By Michelle Flint and Bob Linde
AT ACEER -- BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
To our delight, we discovered that we would have
a tour guide all to ourselves for our four day visit at the series of camps
along the Amazon and Napo Rivers in Peru, called Explorama. Julio, a native
of the rainforest, introduced himself as our guide and immediately asked
about our interests. Since there were only two of us, Julio planned to
tailor our trip to our wants. “We’re hoping to spot some wild animals”,
said Bob, “And don’t worry about working us too hard. We don’t mind getting
sweaty and dirty.” True, we had perspired with the best of them in our
adventure travels. What we didn’t realize is that when you ask for adventure
in the Amazon, you really get it.
We took hikes at dawn and in the afternoon,
and then got one that lasted for five hours off trail through the jungle.
Except at Explorama Inn, there was no running water, no plumbing, and no
screens on the windows. You slept with mosquito netting around the bed.
We visited a family in the jungle and played with their pet sloth, we visited
a shaman who explained his medicinals and how he prepared them and later
saw many of the plants grown by every family’s hut, their personal jungle
medicine cabinet. One night we hiked in the jungle, literally too black
to see your hand in front of your face, to see a tree whose fallen leaves
glow in the dark, a place where the local people come to renew and energize
themselves.
The high point of the trip (pun intended)
was our first full day we toured the Amazon Center for Environmental Education
and Research (ACEER) and its quarter-mile of walkways suspended up in the
rainforest canopy. The walkway, suspended between platforms on trees and
up to 118 feet high, allows visitors to view canopy life up-close at various
levels.
As we hiked the trails to the walkway entrance
point, we heard a distant rumble. Thunder, we wondered? “No”, said Julio,
“that’s the wind.” Sure enough, after a moment the rumble approached, and
the treetops swayed. Then it got cooler.
“El Friaje”, said Julio. Once a year, he said,
usually in June or July, an Antarctic wind comes to the Amazon and for
a day or two it is so cold many fish in the Amazon die. By the time we
reached the ACEER canopy walkway it was already down to about 70 degrees
Fahrenheit. And windy. Up on the first platform we eyed the swaying walkway,
held by thick cables to trees. “I usually don’t take tourists on the walkway
in this kind of wind”, said Julio, “but I want to excite you”.
It was terrifying, and breathtaking. Air plants
dripped their roots from their host trees down to the rainforest floor.
Crimson-crested woodpeckers flew by at eye level. We walked on planks suspended
in the walkway netting, and had a clear view of the forest floor below
as well as the sky above. At one treehouse-like platform we emerged above
the treeline, with a panorama of the rainforest stretching miles until
the horizon.
The Friaje winds came in chilly spurts, and
we waited at each platform for them to pass by. Just our luck: our first
time in the Amazon rainforest and it was colder than our St. Petersburg,
Florida hometown. As we pondered this, Julio grabbed us. “Look! A two-toed
sloth!” We inched out, carefully. About 100 feet away, a large sloth was
hanging by her feet, eating new leaf buds, cradling a nursing baby with
one arm and eating with the other.
A two-toed sloth is incredibly rare, said
Julio, different from the smaller, more common, three-toed variety. “In
all my life in the forest, I have only seen one other.” We tried to steady
our cameras and counteract our swaying perch. The scene was peaceful, quiet,
majestic. Here we were, observing it like birds in a windswept tree. For
a while we forgot that we were human as we blended with the scenery with
our sloths-eye view. This definitely was not like a typical day in the
concrete jungle back home.
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