We have just returned from an amazing four night stay in the forest. Not just the forest—the Amazon Jungle. It was incredible. Everything is so much richer there: the air, the smells, the soil, the life. It truly was a sensory overload; and not everything we felt, heard and smelt was totally positive: the mosquitoes, bees and flies buzzing incessantly in our ears, the constant need to scratch our legs, ankles and arms, the sweat dripping down us and soaking our clothes, the stench of BO mixed with molding clothing…
But we endured all of this. And I´m glad we did. I think I speak for at least some of my group-mates (as well as for myself) in saying that this (perhaps coupled with Achupallas) was the most unique and amazing experience of the trip thus far.
The experience began with a five or six hour boat ride down an Amazonian river. We arrived in the afternoon at Robin´s property. Robin is twenty-nine year old dude who grew up in Concord, Mass (about a mile away from Walden Pond). After high school, around the age of nineteen, he came down to visit Peru. From a young age he had been interested in medicinal plants and in nature. He had come down here seeking the wisdom of local medicine men and healers. After his first journey down here, he was so certain that this was the place from him that he came back a few months later—to stay. He has owned this current property for six years now and has started his own organization: Camino Verde (literally translated ´green path´).
After stopping by Robin´s, we continued another ten minutes up the river to our lodgings: five sturdy but plain bungalows, compete with mosquito-net-beds, and scattered around the central dining hall. In anticipation of our first day of work, we retired to beds quickly, soothed by the roaring of the river and the singing of the insects. The next morning began at 5:30, with breakfast 6:00. We gobbled up our eggs and fried bananas before heading down the river to Robin´s. We arrived and immediately and set out on a two mile hike (through mud puddles and pools over water, over streams on wobbly ´bridges´(scrawny tree trunks), over biting ants, and amongst the noblest, most stately trees I´ve ever seen. We were walking through the Amazon Jungle- a seemingly endless sea of green, complete with flirtatious bird calls and unrecognizable animal tracks. A primordial, instinctual emotion rippled through me. I felt so much at home, thousands of miles from Connecticut.
We arrived at the work sight and began clearing a trail that would be used to monitor and care for the land, and keep out unwanted visitors (like poachers and tree-cutters). We spent the next four hours machete-ing and axing, getting blisters and calluses, falling in mud and off ´bridges´. I even had to take my fire-ant-infested pants to escape their biting. We trudged back three of four hours later, exhausted and ravenous. We inhaled our lunch. The consensus was that a plate of rice, beans and sour kraut had never been so delicious. This was our morning routine for four days, even down to the rice, beans and sour kraut. Our clothes got smellier, our faces got dirtier (despite our races to the showers every evening) and we got even more exhausted. Our afternoons were filled with different activities: transplanting vanilla, learning about carbon offset, touring the farm and woods, chopping open coconuts, planting trees, covering un-canopied soil with a cover crop so that it did not dry out and turn to desert.
We spent our last night in the Amazon at a lake in the middle of the jungle. We saw spider and squirrel monkeys, lake otters, tarantula, caimans, and many types of birds. It was a lake unlike any other I´ve seen before: deep, shinny blue surrounded on all sides by tall thin trees. It was a great way to spend the final night—more time to just observe and relax instead of use axes and machetes.
I really want to return this jungle one day.
-Max