Off to Darkest Peru!

We have spent rather too much of out 7 weeks holiday in Huancayo, doing legal stuff and Santiago and wearing jumpers in the strong sunshine. So it was time to go to Darkest Peru, as I like to think of it, to the rain forest at Satipo.
We spent a short time in the desert of Lima (Yuk) and a long time at he high altitudes of Huancayo and now for Peru's third climate region the Amazon forest. It really is shocking to be able to go from one climate to another in one bus journey. From the dust dry, cold, strong sunshine, low oxygen of the mountains to the humid, hot, strong sun if it's not raining of the jungle.

We got a bus from the bus terminal in Huancayo, where they still celebrate the strong historical and cultural ties between the Junin region of Peru and East Yorkshire. Here is the check in desk for the Goole express!

We didn't go from the potato fields of Huancayo to the potato fields of the East Riding but instead to Satipo over night on a bus with no toilet(We took a Guinea pig in a box with us, because that's what you do. Nobody seemed at all surprised by its occasional squeals).I once learnt a very very hard lesson, coming ac cross the Andes on a bus to Huancavalica with no toilet and no stops, so I was prep aired. NO food or drink for the hours before setting off and as many toilet stops as I could manage before getting on the bus. I enforced this on Michael too and though it was not fun the alternative is so damned painful I am glad I did it.

Apart from the no-toilet and the enforced watching of Mad Max 4 on the video screens, it was a good journey, getting hotter and wetter all the way and my ears popping again and again as we left the Andes mountains to go down to almost sea level Amazon.
 We got off the bus just as the sun was rising over Satipo and you could see the cloud in the valley and the green hills rising above,  Nice to see green stuff after the dust dry summer of Huancayo, and you could smell growing things in the air.very nice.

Now here's a thing that drives me crazy. Satipo, like many places in the rain forest of Peru and probably elsewhere, produces many things, fruits, corn, coca, chocolate, bananas, sugar cane, and many other things, but one BIG crop is of course coffee. Rocio's family are firstly coffee growers here in the jungle and so are almost all the people of the village. They make tons of the stuff every year and it is beautiful coffee. They don't really use any chemicals they use hard work. This is P{eruvian coffee, made by Peruvians as a business to make money. That is all good. So why in Hell is it that they drink bloody Nescafe?? Every shop you go into has little sachets of over priced Swiss crap instant coffee. Like this one in Satipo.

It is not only rubbish in comparison to the good stuff they are making tons of but it costs a fortune  to keep buying those stupid little sachets. I have never seen a jar of coffee in Peru. So the money they make gets sent out of the country to one of the world's richest countries to take the profit. Ridiculous. I have been boycotting Nescafe for about 30 years so far, for many good reasons, and I wish all of Peru would do the same.

From Satipo we got a classic Rain forest Taxi ride up the mud road, past the land slide ( there are always landslides when it rains and it often rains) with about 9 of us in the car to the village of Mentushari. It has about 30 houses and, as I said, almost everyone here is related in some close way to farming, especially of coffee.

It was great to be back there. staying in a small wooded house, less sophisticated than many UK garden sheds, but such a nice place. The day was dry and hot and we drank cold pop and walked about listening to the bird song and the dogs and insects.

Rocio's Dad Florentino is in the process of building a new wooden house on a piece of land at the other end of the village, ie about 3 minutes walk away. It will be so beautiful when it is done. It's a bungalow on a wide piece of land that already has fruit trees but will have far more when Florentino has finished. Here is Michael picking oranges from the tree, just before getting stung by tiny horrible wasps, who were living in the tree. The fruit was great, but the sting hurt him a lot. Strangely Michael seems immune to almost all insects and the like in the jungle. He didn't get any mosquito bites at all and my arms are covered! The wasp sting went away in an hour or so too, amazing.

Here is a view of one side of the house with a coffee plant in front. It has four rooms inside and there is a kitchen/dining room across the yard too. I can't wait to see it when he's finished.
Back at the current house, Alvaro (Michael's cousin) decided to harvest the enormous runner beans!

Well, to be honest they are not beans but a fruit called Pakai (My spelling) which grow on a tall tree. Can you spot Alvaro up there having a snack?

Inside are big yellow or white fluffy blobs each with a shiny black stone inside. You suck the fluff off which is better than any sweet I  know of. We soon finished all Alvaro could harvest without falling to his death.