Carrie Bracco Travel Journal

The Return Trip

cbracco — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 06:58:00 GMT

It was a good thing that the weather was nice for the first half of the trip because by the second week the weather had turned for the worse. It was hard to make landings due to the rough water, so we had some days just on board the ship and I didn’t get much more work done. We spent a couple of days visiting Ny-Alesun and Barentsburg. Ny Alesun is a scientific research station that looks like a quaint little town. Its so isolated that scientists can use the atmospheric readings as controls for what the atmosphere "should" be without all the human pollution. Barentsburg is a Russian settlement, primarly a mining community, but its real purpose is to keep a strategic outpost in the North. The townspeople are essentially trapped in the small snowy village for two years while they work out their contracts-there are no roads to other towns, they don’t have boats or snowmobiles and they cant hike out and camp because they don’t have rifles to protect themselves from the bears.

Since I couldn’t really work, I had fun acting small parts in another artist's film, helped raised the sails on deck and generally rested. During the worst days of sailing, the boat would tilt at a 45 degree angle and it was exhausting just trying to stand up straight. The angle combined with the swell meant that most people stayed on deck trying not to fall overboard or retreated to their rooms to sleep until it was all over. Sleeping meant laying just as much on the wall next to the bed as on the actual bed itself, until the wind changed direction of course and you have to hold on to keep from being thrown out of the bunk.

On the last day of the trip, the cook and crew prepared a five course candlelight dinner for us. The food was very good throughout the trip, but this was truly incredible, especially given the small galley that the cook had to work in. It was probably the nicest meal I have ever had. I was very lucky and grateful that the cook made accommodations for my diet (gluten-free) throughout the trip and I didn’t have to eat peanut butter for two weeks.

Now we are back in Longyearbyen and I will have 30 hours of airports and flights before I will be home.

Moffen Island, 80 Degress North

cbracco — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 06:56:00 GMT

We are at the halfway mark of our trip. The weather has been remarkably cooperative so far and I have my fingers crossed that it stays that way. Aside from some high swells on some nights while sailing, the water has been calm especially where we drop anchor, so seasickness has been minimal. As for the weather, its cold but the layers and layers of wool and wind-proof, water-proof clothing keeps me warm for the first couple of hours out of doors. We usually only spend two to three hours on land at a time so by the time I start getting cold, it is time to start heading back to the ship.

Our typical schedule is that we rise at 8 for breakfast, eat and scramble to get all of our gear together. We go onshore for the morning, return to the ship for lunch and then back onto land for the afternoon. I've been able to make several sketches on site so far, using the onsite sketches to make color notes and taking photo references the rest of the time. The colors are amazing. Each day, the day gets shorter while dawn and dusk last longer. Most of the day the skies glow with soft lemon and pink hues. The water is the deepest, clearest turquoise I've ever seen. The only times I was absolutely miserable trying to paint was while it snowed. The snow would stick to the oil paint and turn it into a gummy consistency that was nearly impossible to work with and wouldn’t stick to the panel.

A couple of days ago, we arrived at Moffen Island. We crossed the 80 degree line at night and the second mate rang the emergency bell to mark the occasion. Unfortunately, I was down in the salon with a couple of others when the bell rang and nearly had a heart attack. We started diving for our life jackets when someone said "No life jackets, just meet on deck". On deck, the crew passed out mulled wine and shot flares into the night sky. We toasted and watched the northern lights on the horizon. It felt like a New Year's celebration with the added relief of not being shipwrecked in the Arctic. A couple of hours later, we reached Moffen Island.

On Moffen Island, it snowed most of the time we were there. Unlike Spitsbergen with its jagged mountain peaks, Moffen was flat and seemed endless. It was a resting place for walrus and they were everywhere. We could walk up quite close to them. They lay in heaps resting on the beach and we worked near them without disturbing them. When it was time to leave, we couldn’t find a place for the Zodiac to come ashore without passing the walruses. They are curious and like to poke at rubber boats with their tusks so it was a bit nerve wracking getting into the boat and motoring within ten feet of them on the way to the ship.

The Expedition!

cbracco — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 06:55:00 GMT

We have been on the boat for two days and already we have seen the Northern Lights and shooting stars. The boat is a 120 ft schooner which is surprisingly roomy for twenty artists and crew. Our cabins are probably about 100 square feet shared by two people. For common areas, we have two salons big enough for two tables each. We use Zodiacs (inflatable motorized boats) to get onto shore during the day and spend afternoons and some evenings sailing and motoring to our next location. We are at 78 degrees latitude and are headed up the coast of Svalbard (also known as Spitsbergen) to Moffen Island at 80 degrees before heading back.

When we go on shore, we either take hikes for landscape photography or stay in one place to work on our projects. At all times, we are accompanied by an armed guard in case we come across hungry polar bears. So far we have only seen reindeer, birds and arctic fox. The landscape is mostly barren rock and snow. The sea seems to stretch on endlessly and there are no other boats on the water. Today, in the distance we could see the last one or two settlements as we passed them before being completely alone in the North.

(Interesting trivia about our location: The Northern Lights do not occur directly over the poles but 20 or so degrees south. We are so far north that we need to look SOUTH to see the Northern Lights! Also, today, someone told me that we are 800 miles north of the highest point of Siberia. The reason its possible to travel here at all and the sea is not covered in pack ice is because the sea currents carry warm water up the Atlantic. )

Longyearbyen, Svalbard

cbracco — Sat, 9 Oct 2010 06:53:00 GMT

We spent the first couple of days in the Arctic at the lodge meeting each other, getting last minute supplies rand touring the town. Longyearbyen is a Norwegian mining town and is the northernmost town with more than 1000 people. There are surrounding towns but they mostly cannot be accessed by road and getting there requires snowmobiles, dogsleds or boats. Even walking a few minutes outside of town is not recommended due to potential encounters with polar bears.

So far the weather has been grey and drizzly so it there haven't been good opportunities to paint yet. But there have been good opportunities to test out my cold weather gear on hikes around town. My boots are super warm and comfortable.

There are about 20 artists on the expedition, many photographers, video artists or conceptual artists. There are also a couple of other painters. Tomorrow we will be boarding the boat and adjusting to our new home, then by the next day, we can begin our projects! I'll be sending another update in a couple of weeks when we return to Longyearbyen...

Greetings from the Arctic!

cbracco — Thu, 7 Oct 2010 06:50:00 GMT

I am currently in Longyearbyen, Svalbard which is north or Norway. Its an old mining town, and the weather is grey and rainy. I am staying a lodge for the next couple of days while getting over jet lag and adjusting to the cold weather. In a few days, I will be boarding the boat and the true expedition and real work will begin. I'm looking forward to sharing photos and artwork with you when I return! :-)

At Home and Bug-free At Last…

cbracco — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:25:00 GMT

I wasn’t expecting to update a travel journal several weeks after returning home. After all, I’m not travelling anymore. But since a bit of the jungle hitched a ride home with me, another post seemed appropriate.

After taking it easy in Cusco for a couple of days and tending to my swollen and occasionally burning legs, it was time to head home. The trip home involved a Friday morning flight to Lima, an overnight stay there and then a Saturday flight to NYC via Miami. That’s a lot of time in transit and by Thursday night I was getting panicky. I managed to convince myself that the infection in my legs was caused by worms and dreaded the thought of possibly arriving in the States with them. After a sleepless night, not sure what to do, I called the Peruvian doctor at six in the morning. I’m sure I woke him and he agreed to come examine me again before my flight out of Cusco. I explained that I thought I saw white stuff inside the bites and he told me that to be certain, he would have to cut open the wounds, which he did with a needle. This being Peru, no anesthetic was involved and it was a bit like being tortured by a friendly, helpful psychopath. He concluded again that there were no worms and that I likely had just seen puss from the infection. Now I could look forward to the two days of air-travel with wounds that were freshly picked open. Oh, goody. I was pretty down on myself for not trusting him the first time and making the situation worse for myself.

Aside from my general discomfort, the flight to Lima and my evening stay there were uneventful. I was mostly worried about the long flights back to the United States and whether I could tolerate sitting still and having to surpress my occasional yelping for the entire flight. I hobbled through baggage claim and customs at Miami grabbing at my various stinging skin infections and then re-boarded for New York. As we landed in New York, I wished I was a kid again so that I could have parents waiting for me at the gate. Lucky me, as I limped towards baggage claim, I saw my parents who had come to surprise me by picking me up at the airport! My father carried my bags, they drove me home, waited while I showered and then we all went out for a nice meal. Apparently, when you travel to the jungle and write home about exotic bugs and jaguars, your parents are reminded that you are their baby, even if you are a thirty-two year old baby.

I spent the next couple of weeks touring several doctors’ offices while they puzzled at my predicament. At first, I still had to manually drain the wounds, applying pressure until a black-ish ooze would come out accompanied by barely tolerable burning sensations, so the first doctor prescribed another week of antibiotics. Once the infection was gone and the black ooze stopped, the bites still hadn’t closed up. Now they looked like regular little bug bites but would occasionally sting, as if I was getting jabbed with a needle, and then they would bleed profusely. I was going through about twenty band-aids a day and the jabbing sensation was pretty distracting.

Next on the tour was a stop at an infectious disease specialist. My first surprise was that the doctor with the conservative Jewish sounding name was in fact a middle aged transvestite. He was tall with a small frame, slimming clothing, large necklace, dangly earrings, nice lip gloss and perfectly plucked eye-brows. Oh, and bald. At first he came to the same conclusion as everyone else: odd but no worms. Then he decided to do a second examination and I offered to wet the wounds so that he could see the white matter that I typically saw in the bath. This lady-like bald doctor looked and squeezed and concluded, “You definitely have maggots in there!” Oh, dear. Its moments like these that make reality seem so fragile.

He excitedly called a dermatologist who agreed to see me right away. At the dermatologists’ office we discussed my options. The low tech options were likely the best. They involved smothering the worms with Vaseline or tape in order to coax them to the surface, then pulling with tweezers. (“Have you tried bacon?” asked the dermatologist. Uhm, no I hadn’t tried to smother my worms with bacon.) High tech options involved burning the skin with liquid nitrogen so that all of the surrounding skin sheds taking the worms with it. I wasn’t too happy about the burning aspect of that. Cutting the bites open didn’t seem to be a good idea because the risk of infection was high. We compromised with the doctor biopsying and stitching one site. While he sent that off to the lab, I would try the home remedies and we would meet back up in a couple of days.

Luckily for me, the following day was Wednesday, my day off from work. After twenty four hours of keeping the bites covered with tape and Vaseline, my little hitchhikers were ready to be de-boarded. By pressing down on the surrounding skin, I was able to grasp just enough of the worm with tweezers and pull it out. The first extraction was pretty horrifying. A friend of mine from Peru had heard my story and suggested that I probably had butterfly larvae, rare but small, which would explain why the doctors couldn’t easily diagnose me. So I expected to pull out something like a small piece of thread. Instead, however, I found myself pulling out botfly larvae. These are ugly, thin on the end close to the skin’s surface and thicker (about the size of a pencil eraser) on the deeper end. The thick end has rows of little black spikes that act as an anchor and create resistance while you try to remove them. Mine were about an inch long at rest but since they are worms, they stretch as you pull. The experience was much like watching Mary Poppins pull a floor lamp out of her handbag. How did that fit in there?!?

The process was pretty nerve racking because if you break them while removing them, you risk infection. I removed one easily enough but two were on my backside, nearly out of reach. Removing them required steadying myself in positions that are only expected of skilled modern dancers. A fourth one died before I could remove it. My body pushed that one out little by little for several days, the way it would heal from a splinter.

For several nights following, I had nightmares involving frantic searches for elusive tweezers and an impending sense of doom. On the bright side, I had more than one kindly friend tell me that if in the future I ever needed help pulling a worm out of my ass, they would be there for me. Aw, shucks, thanks guys! (It goes without saying, but if maggots ever burrow into your skin, I’d be happy to share my newfound expertise.)

I have now been bug-free for several weeks. On my final visit to the dermatologist’s office to get my stitches removed, the doctor’s assistant asked jokingly, ‘So when are you going back to Peru?’ My answer: “Next year hopefully!” In the meantime, I will be enjoying my bug-free legs here at home.

(I hope you enjoyed the stories...)

The good news is, you don’t have any worms…

cbracco — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:03:00 GMT

...the bad news is, this is still going to hurt. When you hear these words from a Peruvian doctor you know things aren’t exactly going according to plan.

I arrived in Cusco last Friday, travelling with my friend Meredith, who I met at the research station in the Amazon. We nearly missed our flight from Puerto Maldonado because there was a power outage at the Laundromat where we left all of our clothes. A half hour before we needed to leave for our flight, I was standing in front of the closed shop door dressed in a tank top and shorts. All of my other clothing was inside the shop. Meredith’s plan was to find someone at the surrounding stores who knew where the owner lived and rent a motorcycle in order to show up at the owner’s front door and demand the return of our clothing. It turns out that the motorcycle wasn’t necessary as the owner lived a few doors down. We were in Cusco by that afternoon, with all of our clothing.

My original plan was to relax and shop for a few days in Cusco and then either head to the countryside near Cusco to do some painting or head north to do some rock climbing near Lima. Cusco is a beautiful colonial city that most people use as a starting point for hiking to Machu Picchu. Since I had been to Cusco years ago, I wasn’t feeling pressured to see all the touristy sights. I was content to be in a place with good food, amazing scenery, hotels with hot water and not a mosquito in sight. Meredith and I spent leisurely days in internet cafes, browsing markets and frequenting the touristy salsa club at night.

After a few days in Cusco, I was mildly concerned that some of my bug bites from the Jungle were not healing but I was told that it takes about two weeks for some bites to heal so I was watching and waiting. By the fourth day, I knew I had a problem as some bites were getting worse instead of better. One of them was causing an occasional and severe burning pain in my leg which meant it was infected and I needed to take antibiotics. Apparently, infections can happen really easily in the jungle because the severe humidity doesn’t allow minor wounds to heal. A couple of weeks earlier, I had gotten a splinter in my leg and had the same painful reaction so I took Penicillian until it healed. This time though, the Penicillian wasn’t working and after another day of random shooting pains, it was time to call the doctor. The doctor switched me to a better antibiotic, but not before some unpleasant probing of my wounds during which I almost kicked him.

In addition to the infections in my leg, I managed to come down with a cold or flu. My solution to this problem was to check myself into the cutest little hostal that I could find. Rather than painting, hiking or rock climbing, I’ve spent the last few days lying about in bed, napping, reading and eating yummy foods (like cooked bananas covered in chocolate and ice cream, yay!) I feel thoroughly pampered. If it wasn’t for the all gross stuff oozing out of my body, I would feel pretty great right about now.

I have one more day to pamper myself lounging about in Cusco before I head to Lima and then onto New York. (And yes mom, I plan to see a doctor immediately when I get home.)

Gallery: Amazon

cbracco — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:40:00 GMT

Goodbye Amazon!

cbracco — Thu, 5 Mar 2009 00:56:00 GMT

Today I left the research station and returned to Puerto Maldonado. By the time I had left the research station, life had evolved into a fairly regular routine. We awoke each morning at 6 for breakfast before the researchers headed out to the field. After breakfast I would shower, sweep my cabin and head out for the morning’s activity. I would either try to paint or get a hike in before lunch depending on the weather and my mood. I would be back at the dining hall for lunch at noon and then continue to work, read or rest until dinner at 6:30 when the researchers would be back from the field. Meals usually ended with some negotiating to find someone to finish your plate as we felt too guilty to return to the kitchen with uneaten food given how hard the cooks work and how difficult it is to bring food up to the station. After dinner, if I wasn’t painting or taking photos for my night series I would sit with the researchers in the laboratory writing out tags for their plants or we would play cards or watch a movie in the library. Towards the end of my stay, I was doing more hiking and socializing than working. I had done a bit of satisfying work and no longer wanted to battle the downpours and mosquitos.

Two of my last hikes were really memorable. One was a hike out to Cocho Lobo, a lake at the end of a swampy trail. Meredith, the assistant to the science director, and I were in search of the “lobos”, a type of giant river otter that is probably as large as we are. After an hour’s hike, we got to the lake and climbed into the paddle boats. We paddled to the middle of the river and saw them almost immediately, the tops of their heads cutting through the water. The made a loud racket that I can’t even describe, it was unlike any other sound that I had heard before. Although we were afraid of scaring off the lobos , it turns out that they were pretty curious about us. They came closer, raising themselves up a bit to get a good look at us and making their crazy sounds. For a second, I was afraid they were going to come too close and envisioned us having to play “whack-a-lobo” with our paddles, but they kept a respectable distance and then swam on. On the way back to the station, we stopped to chat with the researchers working off-trail near by. We briefly got turned around trying to find the trail back to the station and had to call out to one of the researchers to come help us. Although we were only a few feet from the trail, it reminded me how easily you can get completely disoriented in the forest.

The second hike was up to an observation tower to watch the sunset. The tower is near an old, unused airstrip. It is 60 meters high which I think is about 18 stories. We needed to use a harness and clip into a rope before climbing up the ladder. The climb was pretty tough, mostly because its so long that you get bored and tired halfway up. But the view was worth the effort. At the top, we were high above the canopy and we could see the Andies in the distance. I’m not sure how far away the Andies are but its an impressive sight. The jungle seems to go on forever and then faintly in the distance in front of the setting sun you can see the snow capped mountains. While we were up there, we were able to see the macaws flying. They are brightly colored blue and red birds that are hard to see at other times of the day. We also saw a tree fall which was impressive. We first heard a cracking sound and then saw the tree collapse taking with it a good chunk of the canopy. While we can hear these in the forest, seeing one is quite rare.

My last day was a mix of all the typical elements of this trip. I started the day by getting horribly stung by an ant that was trapped in my pants. The phrase “ants in your pants” will never be funny to me again. This ant had a sting like a bee or wasp sting. By lunchtime, a ferocious downpour had turned most of the area around the camp into a lake. All of the trails turned into rivers and the inside of our cabins were soaked. By late afternoon, the rain had stopped and the rivers became trails again. After dinner we had one last party with music and dancing in one of the cabins before trying to catch a few hours sleep for the next day.

For the majority of my three weeks at CICRA, the same 20 staff and researchers were in attendance, although we did have a brief visit from two journalists. (They happened to be from Brooklyn and live less than two miles from my apartment.) For the last three days we had 30 additional people from a university course visiting CICRA. They were leaving on the same day as me and some of the researchers so we were making the trip down the river together. We had to rise at 4am to get the boats loaded by 5:30am. The remaining researchers woke up early to help carry the luggage down the 250 stairs to the boat launch and see us off. Once we were gone, there would only be four lonely researchers left at the station and a couple of staff. We headed down river in a mist so strong that it was hard to see the banks of the river. As there weren’t enough seats, I was sleeping on the wet floor of the boat when our boat got snagged on something in the river and lost its motor into the water. Luckily we were travelling with the other two boats and were not stranded. We were towed to the banks of the river and waited as the crew installed a spare motor. Within a half hour we were travelling again. When we arrived in Laborinto, we took taxis to Puerto Maldonado. Here I have been able to drop off my laundry, buy plane tickets to Cusco for tomorrow, take a hot shower, have my own bathroom and even relax in the swimming pool. I already miss the people from the station but not the bugs or the permanent humidity dampening all of my belongings.

I am happy to finally be bug-free!

After a week...

cbracco — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:17:00 GMT

My stay in the Amazon is halfway over. There are some things that I will not miss when I leave here. I will not miss cold showers or only having one location in the entire station where I can get drinking water. I will not miss the beaurocratic snafu that left us eating nothing but potatoes, rice and quinoa for a few days. (Someone in an office somewhere decided that with less people at the station during the rainy season, the weekly boat wasn’t necessary. They failed to account for the fact that food as well as people arrived on the weekly boat.) Just as we were making jokes about starving slowly and surviving on Benedryl alone, someone finally took a boat down the river to pick up some meat and vegetables. We had a stirfry today for lunch that we praised as the best meal ever. The cooks even managed to make chocolate pudding for desert. Or at least I think it was chocolate pudding. After days of rice and potatoes, just about anything can pass for dessert.

But mostly I will not miss the insects and the constant itching. After an initial resiliency, the bugs have worn me down. Not a moment goes by when there is not something crawling on me, near me or threatens to crawl on me soon. There are things crawling on me right now as I write. I probably have about 300 or so bug bites. I tried to count once but after reaching 20 on one elbow alone, I gave up. In addition to mosquitos, there are chiggers that get into elastic on your clothing, sandflies and ants. There are roaches that don’t crawl on you but for some reason I keep almost sitting on them. The ants are the worst. I made the mistake of stepping onto a stream of ants while wearing sandals one day and I felt like I was being attacked with acid filled darts, which is kind of what they are. I ran gritting my teeth back to the cabin for boots. There is an ant here that is so large its almost the size of my thumb, its called a bullet ant.

After heavy rain, the ants are on the move in large networked streams that resemble urban traffic. Occasionally my cabin is in the way of these superhighways. Today was one of these days. I returned to my cabin after lunch to take a nap only to see what appeared to be a black tar running from the corners of my cabin criss-crossing the floor. No, not tar but ants. They run so fast it looks like dripping liquid flowing down the door frame. I considered sleeping through their hostile takeover since the bed was still clear but I was afraid to wake up in a swarm. Instead, I tried sweeping. No luck, ants find their way about by sensing the trail. After being scattered, it took less than 30 seconds for them to regain their little lines. Next I tried insect repellent on the worst areas. This worked well but threatened to just move the ants a few feet away. So starting at the center of the room and spraying outwards to the walls, I was able to convince them that my cabin was not the best hub for their travels. They were mostly gone in less than 10 minutes which is amazing to me given how thoroughly they had taken over.

Painting has been going well for the past few days. I decided that if I was going to get work done, I would have to stop stalking the monkeys and get to work. That’s really hard to do, the monkeys are really cute. I’ve mostly been painting around the station since hiking into the field is a lot of work and once I get to a nice view its invariably buggy. I decided that my last few days here, I will reserve for hiking while the paintings dry. There are a few trails here, one called Trocha 14, that are almost other worldly. The tree trunks are wider than my arms outstretched. The colors are a vivid intensity of dense greens and yellow-greens that seems to defy logic since very little light actually reaches the forest floor. Half the route is swamped with water requiring the use of knee high rubber boots. Even these are no match for some parts of the trail where the mud threatens to steal the boot while I walk on by. Adding to the Alice in Wonderland effect, I find myself constantly falling into holes, not rabbit holes but typically ant-eater holes. This usually means that I am sunk up to one knee, hurriedly trying to remove my leg before the creature that created the hole figures out that I just kicked in his front door.

Today the station is quiet. It is Carnival, which means that most folks took the boat to Boca Amigos, a nearby town, for festivities. Town might be a bit of an overstatement. I think there are 30 people who live there. They are essentially a boat-stop along the river. They have a telephone, a nurse, a bar and a place to buy food. At one time, it may have been possible to walk to Boca Amigos. In other words, we were on the same side of the river. But the river is wild and chooses its path according to its needs and not the needs of people. The river is surrounded by half-moon shaped lakes. Lakes that were once part of the river until the river began to flow via a different route. And when I say, “were once part of the river”, I mean that the path of the river changes monthly, possibly daily. Boca Amigos was once on our side of the river, but then the river changed paths. Now the town is across the river from us. Even that spot is precarious for them. People living closest to the river occasionally have to pull down their house and re-build at the back of the town as the river carves its way further into the land. Property rights is not a concept that works well in this type of situation.

The entire jungle is a process of constant change and adaption. One night, I awoke to a tremendous cracking sound which scared me frozen in bed. Being the New Yorker that I am I could only imagine that it was gunshots, that a gold miner was out hunting bushmeat and that I would be leveled by a stray bullet. I suddenly wished that instead of mosquito net walls, that I had a nice comfy deadbolt lock. (I considered hiding under the bed, but there are cockroaches under there.) After waking up a bit more, I realized that the sound was a tree falling. You come across tree fall frequently in the field. The trees are tremendous, stories and stories high. When they fall, they take out a huge chunk of the surrounding foliage, creating the few clearings in the otherwise dense canopy. The clearing is an opportunity for struggling plants to receive some precious sunlight and grow up tall. And so it begins again.

I have ants on me.

Welcome to the Jungle!

cbracco — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:00:00 GMT

Buenos Dias from the Amazon! I am staying in CICRA, a research station on the Los Amigos river in Peru. To get here I took several flights to arrive at Puerto Maldonado in southern Peru . Then I took a taxi to Laborinto an hour drive up the river. There I met up with a couple of researchers also catching the boat to CICRA. The ride was five hours in a large motorized canoe with a wooded canopy. Directly to the north of us is a preserved area for uncontacted indigenous people. To the south are gold miners living in huts along the river, mostly new to the area and from the Andes.

The station itself consists of a clearing with several wooden huts and main buildings for the dining hall, library and laboratories. I have a small wooden cabin with a thatched roof without water or electricity. I need to use candles at night and the bathroom is in another building down the path. I found the first couple of days that the cabin was too dark to paint in when it was cloudy so I took over another cabin to be my art studio. The studio has electricity and overlooks the river. In addition to the studio space, I have a desk in the library for using my computer.

There are about 20 people at the station, mostly visiting researchers and station staff. Two are American and some of the Peruvians speak enough English for me to get by with my rusty Spanish. Luckily, one of the Americans is someone working here during her first year out of college. She has been super helpful and a huge source of advice. Very comforting. After being here for a couple of days, the station feels less remote. I researcher told me that there is another station three days boat ride up the river where large cats sun themselves on the shores of the river and the forest is dense with monkeys. He said I should go there next time. (Next time?!) We eat communal meals and luckily for me most of the food is Andean, meaning rice, meat and potatoes, very little flour to avoid.

There are animals everywhere. I wake up in the morning to the sound of monkeys playing around my cabin. Around the station and out in the field, I see monkeys, wild boars, lizards, butterflies, and animals that have names I cant remember or pronounce. There are also insects everywhere. After the second day I had so many bug bites that I’m just not that aware of them anymore!

Today was partly cloudy but it rained for the past two days almost non-stop. Before it starts to rain, you can hear the downpour coming from a distance. It sounds like a roar as it hits the trees. During those days, I spent some time hiking and an afternoon working in the field with a few researchers. They are working on a project that tracks whether plants survive best far from the parent plant. We had to tag trees, mark their location and measure their height and diameter. It is slow going and pretty punishing work in a downpour.

Now that the rain as stopped, I’ve been able to do a little bit more painting outdoors (YAY!) Its been a challenge to work without full supplies and trying to outwit the quickly changing weather. But I’ve done a couple of small paintings that I enjoyed. Hopefully the next two weeks will be equally productive!

I feel so lucky to be here!