I wonder
exactly when the jungle became the rainforest. George of the Rainforest just doesn’t sound right. Nor does “It’s a rainforest out there.” But it’s not so bad to stay in a "rainforest" lodge and that’s why we, and so many others, go to Iquitos. Our decision to fly to Iquitos
from Pucallpa was actually a no-brainer.
When we compared the $95 airfare to a five-day river voyage with bad
food, heat and mosquitoes it was no contest.
Once in
Iquitos you have many options; cruise or lodge, upriver or down, luxury or
budget, 3 days to a full week. And
if you can’t make up your mind there are countless guides, would be guides and
street touts waiting to help you. We selected
Muyuna Lodge, 140 km upriver from Iquitos on the Yanayacu River. It was far enough from Iquitos that
there was still primary forest and we could customize our activities to focus
on birding. The cost for 5 days
with a dedicated bird guide was more than we wanted to pay but in retrospect it
was worth every penny. We boarded
the speedboat around 9:30 and were at the lodge in time for lunch. The first thing we learned was that the
food would be good, plentiful and varied.
Second was that our room was quite comfortable. Most important, we had our own boat and
guide. Moises really knows the birds of the Amazon and by evening we had seen
20 new species.
Wednesday morning we were out before six for
some early birding by boat. After
breakfast we went out again until lunch.
One to three is siesta time for the birds and guests alike and the
hammocks got a workout. Then we went
out again until dark around five. There is much more than birds to see. Both gray and pink Amazon River dolphins are common in the river, giant lily pads in the lakes and there are 11 species of monkeys. And sloths, the 3-toed kind. Other guests visited local villages, fished for piranhas and learned about medicinal plants.
It required
different tactics to see our target bird, the wattled-curassow. We left at 5:30 in the foggy pre-dawn towing a canoe. We picked up Rene and his dugout canoe
at the next village. He and Moises
teamed up to draw attention to the plight of the nearly extinct
wattled-curassow and convinced the villagers not to kill and eat them. Rene usually works with Carla, a
Peruvian ornithologist, who is in town on a resupply mission so he was free to
guide us. In the dry
season our route would have been a hiking trail but we needed canoes in today’s
high water to weave among the trees.
Moises and Rene paddled from the bows, alternating between using
ace-of-spades shaped paddles and razor sharp machetes. Our dugout was smaller and squeeze
through places where Connie and Moises got stuck.
It was too
dark to take many photos in the forest and the canoe wasn’t very stable so we
just sat back and enjoyed the forest for the three hours it took to reach ‘terra
firma’ where the birds live. When
Rene finally heard them we changed boats for boots and stalked them Indian
style. We spooked a couple from
their perches high in the trees before Moises spotted a female sitting on a
branch staring back at us. Connie
did a great job of enhancing my photos shot at maximum aperture and ISO
1250. It was a long and sweaty
morning but worth the effort. Back
at the lodge everyone – guests, guides, and kitchen staff – stopped by to look
at our photos as Connie took advantage of the electricity to download and edit
them. The highlight was the
wattled-curassow, which many had never seen before.
