More Amazon (above ground)

We've been in Lima for the past couple of days. It's a nice enough city, but lacking in the charm and friendliness of Bogota. We've spent the bulk of our time doing "travel maintenance": booking onward tickets, getting haircuts, monitoring our cuts and bites from the Amazon.

I'm assuming you don't want pictures of Leah booking online bus tickets, so I'll finish up with just a fraction of the photos from the Amazon. We flew into Tarapoto, one of the bigger cities in the Peruvian Amazon. From there, we took a minibus for three and a half hours to the smaller town of Juanjui. Then, when the road ended, we boarded a boat that took us about two hours upstream to the edge of Abiseo National Park, which has been closed to tourists for 30 years. To give you a sense of scale, the park is almost exactly the size of Rhode Island.

We stayed at a tiny lodge run by Kevin and Maria, retired World Bank officials who formed an NGO to help conserve the park. From the lodge (where we spent a fair bit of time lounging in hammocks), we hiked, scrambled over rocks to giant waterfalls, and swam in the Abiseo River (a tributary of the Amazon). Fortunately, the piranhas are only indigenous downriver.

It's hard to convey the density of the jungle. You don't go looking for wildlife; it envelopes you.

Thanks to Kevin and Maria for inviting us to this extraordinary place!

Farewell Tess!

Tess Kuczun (Leah's niece) joined us for the first month of our trip. Yesterday, when we flew out of the Amazon to Lima, Tess returned to the U.S. (as planned). What a great travel companion! Tess was fun and resilient at every turn. One example: this amazing cave exploration, seven levels underground. When we came to water, it was time to wade in.

And what happened when the water got to deep to wade? We swam.

But wait, how did we get seven levels below ground? First, we followed a trail marked with this sign.

Then we put on miner's helmets, because once you are more than 30 feet into the cave, it's pitch black.

We started climbing down, suppressing the claustrophobia.  Remember, seven levels. And THEN we hit the underwater river.

Tess, the taxis may be less crowded without you, but we'll miss your sense of adventure, your Spanish language skills, and your all around great companionship.  We hope the transition back to school is not too rough!

WE'LL MISS YOU!

Amazon teaser: snakes, spiders, and snails big enough to put on a leash

We are out of the Amazon, though this will be a short post.  We are exhausted and have to catch a flight to Lima.  We also need to tend to our bumps, scrapes, bites, and stings.  The most striking thing about our Amazon experience (on the Abiseo River, a tributary of the Amazon) was the overwhelming density of life.  As Tess said, "Everything grows on everything."  On two occasions, I was photographing an insect, only to have it attacked by another insect.  We knew we were in for an interesting and exciting adventure when our host said nonchalantly over dinner the first night that only one guest had died in the last year.  (That was part of a VERY PERSUASIVE safety talk on life jackets.)

So let's get to the photos!  This guy was found by the workers about 30 yards from my favorite reading hammock.  Yes, it's venomous.  And yes, I used a telephoto lens.

And spiders.

And the snail that one of the kitchen workers kept as a pet.  Seriously, check out the leash.

The tree wider than our family.

This butterfly escaped from the Izula ant (about an inch long with the most painful sting in the world).

The bee was not so lucky.

Of course, there were some beautiful things, too.

Tomorrow, the cave adventure seven levels underground.

Farewell Colombia!

We are now all healthy.  But even when Katrina had the flu, she played a mean game of whist from her sickbed, literally.

Bogota is a huge but surprisingly manageable city (see below).  Tomorrow we leave for Lima and then deep into the Amazon:  a flight, a jeep ride, and then a boat ride to an area that has been closed to tourists for 30 years.  Probably not great Internet.

To celebrate our final night in Colombia, we went to the main plaza for an evening concert to celebrate international peace day.  The plaza is absolutely beautiful, but we made two key miscalculations:  1) The concert was one part music (wonderful) to six parts political speeches.  In Spanish, obviously.  And 2)  Bogota is at 8,000 feet, so with each speech the temperature plunged another five degrees.  By about the 9th speech, we were clinging to each other for warmth.

Things that make us happy

We're doing a nice long stretch at a great Airbnb apartment in Bogota.  It's great to be in one place for a while, in part because CJ got the flu.  Then just as he recovered, Katrina caught it.  The rest of us are hoping to stay healthy.  Katrina is already feeling better.  In the meantime, these are the things that give us small bursts of joy as we explore Bogota:

1.  Internet.  Roughly 98 percent of squabbles within the group are related to bandwidth, including the ever accusatory, "Who is downloading something!"  CJ solved this problem by finding the public wi-fi behind the Ministry of Communications--"free WiFi for the people."

2.  Figuring out the buses.  Bogota is laid out on a grid, like NYC.  All kinds of public buses run up and down the avenues.  So if we can read the sign in the window of the bus, or throw ourselves on the mercy of someone standing at the stop to send us in the right direction, we can all get where we are trying to go for about $2.

3.  Our neighborhood.  We buy pastries at the same little bakery every morning.  I am sitting in my favorite cafe.  And yes, we go to the grocery store.  Check out the flowers in my cart!  We're here long enough that we have cut flowers (for $1.00) on our dining room table.

We've become streetwalkers in Bogota

On Sundays, the city of Bogota closes down several of its major avenues so that bikers, walkers, skateboarders, and anyone else not in a motorized vehicle can take over the lanes.  We joined the masses and walked nearly the length of the city.

Our walk finished in a park, where we happened upon a communal line dance.  CJ plunged in!

Dramamine: Official Sponsor of the Wheelan Family Gap Year

Yesterday was brutal.  Lots of throwing up, as we made our way on a bus ride from Salento to Bogota, almost 9 hours through mountain passes that make the roads through the Rockies seem tame. To round out the trip, Leah transposed the address of our Airbnb apartment, so we drove around our taxi semi-aimlessly for a while.  Then I put the frosting on the day by miscalculating the taxi fare and paying the guy 10 times what he was owed.  (Some taxi driver was out dancing last night.)  That's about when CJ came down with food poisoning.

But hey, the day BEFORE yesterday was just awesome.  That's why we tolerate days like yesterday.  (It did get us to Bogota, which looks like fun.  And from here, we'll fly to the Amazon.)  Two days ago we rode those horses you saw out to a stunning organic coffee farm.  These little plantations are gorgeous because they are nestled in the mountains.  They are also pretty because the coffee plants have to be shaded with banana and avocado trees.  And as a coffee addict, I was really interested in the whole tour, which of course culminated in a cup of coffee on the veranda.  So, since you probably don't want photos of motion sickness, I give you a Colombian coffee tour in five photos: