This week I got back from my final stint of volunteering at Project Amazonas. We were out for nine days. I feel very lucky to have had this experience, of which I will only be able to convey a fraction.
I think volunteering with a good NGO can be the perfect way to see the rainforest, especially if you're on a budget. Once you remove the profit motive, you can trust that your guides are not selling a bill of goods. If you walk through the center of Iquitos, you'll be swarmed by locals guides who want to take you to the jungle. Some of these people are legitimate experts of the forest, although if they're worth their cost, you'll probably be able to find them in an office or via recommendation of the expat community here. Talk to Bill Grimes or anyone else at the Amazon Explorers Club, or Mike Hollis, who edits the Iquitos times.
Some guides want to take you out to their "lodge," where you'll find animals in cages. Some will solicit you in the street to do Ayahuasca, a traditional Incan herbal beverage that, based on the testimonials, makes you lose your mind (after you've lost your lunch). You'd think people would be more discerning as to go do a hallucinagenic drug with some stranger out in the woods. It is something that should be taken very seriously. I find that the newfound casual attitude to the once-sacred rite of Ayahuasca (which most people in Iquitos have never tried) simply reflects that of the tourists, some of whom actually told me they pre-game with booze and weed before taking a drug that, traditionally, necessitated a week of bodily cleansing and fasting. Turn some of these guides down, and in the next breath they'll offer you "blow, mary jane, chicas?" They know their clientele all-too-well.
Anyway, I came to the rainforest looking for reality, not trying to escape it. For me, Project Amazonas was ideal, as I knew it would be. They're well-organized, with a long-term, sustainable vision. They're priorities are equally the health of the land (old growth rainforest) which they have purchased, and the wellbeing of the communities who live alongside it. The director Devon Graham is a seasoned biologist with an effortless, encyclopedic knowledge of wildlife. He'd be the first one to hit trails in the morning and the last one to leave the dinner table at night. The Project provides seasonal employment to Peruvians, and Devon and Fernando (the only salaried PA employee) had assembled a team of hard-working, goodnatured people, all from Iquitos or villages on the Mazán.
It's not easy. Anybody can do this. There were 70-something-year-old birdwatchers with us, one who could barely walk without hiking poles. The most challenging aspects are the heat and the bug bites. I had plenty but some of us escaped totally unscathed. For 20-somethings who don't have anything tying them down at home, the only real obstacle is the cost of a plane ticket. I did not even look into the very real possibility of obtaining grant money to do this kind of thing, though I might in the future. My time with the Project, and in Iquitos, for that matter, was very affordable. There were biologists, the aforementioned birdwatchers, and even a retired zoologis with us, who came solely to observe wildlife. Thanks to them and the local people staying with us I saw a dozen species of snakes, lots of frogs and bird species. Their trips were more expensive, since they were not doing work but just using the facilities. But even that contributes to the Project.
The work that we did was simple but I learned a lot. I learned how to identify a dozen common tropical trees, I learned what they’re used for, how to steer a pecky-pecky boat, how to canoe upriver with another person, how to map a trail with GPS, and, most satisfyingly, how to use a chainsaw. I learned as much as I could about the native culture from the shy women and the drowsy men in the Pueblos in the reserve.
I'll probably dedicate a few more posts to the cool stuff I saw and learned in the Santa Cruz. But today, to your possible disappointment, reader, I'd like to take on an aspect of the trip that really irritated me. To ignore it would be to miss something worth writing about. So let me get this out of my system and I'll get to more of the positive stuff later.
We would do our work in the morning. Most days after lunch everyone would just stay at the field station and chill, ostensibly because it was too hot to do anything. The thing about siestas, though, is that you can’t sleep in that kind of heat; you lay there, sweating, in this sedated, heat-stupified state, dozing off until your hammock stops swaying...and a few minutes later you wake up soaked and suffocating.
You know those Vietnam movies where there’s a unit posted out in the bush somewhere and they haven’t seen action in ages, and while they’re waiting to hear from Command, their lives boil down to this monotonous repetition of chores, playing cards, drinking, never wearing a shirt, trying to keep socks clean, trying to read while the tropical afternoon heat lulls you off into a hundred little mini-naps? That's what afternoons in the jungle are like: lazy, austere, lethargic, with no real stimulation or entertainment other than the surrounding forest, which at times appears to you as this really gross and malevolent entity. The conversation is stilted and eventually everyone just starts ignoring each other. Very soon you realize that you're out there with someone whom you would not have picked...
Anyway, at the time I originally wrote this, I let a certain personality conflict that I'd had with one of my fellow volunteers stand in the way of getting toward a more meaningful experience. analysis. Now I look back and I see more my own shortcomings, and I realize I have a lot of work to do on myself, especially if I'm ever lucky enough to get to do this kind of thing again...
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