jungle lovin

so after the first or second night, I wake up feeling something pawing my face/head. I open my eyes to find this:



The reserve has two "pet" monkeys (Chico and Paula) that they rehabilitated a while back. The monkeys aren't caged or fed or anything, but they are very social animals and stick around the reserve/nearby jungle because they really love people. It rains every night, and the monkeys get cold and want body heat, so they will just lift up the mosquito net and come in.

Notice how dirty the collar area of my shirt is. Its because Chico always wants to be with people, but he is lazy and doesnt like to walk, so he just climbs up and rides on your head/shoulders. So I was walking through this really flooded/muddy part of the jungle, and the monkeys dont like water, so he climbed up for a ride with the dirtiest paws ever.

So most every morning I would wake up to this:



Its really weird having "pet" animals that are so smart. If they are cold, they just use their hands and tuck themselves under the blanket. If they want food from your plate, they will sneak up behind you super quiet and dart in and grab a fistful. If they want something, they will just open cabinets/jars/boxes/all sorts of stuff. They are crazy playful and were really fun to have around!

So my work the first week consisted of all sorts of stuff. I walked through the jungle a lot with Mario (old guy from a nearby village) and learned all about the jungle farming. He would pick everything we could eat and show us how they grow it and how to plant it. I learned a ton about Pina (pineapple), platanos (bananas), yucca (jungle potato), and all sorts of medicinal plants.

One day I did various things around the reserve, fixing loose rocks in the stone path, digging up worms for the compost pile, clearing wood from a tree they had cut down, painting signs for trees they wanted to mark, and other random things like that.

Another day, Mario (my peruvian roomate from Lima), Alvero ("Monitor" of the reserve from Sevilla, Spain), and I made a new trail one day to the top of the small waterfall. Its so pretty outside that no one really uses the showers, we all just bathe in the waterfall. Its cold as a mother but so is the shower, so its easy to just jump in and get it over with. It feels really good in the afternoon after you have been working/sweating all morning.



So our new "trail" had the simple goal of climbing like ~40 ft up to the top of that waterfall. By the time we were done, getting from top to bottom would took almost 50 MINUTES. Our "trail" also involved some pretty serious rock climbing, climbing up and down ~70 degree slopes, and using trees to literally pull yourself up the mountain. It was so difficult that a lot of people from the reserve couldn't do it/gave up right away hahaha. But it did make me feel like rambo, hacking away through this super dense jungle with a machete and surveying the land looking for the best path.

So typically we would wake up at 6:30 or 7:00, eat breakfast at 7:30 or 8:00, work until lunch at 1:30, and then have the afternoons free to do whatever we wanted (lots of hiking/reading/exploring/swimming). Gloria is the boss and chef of the reserve, she is awesome and has lived in the nearby town her whole life (the nearby town has like 40 people).



That parrot in the picture is Polly, another of the reserve "pets" that can say Hola. Lunch in Peru is the biggest meal of the day, so we usually start with some type of vegetable soup, then when we have eaten that and cleaned our bowl, we file back into the kitchen and Gloria gives us some rice/beans/chickpea type goodness. The food was actually really good I thought, maybe being a vegetarian wouldn't be so hard after all!

So that was the first week, where we only had 6 people on the whole reserve. That Friday, 18 new people were showing up, so Lluc, Didac, Ans, Mario, Daniel, and Kyla (a girl who arrived mid week) decided to clear some space and head to Salvacion, another reserve about 4 hours down the road. Pictures from that on the next update!

PS - Sick again so I have lots of computer time, dont get spoiled with all these updates! Nothing serious this time, I just wore myself out with a lot of bus travel/no sleep for a few days. Then of course the morning I get back to Cuzco, my friend Tim was leaving the next morning, so I did some sightseeing with him and hung out talking pretty late. But I am sleeping and resting lots, so I should be back on the grind soon!