the swamp to look for birds. Kara and I went first. Carlos paddled us through tunnels of overhanging vegetation to a heron look-out, similar to the tower we slept in but only one level. We spotted a couple types of hawks with Kara's binoculars as well as some herons, specifically the cougar heron. It's call sounds feline like a jaguar or mountain lion hence its name. We also saw some humming birds, and some tanagers. It was a beautiful morning.

We packed our things, got a couple more ant bites for souveneirs, had some swamp water tea and eggs for breakfast and got back into the canoe to head back to civilization. We paddled the canoe as far as we could in the flooded forest until a submerged log stopped us and started our wet hike back through the black swamp. Even though it didn't rain, the river must have pushed more water inland because the water was higher than the day before. Just get through. Something brushed against my leg and I just told myself it was a stick and kept moving. We made it through though without an incident. Back on dry land, we had made it. It was sunny, and hot, and we were out of water. We hiked back to the boat, back to the lodge for lunch, filled our water bottles and surveyed the damage. Kara got chewed by every insect possible through her pants, through her hammock, all over her legs and bum. I don't understand sometimes how she likes Nature with bites like those. After lunch we headed out, back to Iquitos. We were too tired for beers. We must be getting older. Showers, dinner, then crawled into bed to read and fall asleep. Our adventure in the jungle was over. It was difficult yet worthwhile. The Amazon is like nothing we've ever experienced. Respect it and protect it. It has something to teach us all.

Welcome to the Amazon!

We had spoken about crossing into Peru a bit different than most tourists and backpackers. Most travelers stick to the coast of Ecuador traveling by bus across the Ecuador-Peru border to the coastal town of Tumbes and on to Macora. However, there are other ways to cross the border, ways that Robert Frost would have written another poem about, this one being called "The River Less Traveled."

Taking a boat from Coca, Ecuador down the rio Napo to the Ecuador border town of Nuevo Rocafuerte, then a canoe from Rocafuerte across the Peruvian border town of Pantoja, THEN wait for a cargo ship to arrive from Iquitos, Peru and spend four to seven days crammed in a hammock like a sardine in a can with over one hundred other people. Maybe Robert Frost should stick to the woods of New England.

We said our sad goodbyes to our new family and friends in the Shuar community of Nantar and made our way north to the city of Coca. Coca is a not so nice, dirty city whose only purpose of existence is to support the flux of oil workers destroying the nearby Amazon forest drilling for petroleum. We happened to arrive for the end of Carnival, the multi-day festival of partying, water fights, silly string, flour and eggs and a free reason for men to chase down women and throw cold water over the front of their t-shirts. We walked around, had some beers and delicious street food and stopped at a grocery store to stock up on cans of tuna, sardines, crackers, water, cookies, toilet paper, and anything else we thought we might want or need on the cargo ship. The few blogs we had read about this journey said the food cooked on the ship is gross, cooked with river water which is taken from very close to where the only toilet on the ship empties into the river. Yeah, gross..,a couple more cans of tuna for good measure.

We bought our tickets for the Thursday boat to Nuevo Rocafuerte down the Napo leaving at 7am. For $15 per person, we loaded onto the long metal canoe with a roof and torn plastic hanging from the windows for when it inevitably would rain. Packed in on the sides of the boat on long benches with sixty other people and as much cargo as they could fit down the middle, we set off. The driver was in the back of the boat near the engine while the captain sat on the front bow looking for shallow spots or submerged trees and debris on the flooded river. Giving hand signals, he would direct the driver where to turn.

Lazily, we made our way down river stopping to drop people off at a village here, a village there. Space slowly opened up on the boat, at one point enough that I could lie down on the bench and doze off into a nap. I woke up a bit later to the sounds of the plastic sheets being unraveled on the sides of the boat and a black plastic tarp being handed out to the passengers in the front to protect them from the oncoming storm. Looking down river, all I could see was a wall of black coming towards us. The rain hit with such intensity, it sounded like the explosion of glass when a car crashes through a plate glass window. We were heading into something heavy. Lightning and thunder began to engulf us, at first from a distance then too close for comfort. I was thinking to myself, "We're in the middle of a huge river, three-quarters of a mile wide, in a metal boat, and we're the only thing around. Shit." Would we head to shore and wait out the storm hidden beneath taller objects? No. We just kept moving down river like it was no big deal. At one point, everyone in the boat jumped when a bolt of lightning hit the water within 100 yards of us. A crack of orange light with a split second before the thunder clap. I looked up at the bow at the captain, all alone with his poncho on, and his lips seemed to be moving. I was convinced her was saying his prayers.

CRACK! BOOM!! Another bolt, I thought it hit us. If it didn't then it was within projectile vomiting distance. This couldn't be happenening, not after what happened in Nantar a week ago.

A week prior, we were still in Nantar, the indigenous Shuar community, and on one of our last days we decided to go down to the river behind the village with some of the kids and teenagers to cool off. We hike down and the little kids begin splashing and playing in the shallow eddies on the side of the river. The water had risen a lot since our previous time down there. Nantar sits in the upper Amazon basin and the river collects all the rainwater coming down mountain from the eastern side of the Andes. One of the teenagers, Asael, dives into the rushing water and swims across with ease. He proceeds to climb a cliff on the other side, dive back into the river and swim back to our side. A bit later, Asael asks me if I want to cross the river? I had zero intention of climbing the moss and fern covered cliff and diving back in. Maybe I just wanted to explore the other side a bit? I didn't have a good reason but I said "Sure." It was a decision I would have made when I was eighteen, not twenty-eight. He swam across first and was waiting for me on a small island of rocks to help me to my feet. I dove in and swam hard, fighting the current pulling me downstream. I made it across safely, grabbed Asael's hand to get on my feet and...he loses his footing. "Fuck" is the only word going through my mind. The two of us begin floating down the river, feet first past the girls with shocked expressions on their faces. "FEET UP!" I thought at first. "Don't break your leg putting your feet down and getting caught between a rock." But that mentality soon vanished when I realized there was nothing but roaring rapids and no way out downstream. Cliffs lined both sides of the river. If I didn't do something, soon, I was going to die. Period. Asael and I scrambled trying to stop our momentum on the rocks beneath the surface. We caught one at the last possible moment before we had gone too far. The force of the water was so powerful and constant. I have my back facing upstream, my feet and hands trying to cling to the rock below. The force of the water pulls my shorts down and rips them off. Boxers it is. I didn't care if I was naked as long as I could get out of that river. We make our way the only way we can, towards the far side of the river. Clinging onto roots sticking out of the cliff, we slowly work our way upstream a few meters to a place where we can stand on a rock, but still downstream from where Kara and Jess were on the other side. Asael tells me we're going to dive back into the water and swim across. It's the only way. "Fuck." He said he'll go first and wait for me, again (this time it will work out) and he's gone, swimming across like it's nothing. An indigenous Shuar teenager with the Amazon jungle as his backyard. But this wasn't "nothing." If I didn't swim fast enough or hard enough, or if I caught a rock when I dove back in (I needed to dive no matter water for the momentum), that would be it. There was no place to go except down the choked canyon. They would never find a body, the anacondas would make sure of that (I didn't know there were anacondas where we were swimming until after the fact). I was standing on this tiny rock, terrified, frozen, screaming at myself for making such a STUPID decision to cross. Kara is on the other side, could see the terror in my eyes and in my body language. She's screaming over the sound of the rapids that I could do it, swim fast and keep swimming more. I didn't believe in myself. I was screwed. I was fairly certain I was about to take my last breaths on this Earth. I took a deep breath, screamed like a wild man, and dove in.

This is what was going through my mind as the second bolt of lightning nearly hit our boat. Surely, I couldn't survived the river with 45 foot anacondas (the villagers told us after when we hiked back up boxers and all) to be on this other river and killed by a bolt of lightning. The lightning kept coming but instead of on top of us there was a second delay before the thunder, then two seconds, then five. We had made it through the eye of the storm.

The remainder of the day was quite mellow. We made it to Rocafuerte, found a cheap hostel, made friends with a couple from France, Tristan and Amandine, got some dinner and a couple of beers on our last night in Ecuador. What a beautiful and magical country. the following morning, we got our exit stamps for our passports, hired a teenager with a dugout canoe and a "peke-peke" motor (it's a weedwacker with a small propeller instead of the string at the end) to take us the two hours down river into Peru to Pantoja. We had six people in the canoe plus the teenager and six backpacks, heavy, weighing down the canoe. There wasn't a half inch of space from the river to the top of the canoe on each side. We were statues. If someone sneezed, we'd surely tip. If it rained at all, or their was a slight breeze, we'd tip. And somehow, like every other miracle on this journey, we made it safely to Pantoja two hours later, dry.

Pantoja is a small town tucked away from the rest of Peru like a leper yet serves as the nearest hospital for hundreds of miles as well as the regional military base. Back in the 90's, Peru and Ecuador had a little border war and the military base meant something more. Now, all is tranquillo. We met a local, Rodrigo, who showed us to the immigration office where we officially entered Peru, and he told us he lets travelers crash at his house for $1.50 per person per night. He's got a grill, fridge, and TV with DVD player and a handful of horrible spanish dubbed movies (we would end up watching them all). Not bad considering the only hostal in Pantoja has no kitchen or TV and cost $6 a night. The only problem we faced was that the cargo ship wouldn't be arriving for at least a week. Shit. So...the three of us and our new French friends became a little family in Rodrigo's home. We'd wake up, boil water over the fire for coffee and tea, wait around reading books or making macrame until lunch, go to the only restaurant in town, come back, read some more, prepare dinner, and at night either watch one of the horrible movies or play some Farkle (a dice game I picked up from good friends in Peace Corps Senegal). Everyday. Save money. Buy rice and plantains. Go to the river and ask about the boat. We'd get different answers from every person we talked to. Meet the new batch of travelers arriving from Coca. One day there was a football match between the military team and the civilian Pantoja team. The civilians won. But it was more fun because the guy sitting next to us had a pet monkey that we played with the entire time.

A week passed in Pantoja only to discover the boat was out of gas somewhere days downriver and wouldn't be arriving for another week. Shit. We made bets if our families had contacted each other yet to see if the others had heard from us. They probably feared the worse that we had crashed, drowned or been kidnapped by drug smugglers delivering cocaine from Bolivia and Peru north to Ecuador and beyond. We were close to running out of money before we could reach an ATM in Iquitos. No more restaurant. ONLY rice and platino. Budget, budget, budget. The last few nights in Rodrigo's house, we noticed rats running along the ceiling rafters, listening to the chew God-knows-what all night long. It was time to get out of Pantoja. After thirteen days, the cargo ship, "Jeisawell" finally pulled into town.

Wow! This ship was a rusty piece of junk. But Hey! We were moving again! I asked a deck hand, probably 30 years old, how old the boat was and his reply made me laugh. He said, "The Jeisawell is much older than my grandfather." We set our hammocks very close to each other so when the boat got packed, people wouldn't try to put one between us or above us. We set off stopping at every village along the Napo to load plantains, massive amounts of plantains to be sold in Iquitos. Chickens, pigs, cows, a couple water buffalo, turtles, macaws, every animal you could think of. The cargo and animals were stored on the first level of the ship below the sleeping area and on the roof above the sleeping area. As more people boarded the ship, the hammocks began to resemble a spider's web. The head of my hammock sat in the hammock of a woman with an infant who loved to rock her infant constantly in the hammock, a constant bump to my head day and night. Below,. where my feet were was the head of another Peruvian woman who liked to push my feet out of the way at night but hey, I'm tall, and stubborn, and set my hammock here first. She just had the bad luck of putting hers at the feet of a gringo who's 6'5".

When it would rain, droplets found their way through the cracked and rusty ceiling into the sleeping area so Kara and I had to MacGyver a plastic rain fly, life vests, and our rain jackets above our hammocks to divert the water away from us. In the rear of the sleeping level was the kitchen and surprisingly the food wasn't horrible. Most meals consisted of rice with salted meat and platino. The three meals a day were included in the price of the ticket. There was the one bathroom on the ship below the sleeping level behind all the cargo. I avoided the cramped, filthy space by all means. I enjoyed much more peeing off the front railing of the boat than crawling under the hammocks to the stairs past the pigs to the filthy toilet.

Along the trip, there were brief moments of excitement that interrupted the mundane recreational activities of sweating in a cramped hammock, sitting on the only bench on the front of the boat, or climbing onto the roof when it wasn't raining to play dice. Early in the trip, the captain's macaw (Yes, the captain had a bird AND he only had one eye! BUT unfortunately wore sunglasses day and night to hide it instead of a patch) flew overboard and was drowning (turns out macaws don't know how to swim) and one of the young deckhands dove overboard to save it. Then later in the voyage, one of the cows on board, who'd had enough of the cruel treatment and conditions decided it would be better to kill itself than remain on the Jeisawell so it jumped overboard but was still tied to the boat. So the captain steered us to shore where all the deckhands got in the water or on shore to push/pull the animal back on dry land, bushwhack through the jungle to make a path back to the front of the boat. At another point, one of the water buffalo charged the men trying to pull it onto the boat and ran itself into the river.

By day four, the novelty and excitement of taking the cargo boat was wearing thin and we were excited to get off the boat at a village called Massan, a town where the rio Napo makes a large loop before entering the rio Amazona. By getting off at Massan, and taking a twenty minute moto-taxi ride across the strip of land to the rio Amazona, and boarding a twin engine speed boat that takes an hour to reach Iquitos instead of staying on the cargo ship for another nineteen hours. Thankfully everything worked out, and we got off at Massan and caught a speed boat because we found out the next day that after we left the cargo ship, its engine cut out and it needed to float with the current until it reached the Amazon river. So...by 10 pm, we were in Iquitos, Peru, the largest city in the world unreachable by road. With a population of roughly half a million people, Iquitos made its mark on the map from the rubber trees that made the rubber barons of the early 20th C. filthy rich before synthetic rubber was created essentially destroying the rubber business. We found a cheap place to stay in a jungle tour operator's office/hostal, put our bags down, took much needed and deserved cold showers, and headed out for some nice cold cervezas in the noisy streets of Iquitos. We didn't know at the time but our Amazon adventure was only just beginning.

Eden's Rose Foundation

Last summer, 2011, Kara, Jess, and I along with a handful of good friends went to the All Good Music Festival in West Virginia. A weekend spent with amazing people, amazing music, amazing experiences also happened to include Jess stopping by a vendor's tent outside the music stage area. Drawn in by poles outlining the entrance stocked with beautiful handmade macrame jewelry, she struck up a conversation with the guy sitting inside the booth, Gregory Sheldon, from Albany, New York. Greg began explaining where the bracelets came from, who made, them, and where her money would go if she bought one. As their conversation continued, stars began to align.

Greg introduced Jess to the Eden's Rose Foundation, a non-profit started by Greg a few years ago to promote gender empowerment, improve basic health, provide clean water, and support entrepreneurship to small communities throughout Ecuador and in the Himalayas. Naming his foundation after a close friend who had passed away in the states, Greg dove head first into creating a sustainable non-profit built on the principles of trust, honesty, and responsibility. Greg does not have a master's in non-profit management. He doesn't have a bachelors. Greg didn't finish high school, let alone go to college. But when Greg sees people in need, he pours every ounce of his soul into finding a way to help. While telling Jessica all about Eden's Rose in Ecuador, Jess brought up our plans to be traveling througout South America in the coming fall. "When you're all in Ecuador, come on down to Tosagua and check out our work!" Of all our plans, or lack there of, througout our trip thus far, this was one we held true on.

After spending Christmas and New Years in dirty Quito, we spent a week at the beach only an hour and a half from where Eden's Rose in Ecuador is based out of, a small city called Tosagua. We called Greg, told him we were making our way to Tosagua and asked if it was still possible to volunteer with Eden's Rose for a week or so. He told us he wasn't quite sure what we would be doing as volunteers but we'd find something. Good enough for us! We caught a bus from Canoa to Tosagua, arrived around ten in the evening to a town that doesn't see too many gringos. People thought we were lost, or waiting for a connecting bus but not actually meaning to be in Tosagua. The town sits next to a river that floods every rainy season creating a mix of contaminated drinking water to mud filled streets filled with breeding mosquitos transfering dengue fever and malaria to a community already full of its share of problems. The surrounding area is the chicken feed capital of Ecuador, meaning they grow primarily only corn to be pulverized and fed to chickens. Sometimes working for these huge factory farms is the only work a man can find to make a small amount of money to support his family. Unfortunately that work means 365 days a year. Oh, you're sick one day, no worries, you're fired! And the work is not pretty. The reason all the drinking water is contaminated is because these farms use heavy amounts of herbicides and pesticides mixed by men with no protection, often times in their homes, contaminating the cooking area as well leading to all sorts of health problems ranging from cancer, to birth defects, to reduced immune systems leading to more deaths from dengue and malaria. Not pretty.

So Greg found this town and this community and decided to act. A close friend of Greg a couple years back in the fetal stages of the foundation was from Colombia and happened to know how to make creative and beautiful macrame bracelets out of a wax string from Brazil. They set out to train some local women in a class on how to make macrame bracelets. Each woman who makes a bracelet gets paid for said piece. Once the women graduate from the macrame class, they're available to create their own small business of training other women and children or selling their jewelry as they see fit. The jewelry from the women associated with Eden's Rose gets shipped back to the United States where Eden's Rose volunteers (read here: summer and fall job? Check) travel from music festival to music festival and follow band tours to set up these merchant tents and sell the jewelry and other products associated with the foundation. All of the money raised from selling the macrame in the states is brought back to Tosagua to build community basic needs centers. 2011's music festival season brought back around $50,000 which funded the first community basic needs center in the outlying community of San Ramone. A basic needs center serves as a place of refuge in times of heavy flooding, a safe and clean place for the women to gather and work while providing a safe place for them to supervise their youngest children, and a place where they can access clean water. On top of all of this, giving the women an opportunity to make some money to support their families empowers the women, builds confidence which has a correlated reduction in domestic violence, and allows the fathers to not have to work 365 mixing deadly chemicals in their kitchens for a penny salary.

So...that's the lay of the lay of the Eden's Rose Foundation ( http://www.edensrose.org). When we arrived in Tosagua and caught a truck taxi to the house where it's based, we found Greg, Terra, a girl from Canada working with the foundation, and the family of Cecilia. The foundation is run out of Cecilia's home. She was one of the first women to graduate from the first macrame projects. Once while Greg had been back in the states raising money and things were falling apart organization-wise in Tosagua, it was Cecilia who took the responsibility to keep things together at the community level. It was Cecilia who began teaching the other women how to make the jewelry. Cecilia is one of those women who can do everything, make it look like nothing, and then do some more. She cooks for her family, and Greg, and volunteers when they're staying in Tosagua, she teaches daily macrame classes to women and children, she breastfeeds her infant son, she watches after her young daughter and her 10 or so year old son with what I would guess is autism as well as her husband, Mario, who has a heart problem, most likely from working 365 in the chemical-laden corn fields spraying. Never complains. Never yells. This is a "woman who runs with the wolves." We would go to the market every couple days, buy a bunch of veggies and rice or quinoa and Ceci would turn it into something delicious, normally a typical soup with a dish of rice and salad and meat when there was some and a fresh juice. Always delicious, always something different. Kara and I were given a room in Ceci's mother's house who lives next door. Jess was given a bed in one of the rooms in Ceci's house. No questions asked, no money asked for, just 100% pure hospitality, a part of the fam. We would help clean dishes and clean the kitchen and little chores here and there where we saw we could lighten the load off Ceci's shoulders. We sat down to speak with Greg about possible ways we could help out. We mentioned how we had just spent a week at the beach and witnessed the artists and vendors hawking all kinds of handmade jewelry to panama hats (made in Ecuador surprisingly) to trinkets most likely made in China. We talked about the opportunity for women to sell some of the macrame here in their own country in touristy places like the beach. We volunteered to head back to Canoa (had to really twist our arms for that to happen) and spend another week selling the macrame or at least seeing if there was a market of tourists to sell it to. We scrapped together some junk wood to make tables and bracelet poles out of and hit the malecon, or boardwalk. Kara, Jess, and I often took just the bracelet poles and walked down the beach stopping at sun bathing potential clients, introducing ourselves and explaining the foundation before trying to sell anything. We would explain how everything is made by hand and all the money goes back to the community to provide clean water and basic needs to families and especially children. This, being the truth, was a great advantage over some of the traveling artists from Colombia, or Brazil who sat in the street with their table and used their money from sales to buy beer or weed or what not. I'm not saying we didn't have our share of beer throughout the week but people are more likely to buy something when they know it supports a good cause. We met some amazing people walking around as well. In one restaurant, we sat down and met a group or paragliders from Oregon rockin out some sweet winds off the cliffs south of Canoa. They got into what Eden's Rose was about and each bought a couple bracelets, one woman particularly, Jane, this 50 or 60 year old ball of energy paraglider bought two $15 dollar bracelets but gave us $40 and just said put it all to good use. So generous. Another day in the week, met Kelly, a larger than life oil rig boat capitain from the bayou of the pan handle of Florida. Kelly didn't speak a lick of Spanish but that doesn't matter when you're as friendly as Kelly and drink beer like he does. You make bi-lingual friends fast. I met Kelly on the beach when he asked if Kara or I spoke Spanish and asked us to help him rent a beach chair. Easy enough. While doing so we struck up a conversation about the foundation and the next thing you know Kelly comes by the table and drops over $120 bucks on different pieces of macrame, all of which he would soon give away as gifts to new friends throughout the night. All in all, over the course of the week at the beach, we raised around $800 dollars for the foundation, quite a success. Ceci and her sister Loly came down a couple of the days to get an idea on how we were talking to people, what we were explaining, because one of our advantages to selling much of the macrame was our ability to speak English. Many of the people that ended up buying one or two bracelets at first when we greeted in Spanish just said "No gracias" or "No thank you" but when we asked where they were from and they said Canada or the U.S. or one couple from Germany who our friend Michael explained everything in German and sold them on the foundation (Thanks Michael!) their mood towards us changed. So....what we discussed at the end of the week was creating a volunteer role for Eden's Rose where future volunteers could teach classes of English to the women who were interested in selling at the beach. How sustainable will this small part be in the long run is unknown at this point but I'm excited to see the progress Eden's Rose makes in the next couple years.

From Canoa, we headed back to Tosagua for a day to recount all the bracelets, discuss the future of sales at the beach (Carnival, which is happening as I write this blog would be a great time to go down and sell), and make plans to head back north circa Otavalo to visit some indigenous Quichua artisans making hand knit hats, sweaters, hoodies, and wood carvings which Eden's Rose also incorporates into

their music festi sales. While in Otavalo, the three of us helped Greg and Veronica, the director of Eden's Rose in Ecuador, designing a new Grateful Dead baby alpaca hoodie using the GD turtles. And since Eden's Rose has a contract with the marketing company Rhino who sells official Dead gear, no one else can make and sell these alpaca hoodies. It will be kind of cool to sell these new hoodies at festies this summer and fall and know we had a part in designing them. We met a indigenous wood carver making Grateful Dead's Blues for Allah pic hand carved into nice slabs of wood. We met this cutest Quichua grandmother knitting hats. We sat in these people's homes, drank tea with them, ate maize with them, met their families. It was a truly rewarding experience and something I will be able to relate when volunteering with E's Rose back in the states.

From Otavalo, our time with Eden's drew to a close here in Ecuador. Greg headed back to the states to hit up a gem festival in the southwest to bring back rocks and gems to be wrapped and made into bracelets to be resold in the states this summer. We would be heading into the Amazon jungle with Charlie, the ethnobotanist we met through Greg in Tosagua, to spend two weeks teaching English and living amongst an indigenous Shuar community but that's for another blog. This was all catch up on the blog scene and a weight's been lifted from my shoulders. Thank you to everyone who contributed to buying a bracelet while we were in Canoa. You've made more of a difference than you can imagine. Thank you to everyone working with Eden's Rose Foundation especially Cecilia and Greg. You opened your hearts to three traveling vagabond volunteers and changed our course for the better. Through running into Greg and Eden's Rose, we met Charlie, and through Charlie, we met the community of Nantar where we arrived as strangers and left as family. I cannot believe this is our life. This is not a vacation but life happening. Let life happen. Let life happen.

No Thank You Mr. "Real Job." We'll Take Our Chances On Our Own

"Wow?" Is that the word to explain and express such intense feelings of inspiration, awe, and love for the country of Ecuador? We are overwelmed. We are joyous. We are happy. We could be working behind a desk in a cubicle for a company whose priciples tell you to screw over your fellow human being in order that they can produce a dollar profit...but it's a "real job." It has benefits. What benefits? Health insurance? You still have to pay incredible co-pays, prescription fees for medicines whose side effects may include insomnia, depression, suicidal thoughts, skin rash. You get one week vacation a year so you can rationalize not killing yourself. But it's a "real job!" What kind of sick, dimented culture have we created. We call ourselves civilized yet we take harmful drugs, destroy our environment, distrust our neighbors, create wars over oil. It's civilized! I choose this life any day of the week. It's not even a question.

Since leaving Colombia and entering Ecuador, we've spent three weeks in an indigenous community volunteering at a local primary school run by a German foundation. We've experienced medicinal ceremonies of ayahuasca, san pedro, and peyote giving thanks to the Great Spirit and Mother Earth with Quechua shamans and a grandmother holy woman from Mexico. We've visited a biological reserve tucked away in the Andean mountain cloud forest. We spent Christmas and New Years in Ecuador's capital, Quito, where I fell violently ill, shit my pants (two years in the Peace Corps in Senegal and nothing but three months in South America and I get my Peace Corps merit badge and now my pack is a couple ounces lighter) but rang in 2012 with love pouring in and out of our hearts. We couch surfed with an amazing and inspiring Italian couple, Cecilia and Francesco, who are building a sustainable house out of cob and bamboo in Tumbaco (follow their story at www.ilalocobproject.info/posts/blog_home), outside of Quito. We spent a week at the beach (finally!) in Canoa watching the sun roll over the western horizon of the Pacific ocean, hike to secret beaches, learn to surf (or begin the process at least), pick up over 100 lbs of trash off the beach in exchange for good vibrations and free frozen cocktails and meet some amazing fellow travelers and locals alike. All of which leads us to now, present, mid January, an hour from Canoa and the beach, in a town called Tosagua volunteering for an amazing non-profit organism (it's alive and constantly growing, changing, learning, becoming better) called Eden's Rose Foundation (www.Edensrosefoundation.org) working with community women and children creating self empowerment projects of macrame jewelry (http://macramebracelets.com) and organic chocolate production (best chocolate I've ever tasted...and made by hand from Cacao bean to melted chocolate bar in my stomach) to be sold back in the states come music festival season and everywhere else Kara and I wander to. Last years money brought back from the sales in the states directly funded the construction of a community center to create space for more community projects. We have been here staying with llocal families, learning how to make macrame jewelry (something we've been striving to learn since seeing Argentinian backpackers/vagabonds selling them throughout Colombia and Ecuador. We've learned how to roast cacao beans, shell them, grind them to create pure organic unsweetened chocolate, mix and pulverize sugar into powdered sugar, mixing the cacao and sugar together, tempering it so it doesn't melt in this 100% humidity, pour it into some plastic molds, throw it in the fridge or freezer and you have delicious, hommade chocolate bars thirty minutes later. It's been great because the chocolate project is new, and the perfect formula of tempering (how long & at what temperature) hasn't been perfected for this climate (some has melted faster than others) so we've just been making alot of chocolate and eating it. If I didn't have a sweet tooth before this experience, I do now. Speaking of which, I'm going to go grab some chocolate.

(5 minutes later) O.K. so where was I, oh yeah, this organization is awesome. So Kara, Jess, and I have been discussing possible markets for this jewelry and we decided that there are alot of gringos in Canoa...and the beach is sweet...so why not live the perfect life, for a week at least, and go BACK to the beach (any complaints? Didn't think so) and see if the vacationing gringos who hang out around the gringo restaurant and bar (which will be playing the Ravens/Patriots game on Sunday) and see if they like the product, want to buy some for themselves or their kids or friend or whatnot. Best case scenario is that the bracelets sell well, the bar sees this, and they buy a bunch of the jewelry wholesale, jack-up the price for them (what gringos do best. Capitalism) and sell them inside their bar. While doing so, we'd be spreading the word about Eden's Rose Foundation, an hour and a half bus ride from Canoa, where people can come visit, see the projects and learn macrame for themselves! Canoa is going to be a pilot marketing program this week. If it goes well, then some of the women themselves can come down once a week or so (weekends when it's busy?) and sell their own product directly, from the hands that made them to the hands that wear them. We've discussed if we have a good week in Canoa, which is a small tranquillo beach town, then we'll road trip it down the coast to the really touristy, party beach town of Montanita and sell like madmen.

Kara, Jess, and I have already joined on the fundraising bandwagon when we get back to the states this summer (talk about the perfect summer job...) and travel from music festival to music festival, then follow the big fall music tours of Furthur (remaining members of the Grateful Dead) and some other big shows, setting up vendor's tents and spreading the good word of Eden's Rose while selling macrame which is exactly how we found ourselves here. Jessica met Gregory the founder of Eden's Rose last summer at the All Good Music Festival in West Virginia. His organization happened to be in Ecuador and we happened to be traveling to Ecuador. "Boom goes the dynamite." Get it? We'll also be traveling around visiting university campuses, the beaches of Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, and of course Canada Lake.

We also met a ethnobotonist who works as a consultant with Eden's Rose who has connections to the Shuar indigenous tribes of the Amazon where we'll end up whenever we decide to leave the coast. Our plan, if it's possible that we have a plan when our plans change day to day, is to take a boat through the Amazon to cross the border into Peru at the end of February when our visa is up...or buy a canoe and paddle into Peru but you never know!