Fire and water

There was a fire in my bedroom last night. Most other places, that would be the start of a pretty lively sort of story - but in Ecuadorian haciendas, it just means that when you return to your room after dinner, there's a crackling wood fire to greet you and accompany your falling asleep. Plus another hot-water bottle - which was warm all night and still pleasant company in the morning. Heaps better than an electric blanket. I'm really tempted to go retro when I get back home.

What with all that, and perfect freshly-cooked pancakes for breakfast, and a roaring fire in the lounge as I passed through it, I was rather reluctant to leave Hacienda Cusín this morning - but duty called. First I visited Otavalo, a market town I thought I had been to before, but hadn't. The Poncho Market isn't just ponchos, it's all sorts of textiles, woven, embroidered and printed, plus hats and belts and such, manned (and womaned) mostly by indigenous people, who David was at pains to convince me are no different economically from other Ecuadorians, apart from their traditional dress. Certainly those on the streets and behind the wheels of their cars looked as affluent as anyone, and as attached to their phones.

The food market was a lot more of a cliché though, with pig's heads, beef tripe, hearts and lungs, and chickens' heads and feet piled up or draped over things like some PETA nightmare. The town is pretty, though, colourful and clean, and very lively - much like, on a smaller scale, Cotacachi which specialises in leather work, of excellent quality and reasonable prices: everything from purses and stylish jackets to Western saddles, chased and studded and a snip at $1200. This town is, unexpectedly, a favourite with adventurous retirees from Canada and the US, who come for the cheap living, equable climate and free health care.

We had lunch today! At Cayambe, the specialty it sends all over Ecuador: biscoche, crisp buttery biscuits that I saw being made with lightning speed and baked in a pizza oven. Delicious, even if I wasn't able to try the option of dipping them into dulce de leche - though probably a good thing for my cholesterol levels.

And now I'm at the Thermas Papallacta, up in the Andes again with cloud swirling around the tops of the volcanoes, relaxed after my wallow in the pool right outside my garden cottage and waiting for dinner in a chair by yet another fire, half-listening to the soap opera an American woman is watching avidly on her tablet nearby, occasionally muttering comments to herself like "She's so not into him!"

I meet my hero, in the stone

After what turned out to be an entirely unnecessarily prompt start this morning - thanks for nothing, Latin Tours guide David - I did another repeat city tour, this time of Quito. It's a city of 3 million, at an altitude of 3000 metres and, confined by the topography, 75km long and 7 wide (David is big on numbers). It's been here a long time and has the usual four-part Latin American history of pre-Inca, Inca, colonisation and independence. They seem particularly touchy about the colony thing here and insist that they speak Castilian, not Spanish.

We visited, of course, plazas and churches: the Compañia de Jesus one is completely gold inside, 10 tonnes of leaf they reckon, and judging by the one shiny side nave they had to restore after a fire, when it was all new it must have been totally dazzling. Though actually they were all ornate and colourful, restraint and religion as ever strangers to each other, at least as far as the Catholics are concerned (95% of the population practising Catholics here, says David).

Then we popped up the hill for a closer look at South America's second-most significant religious statue (thanks, David): the aluminium Virgin Mary with her wings and chain, standing on a snake. Last time I thought her odd stance suggested that she was just about to hurl a frisbee, but now - perhaps as a result of the recent unpleasantness at Ollantaytambo - she looks more to me as though she's suffering from the after-effects of an unwise food choice.

Then, today's high point, we went to the Middle of the World (as opposed to Middle Earth): latitude 00°00'00". Back in 1735 the French sent a Geodesic Expedition here to establish exactly that, and I read all about it in The Map-Maker's Wife which I reviewed by chance years ago, and developed a schoolgirl crush on unlikely hero Charles Marie de la Condamine - so it was a bit of a thrill to go to where he and his colleagues decided the very spot was, and to see his bust next to the monument.

Just a few years ago some spoilsport Canadian came along with his GPS and proved that they were in fact 240 metres out - such wasters, what a let-down, them with their star charts and triangulation - and so there are two sites to visit, the 'real' one a very touristy affair with a dried Amazonian penis fish and a shrunken head amongst other novelties. There is also a series of equator-related experiments to do with water draining down a plug-hole, resistance, gravity and even egg-balancing, which all seemed to me entirely spurious. But David said yes, so there you go.

And now I'm sitting by a fire in the lounge of a 1602 hacienda with painted ceilings, pillars, antiques and chandeliers, tapestries and oil paintings, and a garden outside full of familiar flowers, about to go to bed ready for yet another unjustifiably early start on tomorrow's programme, which will include a market and thermal pools. So David promises.

Love and death

After a morning working industriously, I took a city tour of Lima in the afternoon. It's something I've done before, but it was arranged and the only option was to wander around on my own. That's something I've done before too, blissful in my ignorance of what was actually a fairly dodgy thing to do, since I strayed well outside the affluent district of Miraflores. Having been sternly warned in Iquitos - Iquitos! - about how dangerous Lima is, I came over feeble an allowed myself to be guided by Jean Carlos.

So we started, as usual, at the Park of Love on the edge of the cliff looking down at the surf rolling in from the Pacific, and up at the microlight pilots suddenly blotting out the sunshine as they passed along the edge.  Yes, sunshine! It's unusual in Lima at this (or any) time of year - it's a grey and foggy place normally, which explains the brightly painted buildings throughout the city. It's also amazingly dry - never rains. Well, only 15mm a year, which is pretty much the same thing. The love-lock thing, by the way, seems scarcely to have started here, with just two lonely padlocks on the nearby railings.

Leaving the, frankly, ugly huge statue of two lovers, we drove past Huaca Pallaya, a very much pre-Inca pyramid of mud-brick blocks; and through San Isidro, a blatantly affluent suburb of olive-tree parks, high walls and video surveillance of the mock-Tudor and French-style homes. Then, as a contrast, past Victoria where no rules apply and you can get anything for a (low) price; and into the colonial centre.

Here are squares with fountains and statues surrounded by stately government buildings, the cathedral, churches and people, lots of people including a highly visible, if somewhat bored-looking,  security presence. San Francisco church is obligatory: cloisters, oil paintings, ornate gold-leaf altar and shrines, one of them to the Virgin Mary as a baby. Up above the altar the statue of St Francis is accompanied by a dog, an egret and a mouse, which seems pleasantly even-handed - though he also holds a skull.

Down below are plenty more in the catacombs, thousands of bodies now neatly arranged into bins of femurs, skulls and humerus, sometimes in patterns. Quite bizarre.

And that was Lima, and Peru. Tonight an 11.50pm flight takes me north to Quito.

Goodbye to the Delfin II

It was our last morning on the Delfin II and it started as all the others have: by waking up to a red sun rising over the river, dolphins and people already fishing, and the skiffs waiting to take us on another excursion to spot more birds, and another attempt to pin down a rufous kingfisher in a photo - or, failing that, any other obliging bird.

After breakfast there was something different: up another side river were ponds full of giant water lilies, over a metre across with raised edges, some of them with big white flowers. Impressive, even if the water was stagnant – they don’t like movement.

Across the river was the settlement of Puerto Miguel, where the women make all the dyed straw woven creatures that have been decorating the dining tables on the boat during the cruise, and our bedroom pets (mine has been a large pink and green praying mantis – so much more preferable than the room next to mine, which I saw today has been graced by a huge black tarantula). First though I wandered round the village, where kids were playing boldly (one boy I didn’t see apparently running around with a live snake curled round his neck) or hiding shyly, men were having their hair cut, people swung lazily in hammocks, and sad dogs scratched or struggled. A chicken perched on a wooden grave cross, a fat duck ate a frog, roosters crowed, and modern Western pop music blared incongruously from a wooden hut while Chinese outboard motors made a loud clatter along the water.

Back on board, there was a pisco sour toast where the Marañón and Ucayali Rivers joined to form what Peruvians consider to be the start of the Amazon (don’t ask the Brazilians what they think), 4000km from the sea. Then, at Nauta, we left the Delfin II for the last time and returned to Iquitos, stopping off at a wildlife sanctuary for a too-quick visit to some rescued manatees, slotting water lettuce leaves into their soft, whiskery muzzles. Lovely, gentle creatures, they are killed for food by the jungle people; but they are being educated not to.

With time to fill in before our flights, the Delfin people sent two of us on a city tour. Iquitos has 600,000 inhabitants and in the rubber boom years of 1880-1920 was awash with money, but now it’s much decayed, the Portuguese glazed tiles on the outside of colonial buildings cracked and dirty, the streets rowdy with thousands of motorbikes and motorbike taxis, litter in the broken gutters, people everywhere on the streets, graffiti scrawled on the lime-green, orange and turquoise-painted walls, and large areas apparently under water in the wet season. 

Even Gustave Eiffel's building here - made, it seemed, entirely out of metal - looked down-at-heel; but out on the river at the floating restaurant with its floating swimming pool and cooling breeze, it was really very pleasant, and the food was good. And Edward, met on the return ferry trip, was friendly and welcoming. It's an odd place, though: a real frontier town with, to me, an unsafe feel, but certainly with its own particular buzz. Where else would you see a unicyclist juggling three pretend machetes in the middle of the road, holding up a block's-worth of motorcycle traffic on a Sunday night?

Oh, and El Condor Pasa, naturally

No, sorry, it was today that was properly teeming. We set off early with our togs on under our clothes and went up the Pacaya River into the Pacaya Samiria Reserve, a huge wetland, biggest reserve in South America, that’s heaving with creatures. There were birds for Africa, if you see what I mean, including a tall jabiru which was trying to swallow a too-big fish that threatened to choke it.

Then we found a pod of pink dolphins also busily feeding, popping above water much less than their marine equivalents, clearly pink in the glimpses we got of them. There was a flock of ungainly hoatzins, like startled chickens with Mohicans, blundering about in a tree overhanging the river. Cormorants, the rabbits of the river, flew straight ahead of the boat, not thinking to turn aside; flocks of green parakeets flew overhead. There were even troupes of spider monkeys, moving fast through the trees.

We breakfasted in the skiffs moored under a big fig tree, served fruit, sandwiches and pastries on woven mats and colourful plates, with glasses of juice and cups of coffees. Even the woven straw decorations weren’t forgotten, tied around the serviettes. Delfin II is style all the way.

And then we got to the lake, where we were assured there were no piranhas or caimans, and most of us leaped in, waving aside the proffered noodles until discovering, almost immediately, how much hard work it is to stay afloat in warm, fresh water; after which we all wrapped them around us and  wallowed with great pleasure in the tannin-stained water.

Then, of course, five minutes after getting back into the boats, we found caimans – not big, but still caimans. No matter, we were pleased to have another photo opportunity. Then we worked on catching a shot of the turtles sunbathing on logs, as we returned to the Delfin II for a “mandatory pre-lunch nap” according to Juan Luís. The rest of the day was equally dedicated to R&R, even the evening skiff excursion a mellow affair centred mainly on the sunset across the water.

After dinner things changed suddenly though: the staff put on a concert of remarkable talent and energy, room attendant Jose the star with his guitar/Pan pipes combo as well as vocals, Pedro the waiter showing great facility with his guitar, the chef turning out in a revealing jungle outfit, and even the captain, warming up on percussion, suddenly finding his mojo and leaping into the spotlight with some very lively dancing. It was fun – and yes, the programme did include ‘Guantanamera’. Of course - what did you expect?

Sharp eyes

Now, this morning, there was teeming. Masses of birds, everywhere, as we glided along a side-river in the skiff; fish jumping out of the water; an actual 3-toed sloth hanging upside down high in a tree; and caimans (caimen?).

These were youngsters, lying low in the water, unblinking, hoping to be left alone; but one, almost a metre long, was scooped up for a photo shoot. Smooth, soft and wet, it lay passively in our hands, no doubt hoping for the best – and it was back in the water just a few minutes later as we continued on our little expedition.

We passed a village of thatched wooden huts on stilts, the women washing dishes in the river, the men untangling catfish from their nets as they sat in dugout canoes, a gaggle of kids standing bare-footed on the muddy bank, staring back at us. There’s not much in the way of education in the jungle.

And then we did some fishing for piranha: bits of tenderloin (nothing but the best) on hooks on bamboo poles, dropped into the brown water and, mostly, pulled out again empty just seconds later. I wondered if it would be more effective to stick a finger in there – but then Juan Luís showed us the large scar on his thumb. Someone else caught one, less than 15cm long, orange and white, and it fell into her backpack. When Luís pulled it out, it had a torn piece of the bag lining in its jaws, its tiny white triangular teeth clamped down hard on the nylon.

I eventually caught a couple, plus a tiny silver angelfish, and we took some back to the boat to eat with our lunch (so much more preferable than the other way around) – they’re actually quite tasty, though the white flesh is very bony.

In the afternoon we set off again on another – well, it’s hard not to call it a game drive, because that’s just what it was, everyone with their eyes peeled trying to be best spotter, but no-one better than the guide and the driver who were quite simply astonishing. How on earth are they able to spot something as well camouflaged as a potoo, which looks exactly like a broken branch, as they’re skimming along the river 75m away at about 25km/h? Phenomenal.

But spot things they did: a three-toed sloth moving branches in cliché slo-mo; a troupe of squirrel monkeys; a single monk saki monkey; a spectacled caiman. It was very impressive, and lots of fun too – especially the catching of the caiman – and just super-pleasant, to be gliding along with all this exotic scenery and wildlife passing by. Excellent work, Delfin II!

Dolphins from the Delfin

It’s bound to be a good day, when you spot a pink dolphin from your loo. The Delfin II was moored this morning at the Clavero Lagoon, just off the Ucayali River. This is a headwater of the Amazon, which begins officially downstream where we turned right from the Marañón River during the night.

There were vultures in the trumpet trees and on the muddy bank, waiting patiently in their full-bottomed wigs for their dinners to decay sufficiently; white egrets gliding gracefully over the water; yellow-tailed orioles darting too fast to photograph; kingfishers, swallows, hawks, flycatchers… We paddled past in the kayaks, then zipped along in the skiff; but best of all was sitting back on deck on the boat as it glided along the wide, wide river. SO relaxing.

There was another pretty and tasty meal, there was a talk, a lifejacket drill, a nap, and then a walk through the muddy jungle in supplied gumboots, spotting wildlife. To be honest, it wasn’t what you’d call teeming – unless you counted the ants and mosquitoes – but Luís was very informative, and it was interesting. He did find us some very cute monkeys, though, peering down at us from their nest high in a tree. And tomorrow? There will be piranha fishing!