my first, and most exciting day

It's about time I recap my first week in Peru before Carmen and I met up. I arrived in Lima late night and flew to Puerto Maldonado early the next morning.


On the flight over I looked over my seatmate's local newspaper. The front page had large pictures of angry mobs blocking a road with large boulders. Hmmm...that concerned me a bit. The headline read something I couldn't quite translate.

After de-planing and waiting for my luggage in the small one-room airport of Puerto Maldonado I had to find my host who would take me to my jungle lodge. I searched around the exit of the airport for someone holding a sign with my name. I had a brief moment of panic as I thought...maybe they forgot me?


Just then a friendly guy appeared through the crowd and greeted me by name. He took me to a mini-bus filled with my fellow lodge-mates. I was relieved to have found my lodge friends and plopped down into my seat, exhausted after 20 hours of travel.

I soon found out that our bus was not going to be moving for a while. Apparently a national strike was underway. (Somehow I missed that in the Peru travel advisories...oops.) The demonstrations were getting violent in the town of Puerto Maldonado.

Our bus was supposed to go through the town on the way to the river port, but the police forbade anyone from leaving the airport and had locked the gate. A long line of tour buses waited to get out.


After about over an hour of waiting we suddenly got the green light to move out. The tour guides quickly shouted for everyone to get back on the bus and we took off.



The caravan of tour buses pulled out with a police escort. As we passed the gates of the airport we could see the police were decked out in riot gear. That's when I started to get nervous!


We were led down a bumpy, muddy, back road right through the jungle. In the front of the bus the drivers and assistants scanned the road and talked in rapidly on their cell phones.


Twice we had to stop the bus to clear road blocks- cut palm trees dragged into the road. Then men in the vehicle ahead of us whipped a chain saw out of their trunk and rushed to the front to start cutting up the tree.


Within minutes a group of men and police had cleared our path and so we continued down the road. The palm tree was cut up and pulled to the side of the road.


As we made slow progress down the road we could see a large plume of smoke rising from the direction of the city. Our tour guides on the bus informed us that the strikes had set a government building on fire!

We continued towards the river boat launch point, where we would take boats to the lodge. It was a long, tense ride.


We finally made it to the river. I took a picture of these kids, who were begging the tourists for sweets and coins.


We boarded boats and headed upriver for another 2 hr. ride to the lodge. I was so happy to get on that boat safely!