So after cuddling monkeys and petting snakes, the guides took Pame and I back to the lodge where we became friends with the other four tourists (in the entire lodge) over a delicious dinner of rice, chicken, and the ever-present coconá. Well, that meal probably tasted better than it really was because we were hungry, but so long as the chicken is tender, I can't complain!
As my luck would have it one of the couples was from the States! Charo is a friendly Peruvian national who moved to the USA where she met Esa, her Finnish-born husband. Charo also happens to be a cousin of the trio behind Limón Rotisserie (which has recently failed to exude Peruvian excellence but that was way after I met Charo in January.) Esa turned out to be one of the best sorts of people you could ask for in an expedition: he was inadvertently hilarious because he stuck out so much (more than me), he always had a wisecrack to share, and he was a fan of patronizing San Juan's tavern for beer.
Along with the young couple from Argentina, the six of us and our combined four guides pulled on our boots and embarked on our nightwalk. I'm sorry to say I have no pictures since my camera was charging but if I had taken any, it would only be blackness or a fuzzy shot of mud lit up by a camera flash.If you truly want to be in darkness and don't want to go into a mineshaft, go to the jungle. No streetlamps, no car headlights, no wayward rays of light escaping from someone's house. All we had were our flashlights and the stars.
The guides encouraged us to try walking with the flashlights off, since that's how the locals travel when they need to make a midnight run to... wherever the hell they need to go. I felt comfortable with less light but no one wanted to go without any light. So they stayed on.
Oftentimes untamed animals are more active at night, or so the nature shows tell us. The only animal we saw on our nightwalk was a tarantula on a tree. In a way, I was happy that the hairy arachnid was the only creature we saw at night... I wouldn't want to come face-to-face with a caiman with only my flashlight. Well, I really wouldn't want to come face-to-face with one at all. I prefer a safety barrier in between us.
The possibility of encountering caimen didn't faze us, and after procuring beer from the local pub, all ten of us piled into one paddleboat and pushed off into the river. The night was uneventful, though the beer, the chats, the sounds of frogs and crickets, and the mosquitoes kept us awake. Several times mosquitoes buzzed too close to my ear and during one of these incidents, I slapped my ear hard enough that I side-headbutted Pame, who almost jumped off the boat. Other than that, it was a creaky little cruise of unearthly shapes emerging from the dark. Our vision was limited to the little circles illuminated by our small flashlights, which made the trees we saw earlier that day seem even more strange.
After we docked the boat, we trekked back to San Juan and celebrated our safe return at the village discotech (which happens to be the same house from which the baby sloth came.) A single room with men playing cards at one end, all five teens in the village at the other, and window where we could buy beer made a fitting setting for our hullabaloo. Between dancing to Colombian and Brazilian music and toasting to our quasi-adventures with beer, we learned quite a bit about our guides.
Artemio and Pedro were nineteen, Harry was eighteen, and Cid the shortest was thirty. All the guides went to "guide school," which sounds like a scam to me if you already live in the jungle. Except for Cid, the guides were still training (and as Pame and I found out the next day, were not getting paid during training.) Artemio was a devout Christian and didn't drink beer (we bought him Coca-Cola) but Pedro, Harry, and Cid had no problem drinking beer or dancing with me (that's what happens when you're the only unmarried girl in a group.) I remember the next day Cid was telling me about how he has a lady friend but they had a fight so he had to sleep alone the previous night. If this was the Amazon way of picking up girls, it certainly flew over my head and all I thought about was "how do you fit two people in those small hammocks anyways?"
At some early hour in the morning we finally walked the last 10 minutes back to our lodge and slept. Or, everyone else slept as I put up with the jungle symphony of frogs and insects and the occasional bark. It didn't help that I was covered in mosquito bites and I spent a good hour scratching my shoulders and pondering if the mosquito netting was truly insect-proof before falling into some sort of stupor for a few hours.
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