No Luz!

I´m in Puerto Maldonado now after a trip down from the mountains into the amazon basin. On the first day on the way down there was an armed guard again who wouldn´t let me pass until 6am the next morning, so I camped in that truck parking lot. I woke up with my tent completely soaked because the mountains there are pretty much in the clouds from the amazon, or fog even.

I´ve been fighting for water the whole time, now in one day I´m fighting against it. In the mountains it was so nice, I´d drain 1/4 liter of water out of my body into my tent each night, open it up to the sun and it´d dry within 20 minutes. In the jungle, my wet tent and wet shoes stayed wet until the end, Puerto Maldonado. And I was still fighting for water, sweating like crazy for the three hottest hours of each day.

Once 6am rolled around I set out for the muddiest day of cycling. I didn´t bring fenders, so it just caked everywhere, and there were tons of stream crossings. I only fully dumped my bike once though, and jumped off of it in ankle deep mud.

The scenery was the best out of the whole trip, reminded me of Jurrasic Park more than anything but no dinos. Huge leaves on everything! Clay houses quickly transitioned to wood and sheet medal shacks since I´m sure the water would break down those mountain top houses within months. The people were still very Andean though, I should have taken a picture of the Andean guy with a knit hat standing on the porch of his jungle shack. People spoke Quechuan deep into the jungle, all the way to Quince Mil at least. Probably some great slang.

Construction really picked up here. At first it was just people painting things, the finishing touches. Over the course of the trip it was everything you could think of. At one point they told me to stand back and wait for an hour, and some more stuff I didn´t understand. Shortly after dynamite went off nearby, and I could feel it in my feet. The wait turned out to be 5 minutes.

I absolutely love the Peruvian attitude towards cleaning. It´s so futile, but they do it with pride. At one point in the road there was a truck driver pulled over on the most muddy road possible. It was at least 20 miles of muddy roads behind him and in front of him, and again, also exactly where he was parked. He was sitting there with a rag and a bucket, restoring the facia of that truck to showroom quality, nothing but shiny chrome. Definitely not half assed like I would have done it, I´m talking every surface of that facia was free of dirt.

In lots of towns, the kids and adults alike enjoy shouting out ¨Gringo!¨ at me. I started shouting back ¨Peruano!¨ with equal enthusiasm.

In Quince Mil I arrived in heavy rain and couldn´t figure out how to get into this hostal. Some kid, Cesar, saw me and offered a free place on his floor to sleep. He was from Lima, vacationing with family in the ´Mil for a few weeks. Turned out to be quite rough living in this town. The people across the street had a kid who liked to walk around fully naked all the time, and his shoulder down to his arm had been burned when their previous house burned down. My new friend Cesar told me he was crazy, but he wasn´t the only fully naked person I saw in the jungle. Just like in National Geographic.

Cesar´s cousin was a sad story. She was 16, fully deaf, not going to school as far as I could tell, and....pregnant! The only word she knew was mama, and she used this word all day, even when mama was 30 miles away wearing a blaze orange suit swinging a machete in the woods to build the pan oceanic highway. Teenage pregnancies are common in the jungle I was told.

The house he was staying at in Quince Mil was really comfortable. The kitchen was a shack in the backyard, along with another one for the bathroom and shower. Tropical Peru has ended the male vs female debate on toilet seats, up or down. I´ve seen just two toilets with a seat in the 500km since Cusco, and there wasn´t one here. They must be a crass sign of wealth or something.

They had tons of clotheslines, and the clothes would stay on those lines for multiple days, but then it rained every day, so you had to be lucky to avoid that. Under the clothelines were very well organized rock garderns, probably so the ground wasn´t always mud underneath.

One thing I didn´t expect about the jungle was to experience rolling blackouts, something that´s always been on my list. I was going to play pool with this guy on the one pool table in town, but when we got to the bar there was no luz! Then we were going to use the internet, but again, no luz! Candles started selling like crazy and every store and diner was suddenly really romantic on the walk home. It happened here in Puerto Maldonado last night too, and I was lucky enough to get a video of the lights coming back on at one of the main promonades.

The night I stayed in Quince Mil there I took Cesar and his aunt out for a night on the town! Dinner cost around $5.50 for the three of us, and drinks were $7. We went to the chicken restaurant that did have light somehow.

Honestly after Quince Mil I thought the scenery would continue to get exponentially cooler, but now I´d say my favorite part was Tinke to Quince Mil. The jungle proper has been cool, but not as mind blowing. Maybe I´m not going to the right places.

After Quince Mil I went to the town right before Loromayo, forgot the name. It was just getting fully dark when I got there, I was out of energy. I got the most Gringo! cheers here than anywhere, and ended up with a parade of about 20 young children within minutes of arriving. I taught them the high five, couldn´t think of much else. They followed me as I almost fell over and made a very confused trek door to door looking for a hostal, then luckily it was over. This town was very friendly, though very very poor. I have to backtrack to there today.

Hmm, I should really get on the road. Let me just say Mazuko was a great town, good food, and the first place motorcycle taxis started appearing. In fact it was 1/2 motorcycles here probably, all the locals. One of the toilet seats was here. I tried to buy malaria medication here and the pharmacy said go to the hospital, the hospital said go to the pharmacy. Haven´t had any luck since then either.

Between Mazuko and Puerto Maldonado was this city that wasn´t a city. It was some sort of freetown for motorcycle taxis. It was all grass huts or huts made out of tarps and it went on for quite a while. Tons of motorcycle repair places, and one truck engine repair too. I saw quite the motorcycle heroics here, they were trying to put beer crates on the back of one, two deep x two or three wide x three high, four 32oz per crate. Maybe more, I can´t really remember.

Puerto Maldonado has the best food of the trip! I´ve been stuffing myself every day with baked goods and dinners for $3.30. I was way down on weight when I arrived, made some progress back to my (north) American TV dinner heritage.

I took a river boat ride yesterday, but did it wrong, it wasn´t the best. I´m sad to see they´re building a bridge over the river to Bolivia and Brazil. The way they do it now is with family owned ferries, and it´s awesome. They´re all the same design, built of wood with a little metal for the keel. They carry one car/truck/van each, plus pedestrians and a moto. It´s tons of work, they have to dangerously back the car up two planks at a 30 degree angle, then the boat is grounded on the concrete and they have boards to pry it loose over a few minutes. After that, the 2-stroke motorcycle engine drives a shaft that´s 5ft long and powers a tiny propeller. There´s no reverse, but they have a trick, they point the shaft over the deck towards the shore.

Ok, gotta go now. Heading to Loromayo and down south into the mountains up to Titicaca.