Volunteer

I’ve just finished my first week in the jungle and I’m now back in the nearest city of Puerto Maldonaldo for a day back in civilisation, which mostly consists of eating lemon meringue pie and drinking beer.

The rainforest is humid and hot, only some daylight filters through the trees and gets to the floor so most areas are in a state of twilight all of the time. Animals are hard to spot; it’s so dense that you can walk a few metres from a jaguar without seeing it. Everything seems to want to bite, sting or lay its eggs in me. I have found out a couple of times how fire ants earnt their name, I have a family of tiny mites called chiggers eating their way up my legs, I am a mosquitoes´ best friend and I am trying to avoid getting a bot fly larvae laid under my skin (they lay their eggs in wet clothes and they then burrow into your skin, my clothes are constantly wet so I am a delight for bot fly mothers to be). Snakes lie around waiting to be trodden on, although I suppose thats not their main intention. The humidity rots everything unbelievably fast, my bags already have mould growing on them, my clothes smell like a wet dog and my ipod has some mold in the connection socket. When it rains it really rains, a few days ago we had 150mm of rain in one morning (in Norwich we get 300mm per month!), the trails turned into rivers and lower ground turned into lakes and we spent the afternoon wading around with water pouring into our wellies.

Despite all this I’m having a jolly good time, and all of these things seems like a mild distraction from how much fun jungle life is. The job here is great, we have to complete some tasks and after they´re done the rest of the time we can ramble around the jungle at our leisure hunting down animals. I am sleeping in a bungalow with another volunteer called Andy, he is from Uganda and is really easy to get along with and very nice, he seems to have had an interesting life, not many people can claim to have been shot twice in the back with an AK47 and to have had a broom sword fight with a spitting cobra all before the age of 20. The lodge is nice and our rooms are comfy.

They ring a bell three times a day and I have learnt, as did Pavlov’s dogs, that this means food time. We get a good breakfast and then a 3 course lunch and dinner. Andy and I have made friends with the waiter by giving him a reggae CD and in return we get multiple desserts and sometimes 2 main courses, I may come back fat.
Most days we walk between 10 – 15km along very muddy paths, we have built a bridge, put up signs, cut transects through thick jungle, canoed around a lake and done a few other jobs, but mostly we have just walked for the sake of walking and to try to find animals. In the evening we often go out and wander around the jungle in the dark (with a proper torch!) to search for the nocturnal animals that lurk around.

On the second day it rained heavily in the morning and we were stuck inside, in the afternoon we decided to go for a walk anyway to put up a sign near a lake. We lost track of time and by the time we got to the lake it was past 5 and the light was fading. Not to worry says Andy, I have a torch, and we set off home. When darkness came we were about half way home, he got out his torch, winds it up and turns it on, it looks and acts like a Fisher Price torch made for under 5’s and doesn’t really illuminate anything. Bugger. We continued on getting lost a few times, aware that if we wander even a few metres off the path we will be lost for good and that our bodies will be found inside an anaconda later in the month (ok, thats an exaggeration, we´d just have to sit in the dark for a night). We ended up in a basin, flooded deeply with water, in the dark with our dim torch, we didn’t know which way to go, we tried climbing the sides but slid back down. We tried leaving by what looked like a river but it was so deep it came past the tops of our wellies and we turned back. We panicked a little considering spending a night sleeping with snakes, army ants and a thousand mosquitoes as roommates. Eventually we decided to walk our way out via the river which turned out not to be a river at all but actually the path. Happily we made our way back and I vowed to take a proper torch next time.

We’ve seen a fair few animals; white lipped and collared peccaries, similar to wild boars but bigger and with tusks they roam around the forest in groups of up to 200 stinking like sweaty gyms and urine and freak out when they see you charging, snorting and knocking down anything in their way, we pick a tree when we first see (or smell them) to climb if they let loose in our direction. We see lots of monkeys, saddleback monkeys who are quite tame and like bananas, howler monkeys to try to pee on your head and capuchin monkeys who are very grumpy and throw sticks at you to make you go away.

We’ve also seen other mammals like agoutis, pacas, deer, ocelots (only a dead one though!!!), bats, tayras and Amazonian squirrels who are all keen to get as far away from you as quickly as possible.

We’ve seen a few snakes including a bad tempered rainbow boa who tried to bite us and then chased us down the path. We have a few pink footed tarantulas living at the lodge, one of which can sometimes be found in the toilet bowl. Butterflies are everywhere, there is 1400 species here, the highest number in the world, in all colours shapes and sizes, the same goes with birds and there are 2 wild macaws that hang around the lodge, I have managed to make friends with one of them and she will fly down, sit on my shoulder and eat oranges, the other one doesn’t like anyway and just tried to bite me (he sometimes also breaks into people’s rooms and hides under the bed until them come in, at which point he jumps out and attacks their feet).

Insects in all shapes and colours are all around and when they’re not trying to bite me are great to look at and photograph.

A project called Forever Fauna Tambopata has just come to the lodge, they are carrying out 3 surveying projects on mammals, birds and reptiles (and amphibians). We have been helping them out and when I get back to the lodge I am joining the bird team to go mist netting (to catch and measure the birds) and the following night I will be out in the jungle from 9pm-4am searching for snakes, lizards and frogs. Hopefully I´ll see lots of stuff (although I´m not all that keen to get close to a pitt viper to be honest) and I´ll learn alot too, it will be good stuff for my CV.