Sapuena Village area, and Belluda Caño
We awoke to our first day on the Ucayali River to a rainy morning that prevented us from going on our early morning skiff ride. Some of us returned to our beds having been up late from our night walk the night before while others had coffee and looked for birds and wildlife off the upper deck. The rain finally stopped and the clouds brought a welcome drop in temperature as yesterday had been so hot and humid.
After breakfast, we loaded into the skiffs and crossed the wide Ucayali River to the village of Sapuena. The town stretches along the riverfront and is comprised of a series of open-air wooden homes on stilts to accommodate the rise and fall of the water. A single electrical line runs through town, but the electricity is turned on only twice a week to conserve the diesel required to run the generator.
We broke into three groups and slowly strolled through the town for about an hour. Several of us felt unsettled at the prospect of visiting as we worried that we might make the townspeople feel awkward – in our synthetic clothes and with our digital cameras we felt like the ultimate gringos. But our guides Jesus and Juan Luis put us at ease by quickly introducing us to the villagers, the first of whom was a four-year-old boy who joined our orientation circle. Clad in a ninja T-shirt, high-tech sneakers and a backpack, Jimmy told us that he was on his way to kindergarten on the town’s central sidewalk, which stretched in a perfect line for a full mile through the center of town. We met four generations of a family that had joined into the village’s export agreement with a Japanese processor of camu-camu juice. Jesus told us that the agreement had advanced development of the community substantially by creating a stable source of income. Several of us visited the medical clinic, which was in the midst of a child vaccination campaign, while others chatted with the town journalist, who sat on the front steps of a cabin that hosted both a satellite dish and a loudspeaker system. The journalist told us that many of the adults were out harvesting rice as the river rose in preparation for the wet season.
Our stroll on the town’s prized sidewalk took us past the old school, one of the only cement-block structures, which had been converted into a one-room ‘Hall of Pedagogical Innovation’ but looked endearingly like a one-room library. One family invited us into their home to meet the blind, sixty-five-year-old family patriarch who was out back pounding dry rice into a powder with a huge mortar and pestle in a muddy yard of chickens, ducks and dogs. We were blown away by his cheerfulness and good nature: he told us that he felt like a sixteen-year-old. One of the guides translated a question about how he had met his wife some fifty years ago and the woman just started laughing – but never answered the question. Steve took on the mortar for a couple of minutes and testified to the difficulty of the procedure.
Just past the hall of pedagogical innovation, we took a right turn to walk down the only side street in town, which extended a few hundred yards back into the jungle where the town’s largest and most secure buildings were located: the school complex. As soon as we arrived the students all began to shout and scramble in welcome. We met two teachers, who exuded kindness and sophistication, and the elegant and dedicated school director. As we exchanged greetings, the students were scrambling to relocate enough chairs into their largest classroom to accommodate us. We introduced ourselves person by person – first on the tourist side and then on the students’ side. The children did a much better job counting in English than we did counting in Spanish. We sang songs for each other and told stories. As we left, the students walked us back through town, holding our hands and telling us that they aspired to our professions of engineer, teacher, computer scientist and physicians. After knowing them for only two hours, we found it hard to leave.
Once we got back to the boat, our captain started up the engines and we began to move upriver passing ferries, oil boats and small wooden skiffs. Before lunch, Luis and our sous chef, Alessandro, taught us how to make Juanes with chicken, eggs, olives, rice, oil and bay leaves wrapped and cooked in Maranta leaves. A couple of us bravely stepped up to take a hand at it and found tying together the tamales a lot harder than it looked. Our cooks made a great lunch of them though: they were much more savory than the sweet banana and mango dishes we have been enjoying this week at lunch.
After lunch as we read books and rested on deck, the first mate came out of the bridge to point out four huge blue and yellow macaws atop the palms on the bank. We got a big show of them swooping around on the banks. Jesus then gave us a great talk on the Amazon indigenous culture.
In the late afternoon, we went by skiff along a small tributary wildlife viewing. A tree was leaning into the stream and on its underside were 7 tiny long-nosed bats! This is their favorite roost, over open water such as streams. They were so cute and they have an elongated nose that points down the tree. They hang in a characteristic straight line with each bat spaced about 2” apart. They are so we camouflaged, they look like leaves! But beware if you are an insect at dusk as these are one of the more common bats!
As we slowly motored up the creek, we encountered a dark fuzzy bundle high up in another tree, which turned out to be a very fluffy monkey called a Monk saki. It sat there and munched leaves and looked down at us giving us great photo opportunities. Parrots and parakeets flew over us as they headed to their nightly rousts. A pair of small toucans perched nearby. The solitude and peacefulness of floating along the creek, observing and listening to the forest noises, makes man’s outside world seem so far away and meaningless. Life doesn’t get much better than this. Dusk was descending so we returned to the Delfin II ending another amazing day exploring the Amazon.
