Eating dirt
Manu: Geophagy, it’s called, the practice of eating dirt. Turns out that ‘eating dirt’ is not a metaphor for humiliation (or not just) but a proper thing to do with a nice technical name to boot. In fact, people have been eating clay, chalk and mud for millennia around the world to neutralise food toxins, aid digestion (think: Pepto-Bismol and kaolin) and supplement nutrients during pregnancy.
Local Peruvian women
and a man with his headgear
In fact, hats are something of a speciality in the Peruvian Andes
Animals too, eat dirt, as the Ancient Greek philosopher Galen reported in the second century. Everything from butterflies to birds, monkeys to elephants congregate at specific sites to munch on the earth, getting valuable minerals including calcium and sodium.
Woman in the market, from the front...
...and back
For wildlife lovers, these sites represent a great opportunity to view the visiting fauna – and Manu, the most biologically intact and undisturbed part of the Amazon rainforest, has a few clay licks we’re eager to see. Animals from bush dogs to peccaries and frogs have been observed using the licks here.
Guinea pigs for sale
but not as pets...
We set off from Cusco on a road that’s narrow and precipitous enough to put Bolivia’s World’s Most Dangerous Road to shame. It rises to a high mountain pass and then descends in an endless series of switchbacks through alpine grasslands and then into the delightfully named ‘elfin forest’ (disappointing lack of elves). The forest is so-named for its strangely gnarled, twisted and stunted trees, which are actually centuries-old and enrobed in dripping epiphytes in every shade of green – very fairytale landscape despite absence of the little folk.
We pass a large pre-Columbian burial site
It is thought to belong to the Tiwanaku people who lived here in 200 AD
Researchers have constructed vast nets here to entrap bats for study, but which also hinder our progress, so we return from the forest back to the road and continue our descent. Acjanaco, at 3500 metres above sea level, is continually in cloud, damp, cool, yet full of vibrant pink and red fuchsias that attract hummingbirds.
The village of Paucartambo has sculptures showing the local dances
It's the last colonial village before the jungle starts
Bridge over a river in the cloud forest
Looking across the Madre de Dios at Manu
It is also the entrance to Manu national park, a protected area since 1973 (ancient for Peru) and home to a dazzling biodiversity, including at least 1800 different bird species (more than any other protected area on Earth – there are only about 10,000 bird species worldwide), 13 primate species, 400 ant species and various indigenous human tribes, including 100s of ‘uncontacted’ people, who choose to live a hunter-gatherer existence without the cultural and disease-carrying influence of more recent forest colonisers. (In 1984, large numbers of the Yora tribe died of flu after contact with gold miners.)
Slipper orchids
Ferns
Waterfalls, mosses, lichens and a plethora of orchids bring us into cloud forest, which here is home to a ‘lek’ (regular bird gathering) of Peru’s national bird, the bizarre, charismatic cock-of-the-rock, or tunqui, a bright amber bird whose eyes seem to be planted halfway up its neck, giving it the appearance of being more brainless than other birds. They dance impressively for us – well, actually, for the females; it’s mating season – and call out with an ugly chicken-like noise.
Cock-of-the-Rock
Peru's national bird is a charismatic fellow with a head-bobbing dance
Before long, we have reached the heat, humidity and intense green foliage of the rainforest proper. The trouble with travelling through rainforests is that it involves leaving the world we have so perfectly ordered around we nice clean humans. We become, on entering a rainforest, just another ill-prepared piece of flesh wandering around for anything to take bites out of, inhabit or incubate their eggs in. We are soon bitten to swollen lumps by mosquitoes, blackfly, sandflies, horseflies… Malaria is not a big problem here, but botfly, leishmaniasis and other troubles too horrible to go into are. We spray DEET with the thoroughness of a 17-year-old boy with aftershave on a first date, but still they bite us.
The violet-eared hummingbird
Booted racket-tail hummingbird
Almost impossible to catch them in flight
but Nick perseveres
We are in the Amazon river basin now, beyond the Andes (home to the Incan-dubbed ‘Antis’ people, who lived in the ‘Antisyo’ (jungle)) and protected here in the 1970s by the son of Polish zoologist, Jan Kalinowski, who in the late-1800s escaped imprisonment in Russia (where he was sent for the suspicious spy-like behaviour of creeping around the Russian wilderness while recording animal behaviour) by acquiring for the Russian Tzar the fantastic prize of a giant (dead and stuffed) Siberian polar bear. On achieving his freedom, Kalinowski wisely fled to Peru, married a Cusqueña and sired 18 children, one of whom created the Manu protected reserve.
Turtles line the riverbank
Capuchin monkey
Now, thanks to the policies of incumbent president Alan Garcia, roughly 70% of the country’s portion of the Amazon is given over to oil concessions, there are 17 planned hydrodams (70 are planned for the Amazon as a whole) and the nearly completed Interoceanic Highway linking the Atlantic to the Pacific via Brazil and Peru threatens the area further, passing through two of the largest protected areas. Last June, a clash between protesters and police in Bagua over Garcia’s suspension of the forest and wildlife law, enabling oil company access to the Amazon, killed more than 30 and left hundreds injured. A few weeks ago, a British missionary, Paul McCauley, working with Amazonian people was expelled from the country for helping indigenous people to stand up to oil incursions.
Salvador Lake at dawn
We find a group of playful giant otter youngsters
The last couple of decades have seen an escalating boon in ‘illegal’ gold mining in the area – indeed, the lower Madre de Dios river (which flows into Boliviar, becoming the Beni river, and then into Brazil, where it joins the Amazon river) is now a cacophony of mining activity, growing slum camps with malaria, prostitution and HIV, and a notable absence of wildlife. Around 40,000 tons of mercury is poured into this river annually as impoverished 12-hour-a-day workers process the earth for gold (the workers keep 25%).
Beautiful scarlet macaws
They gather in the bamboo above the clay lick
The future does not look well for this incredible forest, its people and animals. “This is one of the very few parts of the Amazon that was protected before it was impacted by hunting and logging – it’s one of the last places that you can see mahogany trees standing tall. The area from the cloud forest down is pristine and it’s still fantastic for bird watching, in a way that, say, England isn’t,” says British-born ornithologist Barry Walker of the Manu Wildlife Centre, who’s lived in the area and studied its birds for more than 20 years. “The Hunt Oil, Houston, concession is a serious threat.” Hunt Oil are exploring for oil and gas at the edge of the park.
They eat the clay for its minerals to aid digestion
Flyby
Walker, who graduated from a Manchester childhood spent collecting birds’ eggs to full-on twitcherhood, describes arriving in Peru for the first time in the late 1970s, where he fell head-over-heals for the Amazon and its abundant birdlife. “Many species were completely unknown, it was so little-studied,” he says. “The habit of early ornithology was simply to shoot a bird, take it back to the city and give it a name. So no one knew whether the bird lived on the ground or in trees, what its call was or mating behaviour. It was hugely exciting.”
He joined celebrated Amazon ornithologist Ted Parker, of Louisiana University, in birding trips into the forest where they spent years recording birdsong on an analogue tape-recorder, tracking its singer and taking notes of the bird for later identification in the Lima museum of stuffed birds. Together, they recorded hundreds of birdsongs and described unknown behaviours of more.
An old covered boat - the meandering river changed its course leaving it high and dry
It was researchers at Manu Wildlife Centre who first made detailed reports of tapirs using the clay licks, as well as the first reported sightings of black spider monkeys eating clay. Now, researchers are discovering geophagy in more and more primates, indeed it may be that it is the rule rather than the exception to eat dirt.
Bolivian howler monkeys eating clay at the river bank
We head down river from the upper Rio Madre de Dios to the greater Manu river in a canoe that requires heaving over the riverbed every now and again due to the low water level. Along the way, we spy cormorants, colourful yellow ‘oro pendula’ birds that weave hanging nests, turtles and herons. We overnight in a series of forest lodges and the Manu park’s only tented site (owned by Walker) and rise early to visit a high bank of clay visited by hundreds of squawking macaws and parrots. It’s an impressive sight: a blast of colour and sound, with my favourite being the scarlet macaws. These monogamous birds arrive in pairs or in threes (son or daughter in tow) to the lick, where they hang on to the wall and seem to manage to eat and shout at the same time.
The roots of a huge strangler fig
It’s an important social and mating spot for the birds – those chaperoned youngsters will likely find a partner for life at the clay wall, and this is breeding season.
The woolly monkey, one of 13 primate species at Manu
Downstream from the Manu river, we surprise a group of orang utan-coloured Bolivian howler monkeys, lounging on the bank, eating the clay with audible scoffing. This is the peak season for clay-eating, Barry explains, because in mid-winter (well into the dry season), tasty, easily digestible fruits and berries are hard to find. The animals are forced to eat more of the toxin-loaded leaves and fibrous fruits that are hard to digest. Clay minerals seem to help that process. In birds, the grit may provide extra help in the gizzard; in mammals, it’s likely that the minerals and alkaloids help make the plant nutrients more bioavailable.
Nick waits in the too-comfy hide
The biggest treat is reserved for the Manu Wildlife Centre, though, where there is a mammals clay lick. The lick is most active at night, which means leaving the comfort of the lodge for an hour-long trek into the forest to a specially built hide. It is perfectly located just metres from the clay lick and as night falls, we make ourselves comfortable. Only problem is it’s a little too comfy. Barry has placed mattresses and pillows under the mosquito nets and it’s not long before there’s a loud, tapir-scaring snoring from our designated photographer. I nudge Nick awake, and we try to concentrate on singling out tapir noises from the sirens of cicadas, rumble and croaks of frogs, swishing of bats and, I’m sure, roaring of nearby jaguars.
Two tapirs visit the lick! Both wading knee-deep in clay
Taking a big mouthful of clay
Eating mud is a mucky business
Eventually, there’s a rustle in the forest and in the thin torchlight we see not one, but two tapirs – a mother and baby. They chomp away at the clay for perhaps 20 minutes, twitching their noses and huffeting around like hippos. It’s magical, and when they eventually leave, we stay another couple of hours hoping for a revisit.
Dinner plate sized whip-tail scorpion we encounter by torchlight
Walking back in the blackness, trying to avoid sci-fi movie calibre beasties and not step on bullet ants, army ants, scorpions, etc, we marvel at our sighting. Tapirs, the South American indigenous horse, travel miles to visit a clay lick. Will they still come if the area is invaded by oil companies and those who follow the new Interoceanic road, such as loggers, animal poachers and hunters? In Brazil, a 50-metre-wide halo of deforestation follows roads into the Amazon, according to 2008 research.
Puerto Maldonado (and Nick)
The majority of vehicles are rickshaws, but that'll change when the Interoceanic Highway is completed
Slash and burn soot fills the air around Puerto Maldonado
It takes us most of the day to get from the pristine jungle to the frontier town of Puerto Maldonado, a dusty outpost peopled with staggering drunks (from 8am, although they are of the friendly rather than aggressive variety) and strip clubs, hardware stores and delicious ice cream shops.
Boatmen ferry passengers across the river, but a new bridge is being built to link Brazil and Peru
Working on the bridge
Nick takes an instant dislike to the place, but we find a decent laundry for our filthy rags and I spot two small frogs sharing the overflow drain slot of our hostel sink, so all’s good.
A frog in my sink
Sunken gardens
Cusco: It might not look like much, but this unique earthwork is perhaps South America’s most important scientific experiment. The Andean civilisations may owe their existence to four sculpted depressions in the land, about an hour’s drive from Cusco.
Part of the site. The horseshoe section is an Incan addition
Called the Moray, these regularly terraced areas, which descend in concentric circles of carefully built stonework, are agricultural breeding and test laboratories. They were built more than a millennium ago by people who took advantage of natural dips in the landscape here to experiment with different temperature and altitude conditions.
One of the sites. The stones were used to create further differences in the ecosystem
The temperature difference between the bottom-most level and the top can be as much as 15C degrees – about the difference between the average yearly temperatures of London and Mumbai. It allowed farmers to try growing plants in different conditions, so that Amazonian crops strains adapted to altiplano conditions could be produced at the site, which is around 3500 metres up.
That's me, walking through the bottom level. In the summer, the whole system is green.
Complex irrigation systems supply water to the site, and the rocks beneath the soil are full of holes and tunnels that allow water to drain quickly, preventing the lower levels from flooding.
Irrigation systems supply water to each level
It is thought that it was work at the Moray that led to the transformation of maize into a high-altitude crop, which was key for the great Andean civilisations of the Tiwanaku and Incas. Other crops such as potatoes or quinoa could not have sustained large populations without Andean maize.
The vast circles descend more than 150 metres
The Incas added to the project, building further horseshoe terracing higher up. It is thought that they used the Moray to develop coca species that grow higher up and in colder conditions, to give themselves ‘coca security’ at a time when their precious commodity was controlled by Amazonian enemy tribes. Experimentation like this helped people to adapt to changing climatic conditions from El Niño to droughts.
There are no signposts at the site, so many visitors think it was an amphitheatre
Locals refer to the Moray as ‘the greenhouses’ and its influence is felt in the complex crop-rotation system still practiced in the area. Meanwhile, one of the Morays is still being planted by university students as a kind of living laboratory.
Experimental planting is still carried out at the site
Tomorrow, we leave Cusco to travel into the Amazon rainforest around Manu to meet researchers looking at clay licks and enjoy being at low altitude in the jungle. Now, where’s the mosquito repellent…?
I met a very fluffy baby donkey
To Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu: Some 500 years after the Incas walked this route, we set off from Cusco to the ‘lost city’ of Machu Picchu, a five-day journey that differs from its predecessor in a couple of important respects: we are far less physically fit than our Incan counterparts, and we’ve splashed out on a few luxuries, including tents, sleeping bags, insect repellent and, instead of llamas to carry our burden, pack horses (animals that the Amerindians wouldn’t discover until their European conquerers arrived).
Setting off
A group of horses passes by
We drive a short distance – the Incas knew about the wheel but only used it for children’s toys, perhaps, archeologists speculate, because the large boulders they needed to move could not be supported on axle constructions and had to be rolled – and then, where the road peters out, we begin the slow march into the Cordillera Vilcanota. The day is warm and bright, hot air rises on the hum of insects from the valley below and, ahead, the sharp white peak of Salkantay cuts the sapphire sky.
Mountains ahead
Salkantay peak rising over 6000 metres
We set off in good spirits, sharing our Cuscqueño guide Edwin with a lovely young Canadian couple who are fortunately as unfit as we are. The way climbs only gently at first and it isn’t long before we are stopping for lunch in a stream-crossed valley, congratulating ourselves on our hardy trekking achievement.
Preparing lunch
The valley is crisscrossed with streams
After lunch, it’s a different story. The path winds steeply upwards towards the 4700-metre-high Salkantay pass. To one side, the white peak of Salkantay (meaning ‘The Savage Mountain’ in Quechua) soars in a wall of ice and snow, 6271 metres up. To the other, the dusty rock mountain begins to conceal the sinking sun. We’ve rented walking poles for the first time and I stab ahead at the hard rock, gasping in the thinning air, feeling like a cross between my grandmother and a wildly flailing spider – not, as I’d hoped, a super-efficient German alpine trekker.
A glacier
Clouds descend
Me with our Canadian friends, Nick and Ariel, and our guide Edwin
We start to moan. Everyone has something troubling them, from knees to feet, to legs to stomachs. By the time we reach our camp for the night, at a freezing cold 4400 metres, we’re a sorry bunch of unprepared lowlanders whinging away amid the most stunning scenery. The Incas could make our five-day trek in two – less, for the trained messenger runners, who could run in relays from the empire’s northern city of Quito to the capital Cusco in a couple of weeks.
Nick struggles to smile (or is he squeezing one out?)
Into the mountains
Night falls and the stars light the cloudless sky, uncluttered by urban lighting. The Incan gods lived in the heavens, but their star signs were made from the shadows – the patterns of dark spaces between the stars – rather than by joining up the stars as we do. In that way, giant celestial llamas, jaguars and pumas can be seen.
Our chilly home
Peaks at dawn
Next day, we climb slowly to the pass, standing between glaciers – or what remains of them after global warming has shrunk their whiteness. Edwin tells me that 10 years ago, all the mountains we stand among were white, and that the river ran far stronger and fuller. In 1998, a huge chunk of the Salkantay glacier collapsed causing glacial outwash floods that killed dozens, washed away hundreds of homes and shutdown the hydroelectric station further down. The Salkantay glacier is retreating at a rate of 1.02 km per year, with a third of it gone since 2003.
Glacial remains
Looking down on the clouds
Reaching the pass
From the pass, we descend through high alpine desert to the tree-line and then, in spectacular fashion, into one of the world’s last remaining cloud forests, all in a matter of hours. Here, there is little distinction between the ground and air: life hangs off other life, trees trailing orchids and ferns, fungi and mosses living off the moisture in the air. Hummingbirds flit from flower to flower – there are more than 100 different species in Peru alone – and lizards scurry noisily away from their invisible sunbathing spots.
The rocks are full of minerals
Into the cloud forest
Bromeliads and ferns attach to anything
I toss away my poles and immediately regret it as my knee gives way. I retrieve them, hobbling down the vertical slopes in such a shabby state that I have to sit on one of the horses for the final stretch to our camp. Perched on a grassy ledge halfway up a steep canyon, this spot too is incredible. Above us and tessellating far into the distance are the hilltops and mountain peaks of the cordillera, below, the valley coalesces into a far away river, blue in its depth, white with shallow rapids and rusty in patches where hots springs emerge.
Bright passion flowers
Orchids are everywhere
A fern
Caterpillars cluster
Horses roll on their backs in the grass; chicks cheep around us, their wings ornamented with scraps of coloured plastic bags stapled there to identify them by their owners; and dogs chase the shadows of kites flown by small children. We swallow painkillers and rub potions into our aching muscles, outdoing each other with related injuries.
Mountains and valleys
Nick takes a break
At dawn, we set off for the lower valley, descending into humid rainforest of vines and hardwood. Waterfalls rush down the mountainside and the path becomes wetter and more precarious. Tree trunks are spread across places where the path vanishes due to landslides or erosion and we cross them carefully on wobbly legs. In time, we reach the river, where cows graze and crop plantations regularise the landscape.
Our horses cross the river
By a waterfall
This whole area was devastated in up to 40 landslides caused by heavy rains in January. Hundreds of acres of crops were destroyed in the floods, 3,000 people were left homeless when their houses were destroyed, more than 100 people died and thousands of tourists visiting Machu Picchu were stranded for days. Bodies are still being recovered from the rubble of rock and mud around the village of Santa Teresa, where we set up camp and visit the nearby hot springs. These thermal springs at the edge of the Santa Teresa river used to be a major tourist attraction, lined with gardens, cafés and shops. Now, there is a quarry pit filled with delightfully hot water, surrounded by construction machinery digging through the rubble. We soak our weary bones in the bath, grateful that few people are here.
How the hot springs used to look
Me in the hot springs with a digger behind
The next day, we sleep in til 8 and lazily take a colectivo bus to the hydroelectric train station a few kilometres away. This remarkable engineering feat, achieved in 1959 but rebuilt several times, takes water in 7-km-long pipes through the Machu Picchu mountain, where it passes through turbines deep within the mountain, and supplies much of south Peru’s electricity. Last year, the country’s president Alan Garcia announced expansion works on the plant to doubling its installed power to 200 MW, which worries conservationists, who fear that the geological works already undermine the landslide-prone mountain, risking the archaeological site. The new works will also destroy a lagoon there – glaciers used to reach this lagoon but have now retreated hundreds of metres higher.
Water exits the hydroelectric
One of many landslides
We meet a piggy
and a turkey
We walk for several kilometres along the railway line that follows the Urubamba River, rounding the Machu Picchu (‘Old Mountain’) mountain, but failing, as the Spanish did, to glimpse the famous ruins high above us.
The valley
Our first view of the Machu Picchu mountain
A train passes us
The Urubamba river rushes past
Crossing a bridge
By afternoon, we reach the bizarre touristic village of Aguas Calientes, dubbed GringoLandia for reasons that are immediately obvious. It is beautifully located in hills at the foot of Machu Picchu, but the entire village is made up of hotels, tourist restaurants and souvenir stalls. It’s about as artificial a construct as befits one of the continent’s premier tourist attractions – depressingly and expensively so. We hide in our hostel room and sleep.
First glimpse of Aguas Calientes
A train rides through the main street of Aguas Calientes
In the morning, we stump up for the bus fare (we no longer do ‘unnecessary’ walking) up the hill to our prize: Machu Picchu. Built on a saddle between two mountains, with a river running almost completely around it, this is the most beautifully situated human habitation I’ve seen. The morning mist rises from the Urumbamba river through the forested mountain sides, cloaking the surrounding peaks and valleys in ethereal mystery. The Incas liked to live close to their gods of sky and mountain – here they achieved their dream.
The mountains at dawn
View from Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu rises through the dawn mists
A site of some 200 painstakingly constructed polished-stone buildings, including residences, workshops, storehouses and religious buildings are separated from agricultural terraces that descend the mountainside to provide food and help shore up the precipitous slopes against erosion.
Houses - only their roofs have gone
Although some are roofed
The roofs were thatched and tied to stone fixings with llama gut
Water flows through the complex, channelling water to every house through a series of 16 fountains fed from a spring, located many metres above. Llamas browse the grasslands and tourists swarm the ruins like ants.
The first tour group arrives
It’s a complex, meticulously built city in an impossible location by people who essentially lived in the Bronze Age.
Inside a house
The Temple of the Sun
A viscacha (native rabbit) hides in the ruins
But this, the most perfectly preserved Incan site (the Spanish never discovered it), remains a tantalising enigma. We know that it was built sometime in the 1400s and that it was a planned ‘city’, because hydroengineers have examined the careful engineering that still supplies water so competently through the village and allows superbly efficient drainage, and that it was abandoned some 100 years later (although not why). With views across two valleys and access points through the Sun Gate (from the ‘Inca trail’ that leads to Cusco) and the Bridge, which leads to the Amazon, it was easy to defend and strategically located. But there is no reference to this site in the chronicles that describe other pre-Columbian sites, so was it important?
A main square links alleys and streets
A lawned area separates the royal and ordinary residences
The doorways to religious buildings have carved placings for precious stones and decoration
Scholars think so. Some suggest it was a royal residence built by the Inca Pachacuteq, others think it was an important coca growing estate – although coca cannot grow at this altitude, the Incas were agricultural masters and experimented with different techniques and varieties, so it is very possible that a variety existed in the 15th century that was grown here – or that it was an important trade centre between the Cusco-led empire and the Amazon jungle people, particularly in coca.
Agricultural terracing provided maize
Terracing also prevented erosion on the steep-sided site
Spring water was channelled throughout the complex, which is located hundreds of metres above the river
This is quite an interesting theory, because the Incas greatly feared the wild cannibalistic people of the Amazon, and yet we are discovering more and more examples of complex and advanced civilisations who lived in the Amazon. Indeed, it is thought that South American civilizations began not on the coast, but in the jungle, from where ideas and technologies spread to their more famous counterparts. Incan pottery and designs was most certainly influenced by older jungle civilisations. The Incas were never able to conquer these peoples despite many battles and attempts at diplomacy.
Machu Picchu is in a stunning location
Standing at the Sun Gate overlooking Machu Picchu
The Incan drawbridge could be raised (by removing the logs)
Another theory is that Machu Picchu was a ceremonial site of religious importance. There are several temples on the site and places of astronomical significance, including one built so that the winter solstice lines up perfectly with a central stone. And a religious stone that some think was used in ceremonies for ‘tying’ the sun to the earth. Perhaps the site is a combination of many of these.
At the solstice, the sun passes through the window of the Sun Temple and hits a specific point on the rock
Looking out from a house window
We know that fewer than 1000 people lived here, and that the agriculture they could have produced from these fields could not have sustained even this small population, so the site must have been important enough for them to import food. It wasn’t a lack of water that drove the inhabitants away – rainfall was significantly better at the time – but it may, indirectly, have been the Spanish. Epidemics of diseases like smallpox and measles killed half of the Incan population – perhaps the empire was too weak to sustain such an expensive site, or perhaps the Machu Picchans themselves succumbed.
View from the site at noon
Nick, a llama and Machu Picchu. The llama ancestor evolved in North America. Its descendants crossed the Bering Strait to Asia (camels), and travelled down to South America (guanacos and vicuñas). The proto-camel died out in N America. Llamas and Alpaca are domesticated camelids bred from the wild versions in Peru first.
Hundreds of skeletons were recovered from the site by its ‘discoverer’, the US historian Hiram Bingham, who explored the site from 1911 on a Yale research grant, including some with cranial deformation patterns that were common on the coast and elsewhere, suggesting people from throughout the empire moved through the village. Incidentally, cranial deformation is still practiced by some Amazonian tribes). He found two campesino families living at the site and took away artefacts for future study. Controversy reigns over the artefacts, but in 2007, Yale agreed to repatriate most to a special museum in Cusco.
Houses were two-storey, with the steep slopes enabling entrances for both floors at front and back
Through a doorway
Whatever the reason for its existence, Machu Picchu is one of our species most stunning achievements and we left for our train back to Cusco before I had finished soaking in its unique splendour. We have photos, but perhaps this is one of those places that only truly reveals its romance to the visitor who walks in from the mountains.
Worth the exhausting climb
Cusco, city of the Incas
Cusco: Q’osqo, in Quechua, the language of the Incas, means ‘the navel of the Earth’. Legend has it that the first Incas, Manco Capac and his sister-wife Mama Ocllo, were created by the Sun God on Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca, furnished with a gold rod and told to settle in the place where they could plunge the rod into the ground so that it disappeared (aka the Navel of the Earth).
Part of Cusco's Incan main temple
The stone blocks are so well formed that they fit invisibly into each other without the need for mortar and have survived several big earthquakes.
Spanish colonisers built their church on top of the main temple
That place turned out to be here, a mountainous location 3300 metres above sea level, between the Amazon forest and the Pacific Ocean. The city, in the heart of what is now known as the Sacred Valley, is a pretty mixture of low-rise quaint wood and stone terrace houses, elaborately carved colonial buildings and evidence everywhere of when the city was the capital of the Incan Empire.
The main plaza from above
Detail of the cathedral
Steep Cusco street
Fountain
This is the oldest continuously inhabited city on the continent. It wears its history well, the perfectly carved stones of superbly skilled Incan stonemasons merging with the modern steel and glass almost harmoniously.
Women still use the Incan water fountain
Colonial building on Incan foundations
Incredible Incan stonework
Perfect fit
We’ve arrived at the height of tourist season and the streets and squares are riddled with tour groups and crowds of sightseers, touts and souvenir stalls. It’s overwhelmingly crowded and there’s plenty of hard-sell, but it’s easy enough to get away from the throngs – most tourists don’t seem to venture more than a block beyond the main square, leaving the rest of the city nicely affordable and fool of delicious authentic food.
Paddington says Hi!
On the hill above the city
The throngs have come here, like we have, to visit the nearby abandoned ruins of Machu Picchu. Tomorrow, we begin a five-day hike up and over the mountain passes to the lost city. Photos when we return.
Church detail
Trying the enormous local drink
Crazy driver ahead of us, from our bus to Cusco
Flight of the condors
Colca Canyon: The world’s deepest canyon, surrounded by volcanic peaks higher than 6000 metres, plunges more than twice as deep as Arizona’s Grand Canyon, at 4160 metres.
Colca Canyon at dawn
We reach it from Arequipa, driving through the national park Salinas y Aguada Blanca, home to vicuñas, a golden haired, wild camelid whose fine wool (10-14 microns thick) was especially prized by the Incas. It is still precious: 1 kilo of vicuña fibre (which requires shearing 4 animals) goes for $700.
Golden vicuñas
Dry desert scrub lines our route, relieved by circular patterns of manmade grooves in the dry soil – an attempt at reforesting the area that failed under a change of government not committed to the irrigation costs. There is no agriculture in this area; villagers trade llama meat and wool for vegetables in a moneyless bartering system that goes back centuries. The tough sprouting altiplano grass, the same we’ve seen in Chile and Bolivia, is a variety that only grows above 3800 metres and I use it to gauge our altitude.
The fertile valley
In time, we descend to the warmer zone flanking the mighty Colca Canyon. Its sides are ribbed with pre-Incan agricultural terracing dating back 2400 years, nearly half of which is still used. In Incan times, following a happy 400-year period of global warming that saw nearly 300 metres of new arable land become available as the mountains’ snow and ice-caps receded (producing useful meltwater for irrigation), this valley supported some 2 million people. Now, with global warming so advanced that the glaciers here have almost entirely disappeared, shrinking lakes and rivers, just 140,000 people remain. What water supports them comes almost entirely from springs within this seismically active zone and agriculture is confined once more to the more moist lower valley.
Terracing in the valley
In the 1980s, a consortium of 5 countries, including the UK, Canada an France, helped build a remarkable aqueduct that pipes water from the Colca River more than 60 kilometres through the mountains to Maca, a desert valley whose dry lands were transformed to dairy pasture to help support the people of Arequipa.
This is what's left of the snow and ice cap
Above us looms the volcano mountain Mismi, the Peruvian source of the world’s greatest river, the Amazon. In its 7069 kilometre journey to the Brazilian Atlantic coast, the Amazon passes through seven countries, reaching an ultimate width of 50 kilometres. But that is for another adventure – we will join the river further north in a few weeks time.
Wind erosion leaves these witches' hats
The people of the Colca Valley maintain many traditional ways lost to those who migrate to the cities. There are two main tribes here, one that migrated centuries ago from Lake Titicaca, and one that is thought to have originated in the north. They used to distinguish themselves through the shape of their cranial deformation, but binding a baby’s head has become unfashionable of late and so it’s all done with hats now: one group uses a spangly white straw boater with a lacy ribbon and enormous medallion on it (think: bad mother-of-the-bride hat); the other wears an intricately embroidered (far prettier) white cotton sunhat with multicoloured animals and patterns sewed onto it.
Intricately embroidered hat identifies one tribe
Mum, kid and baby llama. Notice the mum's hat shows she is from the other tribe
When the Spanish arrived, they ordered all the valley’s villagers to leave their homes and live in specially constructed square-plan new towns (all the better to be controlled), worship at the new colonial stone churches (illustrated with terrifying paintings of what happens to naughty Amerindians who don’t accept the word of God), and farm care for new animals like cows, sheep and donkeys.
Colonial church
Virgin Mary not looking very Middle Eastern
Peru's black saint is a slave who performed miracles. He is celebrated with a feast of dog, cat and mouse
We stay in the biggest of these towns, Chivay, which, unlike most of the others, is accessible to vehicles and therefore polluted, dusty and dirty. To be fair, we have arrived at an auspicious time: in August, Pachamama (the Earth mother in the Andean religion) wakes up and so the villagers here celebrate her arousal by cleaning streams, irrigation channels and roadways, before the planting season begins in September. The local people accepted Christianity by simply accommodating a fused version into their own religion – the Sun God was a near-enough Jesus/God and Pachamama was the Virgin.
Local woman
We visit one church, in which Mary is dressed local style, with the embroidered hat, dress and poncho. Lima’s black saint is also worshipped in that church, in an annual festival that involves eating cat, dog and a mouse.
Baby alpaca on a lead
Little girl, little llama - both with hats
Looking around town for a restaurant for dinner, I am drawn by a particularly touristy venue (Nick isn’t!), which promises local dancers featuring a ‘Titi dance, malaria/yellow fever dance and cross-dressing agricultural love dance’. Obviously, we have to eat there.
Local valley girl
A local band, playing the usual ukelele-style small guitar, pan pipes and, unusually, a female drummer (probably the most bored-looking member) accompany the dancers.
Pretty woman drumming
'Sun and Moon' dancers
The music is almost identical for each dance, but the dances are great. Each has a different and very elaborate costume – these dances are still actively performed in the local communities but only at festival time at the beginning of December.
Dancer
My favourite was the malaria/yellow fever dance, which involved first the man lying on the ground and shaking deliriously while his female partner beat the fever out of him with a whip and then finally roused him by standing astride his face and lifting her skirt up. And then they reversed roles, with him eventually rousing her by removing his smelly sandal and waving it in her face. Marvellous.
Male member of the malaria/yellow fever dance team
Female dancer
The next day, we drive along the edge of the canyon, passing pre-Incan stone drawings that teach terrace-builders how best to irrigate their crops and seeing, high in the canyon wall, the stone tombs of ancient ‘hanging graves’.
Valley panorama
Terracing in the valley
Only a fraction of the previously arable land can be used now
We reach a dramatic cliff overlooking the deep valley at one of its narrowest points and walk a while along steep paths. We surprise a young viscacha (native rabbit) and its parent, and see flocks of small bright parrots fly from the cliff in a shower of green. But the highlight we see from the cliff’s summit.
Viscacha - like a rabbit but notice the different tail
The awesome Andean condor, a beast of a vulture with a 3.5 metre wingspan that makes the Californian condor look like a crow, circles up on thermals from its cave far far below. Following him come more condors, one after another, still-winged like aeroplanes, directing their flight with the rudder of their tail feathers.
Magnificent Andean condor
From above
The birds are endangered. Local people kill them with poison (or by leaving so much meat that they gorge themselves and cannot fly), afraid they will eat their sheep and llamas. But they are scavengers without claws (they have chicken feet), only eating live animals when they are newborn and the placental scent fools the birds that the animal is dead.
Juveniles are brown
Adults have a wingspan of 3.5 metres
Tourists coming to photograph the birds here are helping spur their recovery – there are now an estimated 100 condors in the Colca Valley.
Soaring through the sky
Get thee to a nunnery
Arequipa: Occupying a block in the centre of the city, with high walls of unadorned white stone, is the the Monasterio de Santa Catalina. It is one of the most incredible religious buildings I’ve ever seen.
The convent, built in 1580 by a rich widow and still inhabited by a few dozen nuns, is a 20,000 square metre citadel within the city, full of winding passageways, Escher-type stairs and landings, courtyards and cloisters. The nuns, all from the best families, who entered the convent were required to take a vow of silence and lived out their days from as young as 12 years old until death.
Noble families secured their places in Heaven by sending their second-born son or daughter into a monastery. But this was no ordinary convent. The wealthy inhabitants brought with them all manner of furnishings and home comforts, including servants and slaves. They lived in houses of varying sizes and luxury, and held concerts and decadent feasts. Indeed, the partying and revelry that went on within these walls made the place so notorious that by 1871, Pope Pius IX sent a strict Dominican nun to Arequipa to straighten things out.
Sister Josefa Cadena did just that: the slaves were set free, the servants dismissed and the nuns were ordered out of their separate abodes and into a rather grim communal dormitory built for the purpose. Eating was done together, and the silence was better enforced.
This is a strange self-imposed prison of women who spend their precious lives not in Larkin’s ‘days’, but in an invented after-life, talking in their heads to a supernatural being, while around them the vibrant, more alive indigos and ochres sing out loud.
Here is a slideshow of my photos:
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City of white lava
Arequipa: We follow Lake Titicaca, crossing from Bolivia into Peru and spot the difference immediately: rickshaws ply the streets (our first since Asia), the houses appear to be better constructed (more concrete, fitted roofs and less adobe), there are cows grazing rather than just llamas and sheep, and the ubiquitous ‘Evo mas’ (‘vote to keep Evo Morales’) political graffiti is replaced by its Peruvian equivalent and ads for the urine-yellow Inka Cola.
Rickshaws - our first since Asia
Heading west we drive through dry mountain scenery, volcanic craters and the occasional fertile valley, where mountain run-off has been channelled into irrigation schemes that support orchards and cereals. In such places, the steep mountain sides are are array of stone ledges, usable terracing built by people who lived 2400 years ago and maintained over the centuries. Just 45% of these continue to be used, partly because the Spanish diverted water when they came, leaving some terraces thirsty, partly because of climate change and also because many of the pre-Incan and Incan villages were abandoned when the Spanish ordered the population into more easily controllable new towns.
High-plateau lakes
Approaching Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city, we drive through a few kilometres of shanty town – hastily built, poor housing with no running water and little power, peopled by campesinos (peasants): migrants from the country’s decades of civil unrest and refugees of the guerrilla conflict with the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorists. The current influx, after greater national stability, is from country people looking to improve their economic prospects. Adding to the shanty town’s ugliness are the multitude of deliberately unfinished buildings, whereby owners avoid paying the tax due on completion of a construction.
Volcanoes line the route
Our bus follows local Peruvians travelling by truck
The city of Arequipa, overlooked by the picture-perfect volcano El Misti and neighbouring high mountain peaks, is a splendid colonial city built from white ‘sillar’ volcanic stone. The main square with it’s large fountain, trees and stone flagging is surrounded by pleasingly proportioned colonnades and an attractive cathedral. Off the square, intricately decorated stone buildings testify to the wealth and importance the city continues to command. Arequipeños are proudly different to the rest of Peru; they speak almost a dialect with many different words, their food is famously spicy and delicious (Nick is a convert to roasted cuy (guinea pig)), and at one time they even introduced a separate flag and passport.
Pigeons mob a fountain in the plaza
European colonnades surround the plaza
We visit the Incan ice princess, a mummified human sacrifice discovered 15 years ago by a German mountaineer atop nearby Nevado Ampato volcano. ‘Juanita’ is an incredible sight, just 14-years-old at her death more than 500 years ago and literally frozen in time. Sitting with her knees bent and her long hair hanging down her back, in her richly woven burial clothes, Juanita is so perfectly preserved that she seems ready to rise up from her icy tomb at any minute.
Lovely courtyard in Yves Klein blue
Peaceful space
Red flowers on blue
Children, always of noble birth, were regularly sacrificed by the Incas to appease their gods, who vented their spleen via natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and droughts. The child, Juanita, would have been chosen for her perfect looks and walked from her home to Cuzco for ceremonial preparations, before making the several hundred kilometre journey to Arequipa and then up the more than 6000-metre-volcano to the summit. Here, prayers and rituals would be performed by the priests and the child would be given a sedative and then dealt a fatal blow to the head – Juanita has a crack in her skull above her right eyebrow.
Detail in the sillar stonework
Sillar is a volcanic stone from the area
It is particularly stable in earthquakes - Arequipa gets struck at least once every century
She was discovered in 1992, when ash from an erupting volcano melted the snow around her burial site and dislodged her frozen body. Dozens of similarly sacrificed children have been found on this and other mountain tops: ritualistic murders to pacify supernatural forces, the last and most devastating of which was the arrival of Spanish conquistadors.
Another peaceful courtyard
Details like this are carved in the relatively soft stone
Gold used in colonial churches was usually stolen from Incan buildings
Colonial-era stonemasons used Incan motifs
Lake Titicaca
Copacabana: At 3810 metres above sea level and covering 8500 square metres, Lake Titicaca is the world’s largest high-altitude lake and, after driving through hundreds of kilometres of desert altiplano, the sapphire expanse of water feels rare indeed. It’s not difficult to imagine why impressive Tiwanaku civilization seated their empire here, building a city of 200,000 people, or why the Incas that came after continued associate this lake with mystical events. The water shimmers like silk after the dust and grit and monotone of the mountains – Titicaca (meaning ‘puma of the rock’ rather than ‘boobs and poo’, as Nick would have it) is remnant of the vast inland sea that once reached from the Atlantic Ocean.
The sapphire lake appears
To get to the pretty lakeside town of Copacabana (afterwhich the more famous Rio beach was named) we have to cross the lake’s Straits of Tiquina. We climb off our bus and take a small, overcrowded motorboat across and wait on the other side for our bus, which, like all the other vehicles, has to embark a dodgy looking raft of swaying timbers.
Loading vehicles onto the barge
Our bus floats across
The Tiwanaku people built their city – complete with complex road systems, irrigation canals and enormous pyramids – in around 1500 BC (although the Empire was at its height from 700 BC) on what was once the lake shore. It is thought that climate change, which caused the lake to recede such that their city and agriculture was tens of kilometres from the water, led to the demise of this once-great civilization.
Incan warrior
The Aymara people, who came after and worshipped an Earth Goddess, Pachamama, also made the lake their base. Their Sun God and Moon Goddess were two islands in the lake, the site of several human human sacrifices. The Aymaras believed their bearded, white god-king had somehow risen from the lake’s depths (currently, half a kilometre deep).
Copacabana is nestled between two hills on the lake shore
Copacabana beach
But it was the Incas, whose vast empire lasted for just a century (collapsing in the 1500s with the Spanish invasion), that created much of what we see today. The Incas believed that the Sun Island was the birthplace of their people – that the first Incas, Manco Capac and his sister wife Mama Ocllo had appeared there on the Sun’s orders.
Walking down hill on Isla del Sol
Tight bands of Incan agricultural terracing
From the Copacabana beachfront, we take a small boat out to the Sun Island. The boat is packed with high-season tourists who selfishly sprawl over the seats, so that two local cholitas have to sit on the floor with their bundles for the 2-hour journey. Everyone is staying on the boat as it travels to the north of the island, except me, Nick and the cholitas who alight at the southern end and consequently have it all to ourselves.
Incan stairway lined with rushing water
Sun Island shaped by tectonic forces
Replica of the traditional reed boats
It’s a ridiculously pretty island, striped with Incan ridges for agriculture that cover the entire rocky surface so that it looks like an armadillo. A flight of stone, Incan steps leads steeply up from the beach, lined on both sides by three seemingly miraculous streams of gurgling water from a natural spring. The three streams apparently represent the Incan motto: ‘ama sua, ama llulla, ama kella’ (don’t steal, don’t lie and don’t be lazy), and the spring is as essential today for the island’s 2500 residents, who carry its water on llama or donkey back to their homes and businesses.
Llamas and donkeys carry everything from water to food
Nick captures an escapee
We spend a lovely, lazy day walking around the island, getting sunburnt despite the chill (it is the Sun island) and visiting the ruins of an Incan palace.
Incan palace
Stone detail from the many-roomed palace
Back in Copacabana, the Festival of Independence is already underway, even though Bolivia’s independence day is not until 6 August. It’s an important time for ‘cha’lla’, a pilgrimage to receive blessings ostensibly from the Catholic Church, but in reality from Pachamama (who has become a fusion with the Virgin Mary for many worshippers). Hundreds of pilgrims from elsewhere in the country and across the nearby Peruvian border have arrived in town.
Three young Bolivians
Copacabana's cathedral
Very busy glitzy interior
There’s music all day and night, fireworks until the early hours and market stalls have sprouted selling everything from donkey heads to fish. Fortune tellers have lined up along 6 August Street, with their bowls of ‘molten silver’, decks of cards and other witchy wares including llama foetuses. It’s a pickpocket’s paradise and we’re extra vigilant.
Nicely arranged bits of donkey
The lake is full of trout farms
This is also the time of Benedicion de Movilidades, a bizarre ritual that involves car, truck, bus and bike owners coming from as far afield as Cusco for a priest blessing outside the cathedral. The line up of vehicles is miles long and each is decked out in party tinsel, paper decorations and their hopes and dreams in miniature kitsch form – this means that car and truck bonnets have a toy bus stuck on them (if the owner is hoping to go on a long-distance bus journey), a doll’s house (if the owner aspires to a new house), bunches of paper money, etc.
Stalls bursting with tat with which to decorate your vehicle
Final touches
Blessed minivans
The vehicles get blessed one by one (cheaper than car insurance) and then the owners get riotously drunk and drive away. Tomorrow, we’ll join them on our way into Peru.
Copacabana by night
Cathedral door detail: the Incas row towards Christianity
The Inca converts
In the Peruvian part of the lake, villagers live on floating islands of reed beds. It's a top tourist attraction, so Copacabana villagers have made their own rather less exciting versions
Cholita and her bundle
Into the Amazon rainforest
Rurrenabaque: The sky is thick with El Chaqueo (the Big Smoke) as we enter the Amazon lowlands, producing spectacular sunsets, but reducing visibility such that the opposite bank of the River Beni is impossible to see. The smoke is the result of seasonal burning of savannah and rainforest to clear fields for agriculture and grazing, and it’s a major hazard. Local farmers believe the thick fug produces rain clouds, ensuring a good harvest, but in reality the opposite occurs: the deforestation leads to worsening drought and poorer forestry conditions, exacerbating the situation. According to World Bank studies, around 300,000 hectares of Bolivia’s forest are lost annually, owing to el chaqueo.
Into the forest
The laid-back settlement of Rurrenabaque (a corruption of the Tacana name meaning ‘Ravine of Ducks’) is surrounded by karst-like hills and perched on the edge of the rushing Beni (‘Wind’ river). Once the daytime scooters and market chitter chatter have ceased, the damp air saturates with frogs and cicadas, bird whistles and bat clicks – the sounds of the Amazon. Here, we are warm and low for the first time in nearly two months and it feels good just to breathe this buzzing air. The downside of all this life, of course, is the mosquitoes, which relentlessly bite any exposed skin no matter how much DEET we apply. And this is the dry season…
Nick on the boat
We board a dugout for a 2.5 hour ride down river to the privately maintained reserve of Serere. The river is wide and fast, banked on either side by rainforest that becomes more pristine the further we travel. We pass the wood and palm, and wood and tarpaulin lean-tos of nomadic tribes, who camp close to the river bank to fish, during this dry season when the forest is relatively poor in fruit and other foods. Children with distended bellies trawl the banks for snacks, easy prey for the many caiman, stingrays and pirhanas that lurk beneath the river’s surface.
Nomadic camp
Fallen trees, partially submerged, provide sunbathing spots for turtles that group together in lines and piled one on top of the other. In the next couple of weeks they will swim to the sand bars and lay their eggs.
Turtles lining up
We spot a couple of capybaras (giant American rodents), who pose stock-still, hoping we don’t see them. Birds of every colour and size screech and call overhead. We see herons and macaws, fish eagles and vultures, small wading birds, tiny bright hummingbirds and kingfishers.
Spot the capybara
A clearing in the forest on the right bank reveals a busy illegal timber port with logs of mahogany, cedar and other hardwoods stacked high and ready for barging out. Authorities periodically confiscate a few logs, but the trade is too lucrative for bribed officials and all else concerned for anything effective to be done.
Illegal logging camp
Further along, another clearing contains a group of gold miners, churning up the earth and flushing mercury and other toxins into the river.
Jungle gold mine
We’re two hours into our journey when out of the corner of my eye I recognise the stringy black, hairy arm of a spider monkey reaching out of the jacket pocket worn by our host, Rosa Maria Ruiz. She pulls the 4-week-old monkey fully out and begins feeding him a banana. He eats it in huge bites that take a few millimetres off the fruit, and pauses to crinkle his face up at ours in a way that makes the whole boat burst out laughing. We make faces at each other for a while, until he is diverted by his desert, a syringe of milk. The tiny monkey was rescued from his mother, who was shot for bushmeat, and Rosa is nursing him back to health after his chest was split open by the hunters. In time, she will release him into her protected reserve.
Baby spider monkey in Rosa's bag
Our boat pulls into a spot on the bank marked by steps cut into the mud and stone, and we climb up into bamboo forest that quickly turns to rainforest. We walk for two kilometres, past giant trees, whose buttress roots dwarf us, strangler figs that knot themselves into plaits and twists and a palm tree that ‘walks’ around the forest dropping new roots in the direction of light channels.
Me in the buttress root
A 'walking' palm tree
Beside our path, the forest is alive with noise and movement: the scurrying of small mammals, the crashing of monkeys in the canopy and countless shrieks and alarms of the many birds calling to each other through the dense foliage.
Capuchins looking at us looking at them
I think Charles Darwin probably described it best, when he first entered the Amazon in 1832:
“It is hard to say what set of objects is the most striking: the general luxuriance of the vegetation bears the victory, the elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, all tend to this end. A most paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood: the noise from the insects is so loud that in the evening it can be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore: yet within the forest a universal stillness appears to reign. To a person fond of natural history such a day as this brings with it pleasure more acute than he may ever again experience.”
Twisty vine
A macaw eats a palm fruit
Eventually we reach a small clearing in the forest housing a two-storey wooden construction with walls of mosquito nets and hammocks strung out overlooking a large lake. A blue and yellow macaw screeches a welcome from its vantage point high in a cocoa tree. The lake ripples with fish and stingrays, reflecting the swoop of low-flying kingfishers.
Our beautiful cabin
We are shown to our cabin, a spacious, raised wooden platform with a roof that is open on all sides to the forest, save for the mosquito netting. There is no power here, so we rely on moonlight, candles and our torches to see after dark. We are serenaded at dusk and dawn by the low rumble of howler monkeys, the multitude of birds and insects and the unidentifiable noises that permeate through the forest.
Tarantula
The next few days are spent in a happy succession of walks through the jungle, boating on the reserve’s several lakes and in general wonderment at the various animals we find. We disturb tarantulas, which scurry back into their white sock nests, find countless paths of busy leafcutter ants (which consume more than 10% of all available leaves in the world’s neotropical zones each year, although they don’t eat the leaves but harvest a fungus that grows on collected leaf bundles), massive bullet ants, army ants, and other types of bitey ants, see tribes of playful monkeys, including howler, capuchins, capuchinos (!) and spider monkeys.
An ants' nest
Leaf-cutter ants
We see the day turn to night as birds desert the skies and are replaced by bats.
Bat
We spend a while with the bizarre frilly headed, horned Serere bird (the Hoatzin), whose chicks are the only winged creature since pterodactyls to feature claws on its wings that help the creatures climb up muddy banks. They have an ugly barking song worse than the cormorants’ but they are quite absorbing to watch. They are one of the few creatures to maintain a healthy population, while others become increasingly endangered, on account of their terrible smell which means no one hunts them for food.
Hoatzin or Serere bird
The hoatzin smells so bad that nobody hunts it
The flora is equally fascinating: vines that when sliced spurt drinking water, nuts sweet as coconuts and rich in protein, medicinal plants that heal wounds, cure arthritis and sooth insect bites, trees with bark like paper and others that taste of garlic.
A fishing eagle
...and taking flight
Coatis and possums climb the trees and wild pigs and peccaries rustle in the undergrowth. The animals are impossible to see most of the time, but we get enough rewarding glimpses to keep us obsessively looking.
Cooking lunch in the bush
When we’re not searching for wildlife, I seek out Rosa Maria, a woman with such a rich and fascinating history that there is only space for a fraction of it here. After a childhood and youth spent living with the indigenous Tacana people, she began during the 1980s and 90s to help these disparate communities organise into political groups that could claim land titles and that way ensure their ancestral areas were safeguarded from exploitation by mining and other commercial interests.
A group of red howler monkeys
How he howls!
It was out of this work that Rosa Maria first conceived a plan for a large national park, which would protect one of the wold’s most diverse forestry, home to more than 1000 species in habitats that range from high Andean glaciers, to cloud forest, dry forest, pampas and rainforest. The park, home to 1,700 people would be created with the full support and participation of these inhabitants, and involve plans for sustainable tourism that would provide livelihoods for the park’s tribes that encourage the protection of its wildlife.
A rescued baby spider monkey climbs on Rosa's hand
When it is fully grown, she will release it into the reserve
Rosa feeds it bananas
Madidi National Park opened in 1995: 4.7 million acres of pristine forest. By 2001, Rosa had set up an eco lodge with cabins in the park and was ready to receive her first guests who would explore guided trails that led through carefully prepared communities. But there was a problem. In 2000, she was featured for her efforts in a large National Geographic article, which had brought a certain amount of international support from donors and tourists wanting to work with her. The former dictator (granted US asylum by George W Bush, but wanted on charges of genocide in Bolivia) was greedy for a slice of this eco-tourism, and his cronies were making good money out of logging and trafficking animals from the park, all of which Rosa Maria was inconveniently in the way of.
Dawn in the Amazon
A lone heron
A sustained effort by the government and park authorities to discredit her had some small success, but still she clung on, continuing to work from the house she’d lived in for 30 years. Death threats were made and an assassin was hired. Her house was burned down with her staff inside. The military turned up with machine guns and police, successfully evicting her from her property and the park, destroying her buildings and stealing her personal belongings.
Is it a leaf, is it a cricket?
Butterfly
A year later, revolution that began in El Alto ousted the dictatorship and installed a new leader. Then Evo Morales was elected. Rosa Maria was invited to the justice ministry for meetings to try to reinstate and compensate her, but one month later, during a routine swim across her lake, she was attacked by a black caiman that nearly killed her. She spent three years in hospital having surgery to save her life and then to restore some function in her right leg, emerging only last year.
Yellow and blue macaws fly
Now, she says, she wants to move on. She cannot stop the logging and hunting of wild animals in Madidi, but she’s having some success stopping it on her own small 8000 hectare Serere reserve. Evo is accelerating the land titling of indigenous groups in the area, so she is shifting her focus to working with these communities to help provide them with sustainable livelihoods, hoping that eco tourism may help the Tacana people bordering her Serere land in the way she had hoped that Madidi might have done for many more people, who lacking alternatives, continue to hunt, log or mine for gold.
Caiman
A 'released' adult spider monkey
Rosa Maria truly is a remarkable woman, and the land she tends is a wonderful patch of precious rainforest. Madidi is a tragic lost opportunity, which now faces an even greater threat: Evo has re introduced a shelved plan for a hydrodam on the Bala narrows at the Andean headwaters of the Beni River. If it were built, it would drown thousands of square miles of Madidi national park.
Vines in the jungle
Hanging orb-weaver spider
Rosa and a macaw
Monkey business
Yolosa: It’s quite difficult to conduct a professional interview with someone when there’s a capuchin monkey sitting on your shoulder grabbing at your pen, but I give it my best shot. Vicky Ossio, the owner of one of Bolivia’s four animal refuges, is gamely ignoring the monkey’s antics and giving my questions her full focus. But when a second – this time, a red howler monkey – leaps over to join the pen wrestling, flipping its tail around my neck to hang on, I concede defeat, and put away my pen and pad.
Pen issues with a monkey on my shoulder
Spider monkeys are cartwheeling across the lawn, leaping on each other’s backs in a black spaghetti of gangly limbs and stringy prehensile tails. Joining the furry entanglement are golden capuchins, one of whom rides in on the back of Vicky’s very tolerant labrador.
Furry bundle of spider and red howler monkeys
The trees surrounding the lawn are dripping with other monkeys of various sorts, and interspersed with primary coloured macaws, which shout encouragement at the lawn monkeys like spectators at a variety show.
Blue and yellow macaws
It’s a pretty incredible sight. Vicky, me and the couple of European volunteer workers become human props to be scrambled over or surmounted for a better vantage point. The labrador seeks short-lived refuge between Vicky’s legs and a domestic cat slinks past, hissing at curious monkeys in its path. A spider monkey hangs off Nick, pulling faces and generally showing off, making everyone laugh.
Marcelo Levy pregnant with spidery monkeys
This haven of liberated animals began life 6 years ago, when Vicky and her husband Marcelo Levy, originally from La Paz, bought a plot of land in the Amazon basin in Yosola at the foot of the old Death Road. It was intended to be their refuge from the pollution and noise of La Paz, but before long they had extended their home to an assortment of native animals. Their land meets the Death Road – formerly, the only route between the Amazon and La Paz – at a wide layby used by truckers to break the long and dangerous journey. Among the illegally chopped logs, coca leaves for cocaine and bushmeat, their cargo often contains live animals from the Amazon to be sold as pets in El Alto’s markets or exported from the country.
Vicky Ossio holds a baby spider monkey rescued last week and still quite clingy
“One day, I spent hours persuading a truck driver to give me the baby spider monkey he intended to sell. I just kept on and on at him until I was such annoyance that he gave in,” Vicky says. “We nursed the creature back to health and that became our first animal. After that, people would alert us to other rainforest animals being kept as pets. Animal SOS, a Bolivian NGO that works with street dogs and cats, started sending us wild animals it confiscated from owners and found in the markets.”
Parrots are smuggled in bamboo tubes in which the central ones suffocate. By the time they reach the refuge, they are often in a very poor state
Now, the couple’s La Senda Verde animal refuge has everything from monkeys to snakes to a margay – a small wild cat with jaguar markings and enormous eyes (the largest of any cat) and hips that revolve 180 degrees. Most of the animals are free to roam around once they have been treated for their horrific injuries and neutered. But some, including the margay need to be confined. “The margay was free, but it ate some of the rescue macaws and a baby monkey, so we thought it was best to cage it,” Vicky explains.
The margay is too dangerous to leave uncaged but Vicky is hoping to enlarge its enclosure
Bolivian law forbids the reintroduction of animals to their natural habitat. Most reintroduced animals, especially cats, die within a week, and there is also a fear that human diseases may be carried by the animals to infect their wild counterparts. But much of it is to do with a lack of resources – reintroducing an animal takes enormous amounts of time and preparation, and the country lacks the expertise, according to the government’s wildlife services.
Margays have the biggest eyes of any cat
Trade in wild animals is the third biggest illegal economy after arms and drugs, and the problem is growing. Deforestation has accelerated over the past five years as farmers slash and burn forest to grow coca to supply the cocaine industry. Once a coca field is exhausted, farmers burn larger areas in rapid succession. “There used to be forest here with clearings for fruit trees. No there is not enough shade for the orange trees to survive and when it rains, all the soil gets washed away in big floods,” Vicky says.
Spider monkeys can live for more than 30 years in captivity so it´s a big commitment
Cocaine used to be produced in neighbouring countries apart from a few remote factories where workers would tread the leaves by foot, but new imported machinery now enables production even in small apartments in La Paz or Potosí, ramping up supply and demand for the lucrative export drug.
Many of the monkeys have bullets lodged in them or missing fingers
Much of the cocaine industry is run out of La Paz’s notorious San Pedro prison, a complex ‘city’ of criminals who pay rent for their cells and control much of the country’s crime. One trick, is to send scouts to steal the computer-brains of high-end cars, after which the owner gets a call on his cellphone informing him where the item is and how much ransom to bring. Insurance companies rapidly pay the ransom because it’s a factor cheaper than importing an expensive car part. Cocaine produced in the prison is so cheap that anything people choose to cut it with, from baking soda to sugar, is more expensive than cocaine itself.
Amazonian tortoises suffer cracked and bleeding mouths in La Paz where they are kept as pets
The industry is linked with the traffic in wild animals: deforested lands lead to a number of casualties – burned animals with surviving young – and increase the vulnerability of those animals left. The animals can be quickly hunted and piled into trucks, in which one in every ten animals caught will survive to be sold. There are said to be three powerful families in La Paz who control the bulk of the country’s wild animal trade. They employ hunters and truck drivers and export to countries including the US, in Europe and the Far East, especially China.
Marcelo and a red howler monkey
Bolivia’s laws protecting indigenous culture are also helping deplete the country’s wildlife. Communities are allowed to hunt bushmeat for food, to chop forest trees for their own use, but not to sell or trade in forest resources. This would have been a fine plan 50 years ago, but with the increase in guns, in roads connecting remote villages to the possibilities of trade, and a fast-disappearing rainforest, what is happening is a systematic slaughter of everything from monkeys to jaguars to tapirs, not to mention the wholesale destruction of any mahogany still standing. Little of this is actually eaten by the community. Instead, the adults are skinned, their flesh sold as bushmeat, their skins racking a good price, and surviving babies are sold as pets. A spider monkey goes for as little as $100 in the market in El Alto, although the villager who captures it will only get a fraction of that.
These turtles arrived as a box of tiny hatchlings
Vicky acquires these in various states. Often, the tips of a monkey’s fingers will have been blown off by a shotgun while it was clinging to its mother; many of he rescue animals have bullets still lodged in their bodies or other missing anatomy from eyes to ears.
Vicky and Marcelo get no outside funding for their work
Walking around the refuge, I see different species of tortoise and turtle – “these come to me with cracked and bleeding mouths, because they can’t cope with the dry altitude in La Paz where they were kept as pets” – and even a caiman.
The 120 kilo Andean spectacled bear
Crossing a stream, we reach Vicky’s 3000 square metre, spectacled bear enclosure. Inside, the big, 120 kilo Andean bear lumbers around playfully, chasing sticks and eating corn.
He’s 3 years old now, 10 times the size he was when he was rescued from El Alto market as a teddy bear cub, but still not fully grown. Bears are hunted for food and also for their claws, which are hung outside houses as good luck charms. Vicky’s planning to expand his already substantial enclosure so that he can cross the stream. In the wild, spectacled bears roam for 15 kilometres a day. She’s getting advice from Münster Zoo in Germany, which keeps Andean bears, and an expert in the US. There is no one who can advise her in Bolivia.
Spectacled bears can live for 40 years
We watch the bear for a while. Unlike Goldilock’s friends, this one is off his porridge. Paddington Bear liked marmalade sandwiches, I offer, helpfully. But Vicky’s bear is very fussy. He likes bromeliads and mandarins, but turns his nose up at most other fruits.
The margay still has a collar from when it was kept as a pet
Vicky and her husband get no support from the government for what has become a full-time job for them both. She has recently opened delightful cabins and built a swimming pool so guests can stay, which helps fund a vet and provide food for the animals. But it’s unsure for how long she can keep accepting animals before she runs out of space and energy. “We were going to enlarge the margay enclosure and build more exciting platforms for he, but I’ve just learnt that two foxes are coming, so we have to build something for them more urgently,” she says.
Monkeying around by the pool. Tourism provides the refuge with much-needed funds
With enormous reluctance, we leave La Senda Verde, to head further north, to the Amazon proper. Vicky is always short of volunteers to stay at the refuge and help care for the animals. If you’re interested, contact La Senda Verde.
