Dear Friends,

As always, I hope you are well! I’ve heard good news from many of you, including pregnancies and engagements, so congratulations! On my part, I have survived another month, although only just…

You may remember in my last letter me explaining about the combi’s and some journeys into town and back. Well the other day I experienced the worst one yet. It started off well, a volunteer and I were sat in the front two passenger seats, we had a older driver who was driving pretty normally, surprisingly even in silence, an odd treat. Then about 2 or 3 km out of the city, we heard this god awful noise coming from the back of the minibus, like a tyre had blown. The driver pulled over and had a walk around the van, got back in and carried on driving, still with the sound of juddering, scraping metal… A few km down the road a Peruvian woman finally speaks up and asked “are we going to patch the tyre?!” The driver responded that it wasn’t the tyre, that we were going to pull over somewhere and another vehicle was coming to pick us up. Another couple of km down the road and we finally pull into a petrol station to sit and wait. About 20 minutes later we start to smell petrol and the Peruvian woman starts exclaiming and dragging her daughter out the van because the engine was still on and she was scared we were going to blow up. We promptly exited after her (and saw petrol dripping from the van). Just in time, before any explosive accidents happened, the back up van arrived in a blare of Latin American music.

We hop in the front seats of the new van to music up full blast accompanied by music videos playing on a little screen in the middle of the dash. The original older driver, leans over, and to our relief and turns the music down. Once everyone is in the new driver jumps in, turns the music back up to full, and speeds off. Now the terrifying part starts. We nearly crashed twice, as mentioned before, headlights and rear lights seem to be optional in Iquitos, which makes going 100km an hour in the dark extra perilous and scary. To top it off the van had the option of normal coloured headlights or flashing purple ones… Of course, maybe to add more atmosphere to the party bus vibe he was going for, he chose the flashing purple ones. This made the white cat, that was sat in the middle of the lane, a beautiful shade of violet as me and the volunteer screamed and hid our heads when the van drove right over it. Thankfully, I mean over it. It seemed to go between the tyres and come out safety, if not in shock, at the back. After our screams he did seem to slow down a bit though, and we made it safely, and in shock, back to the center. What made it funny was that taped to the windscreen was a poster that said “prohibido dormir” – No sleeping… Like we could sleep through that.

You may have seen on my social media a photo of a three toed sloth, that was tied to a tree, with rope around his back leg. Well this is the story: Usually once a week I take the volunteers on a trip to look for Amazonian river dolphins. The boat driver had caught this sloth and tied it up for us to see. Luckily we had a Colombian vet with us who took control of the situation and we confiscated the animal and brought him back to the rescue center. Unfortunately, three weeks later, although the physical wound was healing, the sloth had to be euthanised because the rope had cut off circulation to his foot and all the tissue was decaying. The horrible reality of the animal trade and lack of education here.

We have since stopped using that boat driver and had the first trip with the new driver a couple of weeks ago. I went with the volunteers this time and it was a wonderful morning. Although we didn’t see pink dolphins, the new driver knew where to find a pod of grey dolphins fishing and playing. The light was beautiful and we then stopped at a village to wander round, the village had little hand painted signs up everywhere telling the residents to “look after the environment” , “don’t throw rubbish on the floor” and “clean your patio”. As I was showing the volunteers around the wooden shacks, with no glass windows, tin roofs and chickens roaming around I realised that all of that was normal to me now but all the volunteers must be thinking how primitive it was. The villagers all smiled and said “buenas dias” to us and a little group even congregated to watch all the white people leave.

Aside from dolphins, I’ve seen toucans and a frog that looks like it’s made from chocolate (although maybe that’s just a sign of how much I miss chocolate, you decide)! With the departure of the rainy season the nights sky is becoming more visible and as I walk back to my room at night I try and make sure I look up. I won’t be seeing any northern lights, but the lack of light pollution does mean I can see a lot of stars. This time of year also bring lots of local fruit and delicacies. The long fruit shown below is called Guaba, and it hangs from trees looking like snakes, up to a meter long! You can’t eat the skin or seeds, but you eat the white seed cushion. It has the texture of wet cotton wool and is juicy and sweet. I also can’t forget Suri. The giant beetle grubs! I led the volunteers around the famous local market to see what illegal animals trade we could see. Apart from the usual turtles, tortoises, caiman, paca and peccary we also saw jaguar, ocelot and boa skin. On a less depressing note, I pointed out some local fruits and the Suri on a stick. Funnily enough nobody took me up on the offer to try them.

Despite the locals need to catch, keep and kill the Amazonian wildlife everyone here I have encountered is warm, friendly and kind. Even while walking around the notoriously risky market with the volunteers, where I’d told them not to bring any valuables, a local stall owner warned a girl to hide her gold necklace because someone was likely to grab it. I do realise how that kind of counters my everyone being kind and nice statement though… Talking about friendly and welcoming, I made my third visit to the Maloca Kukama tribe, this month. They were just as wonderful as the first time and I will truly miss them once I leave. Leaving is becoming a reality, as I only have two and a half months left until I start travelling. I have my travels planned (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia), hoping to start booking things soon, including my return flight around the 16th of September! At the moment I am missing British springtime a lot, I keep seeing photos of bluebells, English woodland and Hidcote garden and it makes me ache, wanting to lay down on the cool forest floor or grass lawn and listen to the bird song, smell the leaf litter and flowers. Interestingly, I never considered seasons as something I’d miss, but here things don’t change much, it is always hot and green, and laying on the forest floor certainly is not an option!

As always, I love and miss you all,

Joss xxx