Living in Peru : your everyday companion

Text: Elise van der Heijden - Photos: Helard Aguilar Centeno, Antitesis

A new day breaks over Puerto Maldonado in Peru's Amazon jungle

The Amazon! The lungs of the world, with its seemingly endless supply of trees, filtering the carbon dioxide that we are massively projecting into the atmosphere.

I’ve had the pleasure of living in a part of this astonishing bio-mechanism for 5 months, in the southern Peruvian part of the Amazon, in a small city called Puerto Maldonado.

In this article I highlight my impressions of this area, how it has developed, and where its future lies.

History

Puerto Maldonado is the capital of Peru's Madre de Dios region, named after its most important river on whose banks the city itself is located. It was founded in 1902 during the rubber boom, but after the interest in rubber faded, the town’s growth slowed down, only attracting colonists interested in its tropical wood, Brazil nuts or the gold on its riverbanks.

Not very surprising when you consider that in those days the town was only accessible by river, a long and treacherous journey down from other settlements on the river system.

Tourism really began exploding during the last 20 years, after biologists discovered the extraordinary biodiversity of animals and plants in the region, motivating investors to open up lodges to share the flora and fauna with visitors. The city is now being dubbed “World capital of biodiversity”.

A lizard hunting for bugs

Tourism today

This brings us up to today, when the tourism industry is booming. The city and its surrounding river house around 35 different tourist lodges, most offering guided tours from 2 days up to a week in length. Their guides will take you around the regular tourist attractions such as; the beautiful Lake Sandoval, home of the giant river otter, Monkey Island, canopy walkways, and caimans spotting along the riverbanks. I worked on tours with 2 different lodges, which gave me a peek inside the inner workings of these lodges that receive an astonishing amount of visitors each year.

I could see that visitors were having a wonderful time getting to know the flora and fauna of the region a little bit, but more imposing than anything they could learn or see is to have them experience the jungle. The humidity, the heat, the animals, the sounds, the smells; all of your senses are experiencing the mighty rainforest at all times, and this leaves an impression that you will never forget.

Impact of tourism

But it’s not all just a romantic jungle story when we consider what the growing interest in Puerto Maldonado has done for the region and its people. In terms of the tourism industry, most lodges want their customers all for themselves after they arrived at the airport, hopped on a bus, embarked and disembarked the boat, seemingly embarrassed to show the city itself, and not giving businesses in town a chance to directly interact with the visitors.

Jungle cabins in Puerto Maldonado

The lodges do provide a great amount of employment for the locals, but many owners, who obviously take in the larger part of the earnings, are foreigners.
 
An alternative strand of tourism, however, is doing at least a few locals a lot of good: those cashing in on the interest in Ayahuasca, a cleansing medicinal plant drink. Shamans are charging tourists from $30 upwards for a guided session of the medicine, a unique concoction of two rare plants that grow only in the Amazon of Ecuador, Peru and Brazil. The medicine is mind-blowing and you can not put a price on its benefits, but it feels like some shamans are taking advantage of its healing properties cramming too many people into one session or simply lacking an honest interest to guide visitors through their journey.

Natural resources – where is the limit?

Other industries taking from the area are those exporting tropical wood and the extraction of gold. The biological effects on these areas are serious: deforestation, although luckily not on the same scale as is happening in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, but nevertheless adding to the negative effects of global warming, and the pollution from mercury that gold miners use in their process to extract gold from the riverbanks.

Frequent house guests: spiders

To protect the astonishing biodiversity, two large areas have been declared as protected areas, the Tambopata Candamo and the Bahuaja Sonene National Park, together measuring an area of 1,365,836 hectares.

Aside from this, in a country that has always relied heavily on its raw materials for its income, it remains difficult to stem the flow of companies extracting these riches for export. The town is now waiting with bated breath for the completion of the Interoceanic Highway whose asphalt will be crossing the town, hopefully bringing with it a new wave of revenue from an increasing movement, but I fear it will also bring a new wave of profiteers with their mouths watering over the possibilities in the area, and deciding to exploit it, without giving back to nature.

Good intentions

Even those coming with perfectly good intentions haven’t always left a clean trail. There are now many NGOs operating in the area, some focusing on biological research and preservation, others concentrating on helping the natives of the area. Here’s an interesting story I picked up during my stay which shows how some NGOs are getting it wrong because of a lack of understanding of indigenous culture.

The natives of the area, Machiguengas, Ese' Eja, have originally been hunters and fishermen, eating wild animals of the region such as peccaries, even snakes and monkeys, and varying their diet slightly with tropical fruits and yucca which is abundant in the forest. They do not build communities and settle down, they simply stay in an area within the protected park until the nearby fruits and wild animals run out, and then move on to a different part.

They do not practice farming nor herd animals, they are completely foreign to the notion of planning for the future. Considering that they might not always be able to live like this, one NGO decided to educate the natives in cultivation and breeding chickens, so they would have a steady food supply. For three months they lived with the natives, educated them how to breed animals and cultivate the land. Then they left them with a full chicken pen and various planted vegetable seeds.

Another three months later they went back to see how the tribe was doing with their new way of living, only to find that they´d eaten all the chickens, left the crops to rot on the fields, and had gone back to their familiar hunting habits exactly as they did before. Do you think the NGO reported this result back to those who donated in order to provide the financing for this project? Just wondering…

Visitor advice

Sunset over Madre de Dios

For those who wish to get a feel for the jungle around Puerto Maldonado, my advice is: definitely go, but think about where you book your tour according to the type of experience you want to have. You will see much more wildlife if you go camping, or book a tour with a lodge that is located deeper inside the forest, further away from civilization.

Another option, if you have more time on your hand or don't want to follow a tour with 20 others, is to hire a private guide in the city. There are plenty of good ones, with good English skills.

Finally, anything I have tried to put in words will not equal the experience you'll have if you decide to check it out for yourself: it has left me with a much better understanding of and a very deep respect for Mother Nature; her strength and the stunning beauties she harnesses. Enough understanding and respect to  convince George W. Bush and the U.S. government to reconsider their stand on the Kyoto treaty? Visit the area yourself and let me know what the chances are!

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	please visit Elise's blog named 'Ciao London, Hello Peru'
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