Pacaya River
We are getting into the routine of awaking at 6am for a 6:30 skiff ride. Finally (duh) it hits me that we are on safari – a jungle safari. What is so stunning about this place is how flat and expansively wet it is underneath the constant canopy of high trees. Yet the sky is a Texas sky – big. This morning we headed out on a long 20-mile skiff ride up a tributary on a tributary on a tributary of the Ucayali, which becomes the Amazon when it merges with the Marañon. Mike told us that our skiff ride would be distinguished by breakfast on the river this morning instead of in the dining room. So we expected another excursion in which what would be special was the variation in the meal.
What we got was a fascinating and major display of wildlife. And while the breakfast was lovely, it took third billing after nature and then the human traffic in the backwater, which was comprised of small-scale fisherman on eight- and ten-day excursions to capture large numbers of walking catfish for transport down to Iquitos in small dugout canoes.
We are now bored by such birds as jacamar, kingfishers, oropendola, trogons, hawks, aracari, woodpecker, cardinals, egrets, herons, terns, plovers, and even parakeets and sloths and pink dolphins. Six days in, we recognize them by their behavior and just point them out to each other as the drivers speed past in the three loaded skiffs. To sustain our interest, the naturalists caught a fish and threw it in a large arc across the river to incite a hawk to prey. What interests us the most at this point are the more obscure and hard-to-spot birds: the toucans, macaws, parrots and hoatzin (and we saw all this morning but toucan). We scouted for river turtles, iguana, howler monkeys, squirrel monkeys, and anaconda (and saw all but the anaconda).
As we pulled into our spot for breakfast, the naturalists translated a discussion with two fishermen who were consolidating their catch across two hand-hewn tree trunk canoes. After doing the math, we reckoned they’d draw about $1,000 for eight days of work on the river. I felt like a fragile subspecies in accepting the naturalist’s offer of hand sanitizer before being served a luxurious breakfast of coffee, craft pastries and fresh fruit on porcelain plates with cutlery and white cloth napkins. I resolved when I get home to think more carefully about what I am doing when I eat a fresh-fish dinner.
Mid-day has become routine: resting, reading, a long lunch, an occasional lecture. Today’s was especially languid perhaps because our lecture was on towel folding – less serious than yesterday’s geology talk or the prior day’s discussion of ecological diversity.
And then, on the early side this afternoon, we boarded the three skiffs at 3pm for a long ride up the same river we had traveled in the morning, but at high speeds until we passed the spot we had been for breakfast. The skiffs running at 20 mph on the 20-mile track over 4.7 miles as the crow flies felt like roller coasters that swished only side to side with no vertical elevation. Slowing down, the feature of the afternoon became monkeys: first the squirrel genus interspersed with howlers with their huge prehensile tails and big faces; and then more squirrels on a track through the trees; and then more howlers; more squirrels and howlers; more squirrels. Two hours after departing the Delfin II we broke into a huge Amazonian freshwater basin just prior to sunset, and the guides invited us to jump in the water to cool off.
At 80 degrees, there was no shock on entry. About a third of us cooled off in the water while the others took pictures and drank beer. The water levels are rising about 2 or 3 inches a day, and the place felt like it was more underwater than above water. As we climbed back into the skiffs after our swim, Mike and Jesus glimpsed some monkeys on the other side of the lake and, skeptical that we would see much, suggested we take a quick look. The effort yielded more squirrels and howlers, hanging upside down, languishing in the early evening sun – and then – brown capuchins interspersed with the howlers. And the squirrels arguing. More and more of all of them. We sat in the skiffs drinking beer and drying off for the better part of half an hour watching them all interact.
On our fast ride back through the swerving tributary, we focused mainly on the setting sun, which was moving from right to left and back again as we navigating the swerves of the river. The hour-long rush back to the Delfin II was punctuated by a brief stop to watch white-fronted capuchins – the only remaining species of monkey on our list!
Tomorrow we make our way back from the tributary Pinarowa through the Ucayali to the Amazon. I can’t wait.
