Welcome to the Peruvian Amazon Jungle: From surreal dream… to the worst nightmare of my life

I flew home from Africa on May 10th, first to spend a day with a dear old friend of mine in London, and then to arrive in LA on May 11th. The plan was to spend 2 weeks in LA to see friends and family before heading to South America for 5 weeks, since it was cheaper than flying straight from Africa, and I had a free round-trip flight with Northwest Airlines/Delta. I ended up having a wonderful, loving 2 weeks spent re-connecting with my closest friends and family, and I´m so happy I got to decompress from my travels and reflect upon how wonderful this time of my life has been.

So May 25th I set off to Lima Perú on a 12-hour flight, and this time it was such a different experience than my first flight to Fiji when I started my 8-month ¨round the world¨ trip. I knew which clothes and equipment in my backpack would serve me the best, I knew how to meet people in my hostel, and most importantly I now knew what kind of a traveler I am—how to stay balanced, centered, grounded, safe and happy during my adventures. I had just purchased my Footprints South America Travel Book (which I wouldn´t recommend—it´s more like the Yellow Pages than a guide book, and I´ve heard the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet versions are more comprehensive), so I really didn´t know that much about Perú. Mostly I was just excited to speak Spanish and really connect with the culture, since I´ve always loved all things Latino, and hiking Machu Picchu has been the number one thing I´ve wanted to do for the past 10 years!

My first thought when I arrived in Perú was, ¨It smells like Guatemala, but looks like Spain.¨ J After being in Africa for 3 months, I was impressed with how developed it was, with busy freeways, tall buildings and a heavy smog in the air reminiscent of LA´s pollution. I appreciated chatting with the friendly and professional taxi driver, Enrique, who picked me up to take me to my great hostel, ¨Hitchhikers Backpackers¨ in the popular Mira Flores area. I ended up spending 2 and a half days in Lima to get oriented, taking the first day (Wednesday) to walk around the nearby Kennedy Park, and book a cheap flight to Iquitos in the northern Peruvian jungle for 5 days from Friday-Wednesday. Thursday morning in the hostel, I met a really friendly girl named Alicia, originally from Chicago but who now lives in Toronto. We checked out a wonderful Art Museum and then the Plaza de Armas in the City Center, meeting some Peruvian students our age who wanted to practice their English and chatting/dancing in the street with them for a few hours. We had delicious Peruvian-style Chinese food for lunch (chifa), and for dinner shared pizza and a delicious sweet alcoholic drink called ¨pisco sours,¨ as well as chocolate with churros for dessert. It was super fun!

Friday morning Alicia and I walked around the ¨Park of Love¨ by the ocean and had a cheap ¨menu ejecutivo¨ lunch of $3, before I had to leave for my flight to Iquitos at 3pm. I read a wonderful book in Spanish along the way, ¨The Storyteller¨ by a famous Peruvian author, Mario Vargas Llosa, about cultural clashes between the Western world and the Amazon jungle. Yay for continuing my tradition of reading a book about each country that I travel to while I´m there! Arriving at the Iquitos airport at 7pm was a really pleasant experience— I chatted with a information booth lady who gave me several maps, recommended a hostel, and told me the price for a ¨moto-taxi¨ is 8 soles or less than $3. Riding to the hostel in the humid weather with the wind fresh off the Amazon river in my face, I felt so independent, free, confident and happy... yay for really starting my adventures again! 

I loved my hostel, ¨La Casa de Samantha,¨ and met some really nice people right away. The next day (Saturday) I went to the zoo with Roger from Spain, and a couple from France named Lulu and Laurent. Although like other zoos I´ve visited in less developed parts of the world, it was pretty depressing-- the animals lived in poor conditions with little space to roam-- it was fantastic to see up-close all the animals we hoped to see the next day on our trip into the Amazon jungle. We saw jaguars, jungle cats, 20 foot anacondas, and a fish called ¨peiche¨ that´s 5 feet long! My favorite part was the pink dolphin, which is native to the Amazon river and smaller than the bottle-nose dolphin, pink in color, and with a really narrow beak. It was holding a 2 foot stick in its mouth near the wáter, and Roger grabbed it from its mouth to throw it, and it actually swam to retrieve it! We played fetch with the dolphin for about 20 minutes, and I was so surprised that like my experience swimming with dolphins in New Zealand, they really are just like dogs—smart, friendly and playful. After the zoo we went to a nearby research center, where we saw 13 baby manatees... the best part was that I got to feed milk to one of the babies! They are super gentle, peaceful animals… even if they´re not much to look at.



Back at the hostel that night, a group of 8 of us made dinner together (couple Lulu and Laurent from France, couple Josh from Sacramento CA and Virginique from France, friends Sophie and Katherine from Canada, and solo traveler Noelle from Canada), and decided to book our 3 day, 2 night tour into the Amazon jungle for the next morning. I didn´t really care for the tour guide from the company Amazon Adventures, Wilfred, who seemed overly direct and like he wasn´t the best communicator, but our group argued for a super cheap deal of 80 soles per day or $27.66, so we all agreed.

The next day, we woke up at 8am to leave our backpacks at the tour company, and then drove for an hour and a half to a little village called Nauta just south of Iquitos. We got on a motor boat, and then cruised for another hour and a half to a camp, where we had lunch of rice, fish and fried plantains. At around 2pm, we set off in a smaller canoe-type boat, and searched for animals for a few hours. We saw a few giant sloths in the trees, as well as butterflies, bats, all kinds of birds and a few monkeys. The jungle was beautiful and the wáter of the Amazon was super wide, slow and brown, like no other river I´ve ever seen! At one point we saw 3 pink dolphins swimming in the cross-section of two flows of wáter, so we stopped and got to swim with them! It was so fun, and I was proud of myself that I was able to temporarily conquer my phobia of snakes (including wáter-dwelling anacondas) to be able to do it! A few hours later our guide saw another sloth in a tree, and he actually scurried up the tree to bring it down for us! Probably not the most environmentally friendly action, but it was fun nevertheless to take my picture holding a sloth, which looked like a muppet up close. :) We then went cruising along the river for another few hours to see the sunset, and I swear that the whole time, I felt like I was lost in a surreal dream. I kept having to glance at the map of the earth on my flower tattoo to remember, ¨I´m in South America right now.¨ The jungle just looked so much like the other jungles I´ve seen in Belize, Guatemala, Fiji, and Thailand, and I felt really confused about where in the world I was! We went back for dinner in the evening, and later went out for another 2 hours from 9pm-11pm, and the sound of the motor made me doze off to sleep. Drifting in and out of consciousness, I again felt like I was lost in a serene dream… little did I know that my adventure in the jungle would soon turn into the worst nightmare of my life.


Although I slept peacefully for 2 hours in an uncomfortable and wet position on a rocking boat, I didn´t get any sleep that night because Sophie next to me was sick and kept tossing and turning, and it was pretty humid and uncomfortable on our tiny beds, even though we had bednets to protect us from the mosquitos. The next day I had a small breakfast of an egg, an apple and a banana, before we set out to a more deep area of the jungle about a 3 hour boat ride away. I was really scared that we were planning on sleeping in hammocks with bednets in the jungle, since I was already close enough to the snakes and didn´t want to risk seeing any up close and freaking out and having it ruin my trip. But everyone with me really wanted to explore the jungle, so I figured it was a good opportunity for me to just deal with my phobia and not let it affect me. On the way there, I spied a huge 3-4 foot snake swimming across the river in front of us with its head out of the water, and screamed out enough expletives to let the rest of the group know just how huge my phobia is. :)

(Note: To those of you reading this who don´t know me well, my phobia of snakes has been something I´ve dealt with since I was 18, and I even had therapy in college to try and get over it. I planned my RTW trip around not having to deal with snakes, i.e. deciding to stay in snake-free New Zealand for one month vs. snake-infested Australia for one week, and my biggest fear about South America has always been the number of snakes that can kill me in one second. So it was a REALLY big deal for me to even want to go to the Amazon jungle, let alone deal with what I´m about to tell you!)


We arrived at a small sandy area of the jungle at around 1pm. Although we were all hungry for lunch, the guide told us that the weather was iffy, so it would be best if we snacked on bananas, pineapples and bread and just set out on our 1-3 hour hike, and promised us a big dinner when we got back to camp. Putting on our rubber boots (for all the wáter we would have to cross through, in addition to protecting our feet in case we step on a venemous snake, frog or spider... ugh!), I asked our guide if we would need a rain jacket, and he said no. So we all set off into the jungle at about 1:30pm, without hardly any food, a small bottle of wáter each, and no emergency equipment. Can you tell where this story is headed yet?


For the first two hours of machete-hacking our way through the dense bush, I was terrified out of my mind, jumping and saying terrible words under my breath at every twisted branch, leathered leaf and bright green or red tree root that resembled a snake. As I had learned the previous day in the zoo, there are tons of snakes in the Amazon jungle that can kill you with one single bite, and my imagination played tricks on me so that I literally saw them in my head everywhere I looked. I made Virginique walk in front of me, because she was so careful to hold branches back for me and warn me for holes in the ground, as we trudged forward. I was in my usual ¨Cassie state of fear¨ mode, where I jump and scream at every little thing that moves in a 15 foot radius, but dealt with it nevertheless.

After a few hours of hiking I finally started to feel comfortable, and even surprised myself that I was having fun. We came upon a palm tree and our guides had us chop it down, so we could eat the heart of palm for dinner. It was about 3pm and we had walked for about two hours, so I wanted to go back after that, but the guide didn´t ask us what we wanted to do, so we continued forward. After about 20 minutes it began to rain, and then a half hour later we asked our guides how far back it was, and they said an hour. I was pretty surprised, since I thought we were closer, and went with the flow. Another 30 minutes later, it was nearing 4pm, and we knew it would be dark at 6:30pm, so we again asked them how much farther. Lulu kind of snapped at the guide-- ¨I´m about to get my period, I´m hungry and tired, and I´m about to kill you if we don´t go back now! Are you lost?¨ They said no, and I tried to help the group be calm, since I didn´t really care about eating-- just wanted to stay safe from snakes. Right after this happened, the folks up front actually came across a boa, and I began to freak out, but thank goodness they killed it and tossed it where I couldn´t see it. Finally, it was 4:30pm, and the light was beginning to disperse unevenly so there weren´t shadows, and the guides admitted that they were a bit disoriented. We couldn´t believe it. They said because of the rain and the light, they had lost their way, and they just needed to examine the virtually stagnant water to see which way it was running, since that would tell them where the big river it was running to was. Are you kidding me??!


I really couldn´t believe it when it was 5pm, would be dark at 6pm and impossible to walk at 6:30pm, and we were lost in the jungle, like 6 hours from the nearest tiny village via canoe. All I could think about is ¨ what happens if someone gets bitten by a snake and we can´t deal with it for another day?¨ Having just been to the Amazon zoo, I knew every type of crazy scary animal that might creep up on us-- jaguars, wild cats, 20 foot anacondas, coral snakes, poison dart frogs, venemous spiders, you name it. We came close together in a tight line and continued to slowly walk as the light disappeared, and before we knew it, it was 6:15pm and impossible to walk any further. Thank goodness everyone in the group but me was a smoker, since we used their lighters to walk up hill toward a little clearing, where there weren´t as many trees and you could somewhat see the night sky, and we had a few logs to sit on. Our guide Wilfred wanted to go look for the river with his assistant guide Hugo, but our group wouldn´t let them both leave, saying we didn´t want to be left alone. At the time, I still had complete trust in their competence since they´d so far protected me from the snakes, so I wanted them to both look and hopefully find the way more quickly, but the group won and Wilfred stayed with us. 20 minutes later, Hugo returned, saying he still hadn´t found the river, and we´d have to wait until either the moon was bright enough to let him look for the river, or we´d have to wait until the morning. Although it had just rained and everything around us-- our clothes and bodies included-- was soaking wet, they chopped down a tree with the machete to make a fire. Slowly building it up with bigger and bigger pieces of wood, we began to peel off our clothes and dry them, as well as our hands and our feet. I watched myself shift from irrational fear of snakes to rational terror of spending a night in the Amazon jungle with no food, water, rain jacket or insect repellent... thinking ¨well THIS is what real fear is.¨ Cuddling beside Virginique and Katherine on a log, we quietly agreed that this was the most scared we´d ever been. I had already been quiet and morose for the hike, but I now let myself slip into a silent, knowing sense of what it would be like to die, like a prisoner must feel when waiting for the gallows. Although I said a few prayers for safety and return, my mind constantly raced on and on about how I was too young to die, there´s so many things I still need to accomplish in my life, and how if I was ironically the one to be bitten by a snake or eaten by a jaguar, I wanted to tell my fellow travelers to tell all my friends and family that I loved them.  Whereas while hiking Mt. Kilimanjaro, I consistently thought ¨I have to make it so I can tell people that I accomplished my goal,¨ this time I was thinking ¨I have to make it because I´m too young to die and have too much to accomplish still.¨ My worst fear in the world had actualized, and I was literally in Cassie Hell, not knowing how or whether I would survive.

It was by far the worst night of my life. The hours passed super slowly, as we stood, sat and lied down by the fire, slowly engaging in bouts of conversation and then silence. Sophie, Noelle and Josh had stomach cramps, and poor Lulu was at risk of a bladder infection because she didn´t have enough water to drink. The guides cut down palm fronds for us to rest upon, but the mosquitoes and fire ants pretty much ate us alive. Virginique and Josh were both wearing sleeveless shirts, and those of us lucky enough to be wearing long pants found that the damn mosquitoes could bite us through that too. I was scared out of my mind that a coral snake would bite me, or we´d spy a pair of gleaming cat eyes not too far from our fire, and I would die. At around 10pm I finally found a comfortable spot on the ground by the fire lying on my side with my head on a log, and was lucky enough to be next to the guide and Laurent, with Noelle alternating from lying on my thighs and spooning me. We were all sort of cuddled up like that till about 1am, slapping at mosquitoes and scratching at the fire ants, when it began to pour. The guides had decided to wait it out till morning, since they said there would be light at 4 or 5am, and we were finally completely dry, so the rain was devastating. We tried to hide under palm fronds, but it literally poured a massage-strength shower for an hour and a half. We were soaked to the bone and freezing, but there was nothing we could do but sit by the dwindling fire, deal with the heavier onslaught of mosquitos, and keep our faces dry with the leaves. It slightly let up at 3am, but continued to drizzle nonstop. At 4am we burned our guide´s boots so the rubber would make the mosquitos go away, which didn´t really do anything but make us breathe in nasty air. We tried to catch water from the leaves into our empty bottles, but even that tasted like smoke and was filled with dead mosquitoes. 

At 5am it was still virtually pitch black, and the time somehow slowed down again just because we knew we were close to being able to leave our spot and search for the camp. A grueling 45 minutes later, our guide said we were ready to look, and we again got into a huge fight about where to go. The guides knew there was a big stream down the hill that would lead to the river, but they wanted to look up the hill just to find an easier path that wouldn´t require any fording. My friends were yelling that we should just look for the river, and I finally exploded at them, saying even though our guides were incompetent, I wanted to go with them because they knew more about what they were doing than them, and we should just stop arguing. Finally we set off down the hill toward the river, and crossed a big stream with a bit of balancing on a log... and wouldn´t you know it, we came upon the camp! It was a freaking 10 minutes walk from where we had spent our sleepless night! We hugged and kissed and danced in the rain we were so happy to be back safe, and I just kept muttering over and over, ¨I´m alive! I can´t believe we freaking survived!¨ I think I´m still coming out of shock about the whole, traumatizing experience.


Not having slept for 2 nights in a row, I passed out for virtually our whole ride home, on 2 separate two-hour boat rides and then our car ride back to Iquitos. My friends were irate and discussing all the ways we should make the company pay for putting our lives at risk, but I just wanted to forget about the whole experience and let bygones be bygones, still believing that it´s a mistake that could happen to anyone. When we got back to Iquitos and finally sat down to explain to our guide´s boss exactly what happened, it finally became clear to me just how crazy their incompetence and negligence was. They refunded us 110 soles of our 240 sole expense, or just under half of the $80 we paid, and we wrote bad recommendations for them before heading back to our hostels for dinner and sleep.


Today, I got to hang out with everyone a bit before leaving Iquitos, and we gathered information from our hostels and other sources to find out that our tour company-- Amazon Adventures-- was really bad. Apparently our guide wasn´t even a real guide, but a salesman, and on a previous trip, they took a lone German girl into the jungle for a drug-induced Shaman experience, and she was raped. While we became more angry through sharing these types of stories, we also realized that we got what we paid for, since the tour was so cheap. We all have a slight fever from having wet feet for two days straight, and other than that I´m just kind of still in shock that I freaking survived a night of being lost in the Amazon jungle. It was definitely my worst nightmare, but I also like to think that I learned something... to be grateful for my life, and I guess what doesn´t kill you only makes you stronger. Like for example, I firmly have decided that I want a pet boa when I´m home, so that I can finally conquer my snake phobia. I think I´ll name her Rosa, after the rose-colored dolphins I swam with in the Amazon. :) And she´ll be a tribute to the snake we had to kill in the jungle, so that I could make it through the worst night of my life with at least a shred of dignity, haha. 


As for the rest of my trip in Peru, I´m now back in Lima, and ready to head to the south tomorrow to surf down sand dunes, before heading on to Bolivia for a whole new host of adventures. In the future I will make sure that I pay the proper price for any tour that I book, and let people know exactly who I´m with and where I´m going if it´s a potentially sketchy situation. And I guess at the very least, it makes for a great story... I hope you´ve enjoyed the story more than I enjoyed the experience!