Volunteering at Tierra Linda in Peruvian Amazon Jungle - through IVHQ & Maximo Nivel

My 15 yr old son, Leo, and I decided to volunteer abroad in July 2017.  We found that IVHQ had great deals, so I narrowed it down to 3 destinations and projects based on interest level and the cost of airfare.  Then I let Leo decide between Kenya (teach PE and English), Guatemala (animal shelter) and Peru (jungle conservation or animal shelter)   Although Leo really wanted to go on an African safari, he decided that Machu Picchu and the Amazon Jungle couldn't be passed up!  So we signed up for 2 weeks of Jungle Conservation in Peru.  IVHQ contracted Maximo Nivel, who picked us up from the airport and gave us our orientation.  We did a 4 did jungle trek to Machu Picchu and spent a couple days in Cusco before heading off to the Amazon, but that story is in a previous blog.  We didn't know exactly where we'd be going in the Amazon, so we couldn't read about it ahead of time, but at our orientation in Cusco, our destination was described to us!

We would be going to a buffer zone on the border of Manu National Park, where human impact had taken its toll.

   

They weren't kidding about the bumpy road!   I saw other combis stopping so tourists could get out to vomit!  We were the only non-Peruvians in our combi so there were no touristy breaks for us!  We did get to stop in Paucartambo and weaved through a raw meat market to find the restroom.   The need to go to the bathroom again became critical about 1 hour before we got to Jose's house.

This is Jose and his house along the main road that goes from Cusco to Manu National Park.  Jose is an entomologist originally from Majorca.  He paid $15,000 for Tierra Linda 18 years ago.  Now it's worth $200,000.   He employs Pablo to run the volunteer program, but he's losing money on it.  He hopes to turn his home and this property into a bug museum where tourists can stop on their way to Manu and other destinations.   Jose's house is a 40 minute walk down a very rugged road to Tierra Linda.  We walked it several times.  One of the financial goals is to be able to even out the road, so it won't hurt Pablo's truck and require him to get it repaired all the time! 

This is my son, Leo, sitting with Pablo at Tierra Linda.  They bonded over soccer.  Pablo is a Barcelona fan, but you see, Leo supports Real Madrid.   There were long arguments over this.  This was my son's favorite place to sit during break.  There is no internet at Tierra Linda, so Leo actually read several books on this hammock, including all his required summer reading for English and all the Peruvian travel books that Pablo had on his bookshelf.  Pablo himself used to be an engineer, but he gave all that up to save the rainforest 5 years ago.  He started as a volunteer, and he now makes only $3,000/year and spends half of it on his plane ticket to Spain once a year to see his family.  He is a one man show at Tierra Linda.  He does all the volunteer coordinating, all the work, all the cooking.  Well, almost a one man show...

This is the other key team member at Tierra Linda:  Inti.  He goes everywhere with Pablo and is a really sweet dog.  Unfortunately, monkeys don't visit the camp because of Inti, but that might actually be a good thing.  Monkeys are so destructive.

Here you can see the bedroom house in the center, the kitchen building in the far right, the toilets on the closer right and the garden on the left.  Volunteers like to sit in hammocks under the bedroom house during breaks.

     Here is the main house at Tierra Linda:  no walls or anything like that.  It's just a kitchen, a dining table/ping pong table and a small seating area.  Pablo built everything.  Most of those boots have holes in them, so bring your own boots!  One was bitten by a Caiman while Pablo was wearing it.  The water in the bottles comes from the river!  Yes, there is a small solar panel on the right.  We could take turns plugging into that to charge our phones (just for picture taking.)  We spent some of our volunteer hours scrubbing the mildew off all that wood.  Mildew sets in fast here.  After 2 weeks, my carry on bags were covered in a nice layer of mildew.

     What did we eat under this roof?   Pablo is a vegetarian on a strict budget, and Tierra Linda has no refrigeration.   There wasn't as much protein as we are used to, so I'm glad I brought a lot of protein bars with me.   Pablo made veggies and rice, pasta with sauce, crepes, lentil stew and porridge for breakfast.  One time he made Spanish tortilla from 22 eggs for a group of nine volunteers.  Pablo loves cheese, but cheese and eggs strain his budget.  He's a good cook with the ingredients and resources he has!   

Here's the entrance to the bedrooms (right), the two toilets and shower (far back), laundry line (left) and the kitchen house (far left).  My son and I had our own bedroom, but many of the volunteers share a room.  No one uses the shower; it's just used for storage.  The toilets don't flush on their own, but it's fun to carry the bucket to the river to fetch water.  Then you empty the bucket into the toilet to flush it.

Filling the toilet bucket from the river.  Now I remember that the bucket had a leak, so one needed to walk as quickly as possible back to the toilet!

This is the room that my son and I shared.  It's really just a simple shelf and two bunk beds with mosquito netting.  Thank goodness we never saw a single mosquito our whole time there!  Pablo advised us against taking our malaria meds; there was no need for it, and the side effects can be nasty, he says.   He saw people turn crazy!

I'll describe the different volunteer jobs we did.  First of all, we raked leaves all over the volunteer camp so that snakes wouldn't have a place to hide.  Vipers live in the area.   Pablo saw one cross the road just 1 foot behind my son while they were walking down the road.

  The toughest job was facilitating permaculture, or sustainable agriculture.   On 2-3 occasions, we had to dig up black soil, putting it in a leaky potato bag and carrying the bag for about 10 minutes down the trail to the garden on the volunteer camp.  This trip had to be repeated as many times as possible!  We would call it done after 6 trips!  If Pablo gets the garden up and running, it will supply produce for the volunteers.  

These are the garden beds we helped make and where we carried the soil to.  We had to filter the soil to make it very fine by throwing it against the mesh frame (on left)

Here's part of the path that we had to walk over while carrying the bags of soil!  Past volunteers probably helped build that bridge!  

The many paths are important for biologists who come to do research at Tierra Linda.  Volunteers keep them clear so the research can be done safely.  We all grabbed a machete to clear up the paths.

Here we are widening the path with machetes.  If the path isn't wide enough, users could become snake victims!  Pablo and volunteers created the paths in the first place.  They meander through the forest in a way that lets you see the most forest possible.

Look how nicely Leo has cleared the path with his machete!  Sometimes we cut away 15 mature but less desirable plants just to plant a tiny little tree at the side of the path.  There was one original primary growth tree left on Tierra Linda.  Pablo says that if it were cut down, it would sell for $4,000.  That's why the buffer zone doesn't have any tall trees left!

Here we are fixing a lookout platform.  If you are quiet up there for long enough, you might see  an animal come to the watering hole/swamp below.  We never got to see anything here.  It's hard to see animals in the jungle, especially in the buffer zone, where human impact, such as farming and deforestation has affected the jungle.  All the forests we saw were secondary growth forests.  By planting trees and taking care of the environment, Pablo is hoping more animals will return.  He also wants to expand the water area to make a lake to attract more animals.  Maybe the next volunteers will do that (after they repair the road to get there!)

Pablos shared his knowledge of many plants with us on guided walks.  This is Cordia Nordosa, or Huevo de Gato, Cat balls (see upper left of photo)  Ants live inside the balls.  In this symbiotic relationship, the ants protect the plant from herbivores and the plant provides food and shelter to the ants.

Once, while I was giving new volunteers a tour of the forest, I discovered these caterpillars on a tree.  They had changed their pattern by the next day.  This is Day 1

Day 2

Close-up of the caterpillars

We were lucky to be at Tierra Linda while some biologists came!  We spent 2 days assisting entymolologists from Peru, Switzerland and France!  They were looking for a new species of butterfly.  They had already discovered 2 members of a new species, but Peruvian law says that you must find 6 members to be able to declare and name a new species.  Tierra Linda is particularly rich in a variety of butterflies.  The river serves as a highway, or autopista, for butterflies.  We learned how to properly catch a butterfly without damaging it.  We had to be careful not to snag the $60 nets on any sharp plants or rocks.  It's important to the ecosystem to protect butterflies.  It's also difficult to keep the locals from catching butterflies to sell them.  Some butterflies sell for thousands of dollars!

We guided the scientists through the trails and kept our eyes open for butterflies.  When one was caught, they took a quick look and either let it go (if they already knew that type of butterfly for sure) or folded it into a wax paper envelope for identification later in the day.  We learned to compare the markings on our butterflies to the markings in books and identify them.  What's amazing is that while we were there, the 3rd and 4th butterflies in the new possible species had been found!  It was amazing to learn that there are so many gaps in scientific knowledge about butterflies.  Scientists are still trying to figure out which caterpillar goes with which type of tree... 

We also helped set up other types of bug traps.  Here a light is shining on a hanging sheet to attract bugs in the evening.  We had to do this at Jose's house (a forty minute walk down the road) because he has electricity.  The scientists hoped that this sheet would turn black with bugs, but it never did.  At one point, one of the scientists was playing with one bug for an hour.  It was fascinating to see how passionate they were about their professions!  The next day we set out traps with human feces to attract beetles.

Of course everyone took turns washing dishes in the river.  We used biodegradable soap.

In the middle of the day, we would all walk 10 minutes to the the part of the river where we took the black soil from.  That was our bathing/ swimming part of the river.  My son was the only one who dared to climb through the branches and jump off the cliff, but everyone else sat in the waterfalls and washed their hair with biodegradable shampoo in the river.

Here's the river where we could bathe.  Rocks and waterfalls are to the right.

One of the most memorable days with Pablo is one I have no pictures of!   He told us to put on water shoes and we would walk down the river to pick up any litter we might find.   We would be wading in water and climbing over rocks and waterfalls, so an ordinary camera was out of the question.  It was quite an adventure.  At one point, Pablo threw a rock into a cave so we could watch tens of bats fly out.  We ended up at another volunteer jungle conservation camp, similar to Tierra Linda, and then walked home (pressured by the upcoming darkness) over the land.

Pablo takes everyone to the closest town, Patria, once a week to teach English to local children.  If the children learn English well, they can become tour guides and make money off tourism instead of farming, deforestation or cocaine production.  Pablo let me teach them Zumba also!  Some of them, however, were more interested in playing with my iPhone than actually dancing.  We taught at the local restaurant, where we also had dinner.  At first we were hesitant to eat there because the local market scared us away with it strong smell of unrefrigerated, raw poultry.  The restaurant, however, was great!  It is rumored that local cocaine dealers eat there, too.  Some of them live frugally so their wealth won't attract the police.  Some of them could pay bribes to the police.

There are 2 internet lounges in the town (the first one we tried was so dark I couldn't even see the keyboard), and Pablo gave us about an hour on two separate occasions to communicate with our families and friends back home!

   All in all, volunteering at Tierra Linda was a unique, once in a lifetime experience.  We are Americans who lived in the jungle without electricity, running water or internet for 2 weeks!   We heard some fascinating stories about life in the jungle and the dangers of trying to protect it.  Three biologists had recently been killed outside of a gold mine.  The owners of the mines don't like to see biologists wandering near their gold; they are afraid the biologists will find valuable plants or animals and have their mines closed down.
     Pablo did arrange a weekend trip for us in between our two weeks there.  My son and I were the only volunteers that weekend, so we had to pay for the whole trip ourselves, which was fine.  We had a private tour.  The catch was that the tour guide, Carlos, only spoke Spanish, so I had to exercise my listening capacity!  An English volunteer,  Phil, who came earlier than us but overlapped with us reported that he did a weeklong trip because his visit coincided with that of wildlife photographers.  He got to accompany Pablo and them into the primary forest where they ran into indigenous children, who shot at them with bows and arrows!  Our journey wasn't quite as exciting but check out the synopsis of our weekend adventure below:

First, Carlos had hired a taxi driver to take us on our journey, and first they dropped us off at the Plaza de Armas in Pilcopata so we could take pictures while he went shopping for breakfast food.  

On our route we passed by a beautiful view of Manu National Park, called Mirador Atalaya.

Our next stop was at a wildlife rescue center.  We were the only guests there and we were allowed to take as long as we wanted to visit with the animals.  Here we are petting some king of wild pig common to the area.

There is nothing like seeing macaws flying in the wild if you are from America, where you only see clipped ones at petshops or sitting  on perches.

We saw wild macaws fly across this field to be fed for us.

I can't believe I finally got to hold a sloth!

and a Spider monkey!

Posing!

It was a real treat to watch the monkeys play with the wild pigs!

We stayed in Atalaya that night, for we would take a boat trip from the Atalaya port to the clay licks the next morning to observe Amazon parrots, or loros, as Carlos called them.

It was pretty exciting for us to see this sign near our motel, which says "Caution!  Transit zone for indigenous persons in isolation.  To escape conflicts, don't try to contact them, give them clothes or food or photograph them.  They might think cameras are weapons."  We even heard that the indigenous have kidnapped some girls, to minimize inbreeding.

Our motel at Atalaya Port:  It was very simple.  The pea soup was amazing, but we had to constantly defend our food from cats that were allowed to jump on the customers and beg for food.  Other than that,  it was just a place to sleep and wake up early for the boat ride.  Unfortunately, in Peru, you often get woken up too early by roosters!

You need to leave at sunrise because the parrots come early to feed at the salt lick.

You will see plenty of jungle along the river.   Parts of the jungle are primary forest, owned by different private landowners.

We spent a few hours on the boat.  We were the only customers!  The river is called El Rio Alto de Madre de Dios.   I believe it's the same river that Phil and Pedro floated farther up.  It connects to rivers that flow throughout the Amazon and Manu.  At the salt licks there were other European tourists.  They had set up their telescopes (and shared the telescopes with us) to get a good look at the Amazon parrots, which fly in pairs and mate for life.

Carlos had us stop at another wildlife preserve for a couple hours.  We hiked through the jungle and took a raft ride.

Carlos guided our raft through a bird sanctuary in search of capybaras.  We found a fresh jaguar paw print but unfortunately no capybara that day.

We did hear a variety of lively bird calls and saw Andean Condors and plenty of Hoatzin.

The Andean Condors were caught alive and tied to bulls to peck at the bulls during bullfights.

Hoatzin  It's not hard to see these at the wildlife sanctuary we went to.

After the boat tour we went back to Atalaya before we went to lunch at Carlos's family restaurant in Pilcopata.  The streets of Atalaya are shown here.  Those must be the noisy roosters!

At Carlos's restaurant we got to relax and observe Amazon parrots close up.  These are the parrots we saw thousands of that morning at the salt lick.  These are Amazons and not macaws because they have feathers all the way around their eyes.

Next Carlos and the taxi driver took us to Hignkiori, where strange boulders seem misplaced in the middle of the jungle and no one knows how they got there.  They also have petroglyphs written on them.

Cotton trees grow there.

Standing on such a boulder

Walking from the boulders.  See how they look out of place?


That concludes our time in the Peruvian Amazon.  As we left Pablo and Jose, our van was checked for cocaine.  They searched inside all our bags. It was a standard check.  The ride back to Cusco was long and bumpy.  The elevation gain got the best of me again.  Luckily I had a plastic bag from my lunch!

We still had another day to spend in Cusco before going home.  Of course, the first thing we wanted to do was have a large non-vegetarian meal so we found a brunch at at Hotel San Agustin.  They also pumped oxygen into the room, so I felt great!

For lunch, even though we were full from brunch, we tried Barrio Ceviche on the Plaza de las Armas.  Delicious!

Then we visited the coca leaf museum and learned everything there is to know about the coca leaf.   Coca Cola is the only company in the US that is allowed to import and use it!  We also bought some coca leaf souvenirs and took our chances getting them back to the States.   It's a shame that coca leaf imports are banned.  The coca leaf is quite healthy and makes me feel energized.  It's only dangerous when people transform it to cocaine.  

We wondered why this skull was so elongated!

The answer is here:   The Incans used to bind the skulls of youth on purpose to achieve this look, especially for royalty!

You can't get far in Cusco without having an adorable llama put in your arms for a photo (and then you have to pay).  We were told that these are actually just baby sheep posing as llamas!  Notice the modern car trying to squeeze through the original, narrow streets.

We also enjoyed hot cocoa at the Chocolate Musem, with a nice view of the square below.

And that concludes our Peruvian experience!  We hope to go again someday!  There are so many places we didn't get to visit!