Dear friends,

As always, I hope this letter finds you well. It has been a busy month and I have a lot to tell you. Firstly, I forgot to mention in my last letter a little anecdote that happened on the reserve walk. As there was only two of us, my volunteer and me, to translate, we had to join a group of four. The three adults were only wearing flip flops or some kind of sandals. As you might remember my horrible plant-induced chemical burn on my ankle (that occurred while wearing boots, socks and trousers), I hope this horrifies you as much as me. We ended up spotting some monkeys but they soon vanished because the group kept talking really loudly. But don’t worry, they got their comeuppance, when we walked through a patch of giant ants and they all started screaming because the ants were biting their unprotected feet.

Back on to this month, I have done two more reserve walks. Seeing lots of squirrel monkeys, some interesting fungi, and even picking up a leaf lizard to give the group a better view. Apart from possibly getting lost in the jungle, I could probably guide the walk myself now. The first walk, was an hour shorter than normal so it was a route I’d never seen before. Fairly uneventful, although on hearing titi monkeys calling close by, excitement mounted and we made our way across a bridge towards them. I then hear this almighty CRACK, THUD, GROAN behind me and turn to see that my volunteer has fallen straight through the bridge! Luckily it wasn’t high and they had landed awkwardly in the muddy sludge below. After a quick first aid check and some minor injury treatment we carried on, although the noise had scared the monkeys away.

When I turned up for the second walk of the month, I was amused to see that the main path had a bit of rope across it with a sign saying “Path closed due to bridge maintenance”. Yet, following the guide, we skirted the rope and did the normal, longer, route. Interestingly on this walk it seemed we were following in the footsteps of at least one hunter. We heard two gun shots, and came across a piece of fruit in the middle of the path. The guide said butterfly hunters will place some fruit in between 2 trees and wait for the butterfly to finish feeding, then while it is resting on one of the trees, catch it. Apart from a couple of impressive blue morphos I haven’t seen any butterflies big or stunning enough, while in the reserve, to warrant the effort. The hunted leaf lizards go for 80 soles (£20) and are embarrassingly easy to catch, as I have proven, because when they know they’ve been spotted they freeze and play dead. Anyway, as we were leaving the reserve I spot a chunky slightly furry spider, the size of a big house spider, in the middle of the path, and ask the guide about it. He says that the week before he had been getting his washing in and that same species of spider had been hiding on the clothes and bitten his little finger. He had intense pain in the finger for 2 days, his hand swelled and he lost feeling in it, up to his wrist, for 2 weeks! We made a swift exit.

Another interesting trip I did with the volunteers, was a visit to the new aquarium in Iquitos. Not knowing what to expect I was very pleasantly surprised. It was started by an American biologist and even has a little gift shop (the measurement of any good attraction). I learnt a lot and didn’t know that the Amazon had such interesting and colourful fish, including electric eels, rays, angelfish, lungfish and pufferfish! Including the leaf fish, that changes colour to match it’s background leaves.

I have also learnt how to talk to frogs this month… This big green dude is called a monkey frog in Spanish, because they’ve lost the ability to jump, and climb in the trees instead. They are used in body cleansing rituals, by being rubbed on an open wound which induces vomiting and diarrhea. Since I arrived here, the best sound I’ve heard is a deep WAARP call, heard at night from high up in trees. It’s one of those sounds you have to copy, a bit like when a cat meows at you. Well turns out that the way to find them is to call back at them by making the WAARP sound and waiting for them to respond. Imagine a Marco Polo type situation, but in the dark jungle, with frogs.

I’ve also spent a lot of time in the city this month. For days off but also for work. One of the volunteers was sick and I took them into the clinic two days in a row. The first day I dragged dried mud all through the nice clean clinic and a nurse went round after me with a mop. I’m not sure if you’ve seen Wall-E but I felt like Wall-E on the big clean ship with the little angry cleaning robot called Mop following him around cleaning up the trail of grime. It got even funnier the next day, as although I wasn’t as muddy, as soon as I walked into the clinic I could smell how bad we smelt. Living in the jungle, sweating all day and showering in none too clean water can have that effect. To top it off, when the nurse came to put an IV in, she cleaned the area beforehand and the colour of the cotton wool had us belly laughing. It was a disgusting brown colour, to which the volunteer exclaimed “I showered before I came!”. Which put me in mind of Eliza Dolittle, from My Fair Lady, shouting ” ‘ereee, I washed my face an’ ‘ands before I came, I did”.

The clinic trip took a while so I ended up driving back to the center in the dark. Something I always avoid if at all possible, because it’s just so dangerous. The lack of lights on moving vehicles and people walking on the side of the road is scary. Watching out for and avoiding dogs, people, mo-peds, lorries, coaches and tuk tuks gave me a headache. And even if they did have lights, they’re not necessarily normal lights. Their lights consist of purple, blues, yellows and and greens, and to top it off, they can be flashing! I passed one particularly ridiculous disco tuk tuk, that had all the colours of lights, including flashing purple headlights. How they actually see anything is a mystery. A coach nearly blinded me with a yellow light bar along the bottom of the front of the coach, as strong as full beam. They also flash here to say hello, and to warn oncoming traffic they’re coming (as if I couldn’t see them). So getting flashed constantly with full beam is fun. Although to be fair, in the dark, with the lack of lights I can’t see them, in which case they flash their full beam so they can still see the road when passing you.

To get into town, you basically hitch a lift with passing cars, most of them are commercial taxi’s but sometimes they’re private. So aside from travelling next to someone with live chickens on her lap and in a shopping bag by her feet I had another interesting experience the other day. I jumped in a red pickup, and they said they’d drop me into town for free. Normally the journey to the airport takes an hour, we got there in 25 minutes. The driver was a lunatic. His female colleague in the front kept hitting him when he did something stupid and kept saying “tranquilo, tranquilo” meaning “calm down”. She also noticed I was turning green in the back and tried to get him to behave, but I made it alive in the end, and didn’t throw up.

Once I survived the journey, I have tried some new places to eat in town, including an insanely cheap local Peruvian restaurant, that served the best camu camu juice I’ve ever tasted here (camu camu is a local fruit, that’s grown along the Amazon, incredibly high in vitamin C), I will certainly miss camu camu when I’ve left. I’ve discovered the best ice cream shop, where the camu camu ice cream is mouth watering. And I also spent Palm Sunday in town and watched local making “palmitas”, which they buy and then keep at home to protect themselves. I’ve seen a few stuck on tuk tuks, which are definitely needed…

As always, I miss you all.

Lots of Love,

Joss xxx