Tarapoto and Nuevo Loreto (Andrew)

Last week we took our first “business trip” in Peru that didn’t start out on a boat. We, with our friend Pam, headed to the Iquitos airport on Friday. Due to a lucky twist of timing, we had the experience of seeing what happens when one of the famous soccer teams from Lima comes to play a rare game in Iquitos. We passed the crowd circling one of the plazas, but they caught up with us at the airport with horns honking, giant flags waving and bells ringing. It looked like this game was going to be much more exciting than the international match we saw. The security guards, however, didn’t look nearly as excited.

We arrived in Tarapoto in the dark just as the rain was hitting, and after launching ourselves into the pickup truck sent to pick us up at the airport, we arrived at our hostel, La Patarashca. It continued to rain hard the first night, so it wasn’t until the second night that we discovered that we were across the street from Tarapoto’s loudest bar. But there was a great little courtyard with rainforest plants and a leaf-thatched roof over a patio which was great for catching up on some of our work. There were also a couple parrots that started chatting at 6 in the morning, but we liked everything else so much (including the price) that we stayed through the weekend and into the week. We tried to visit a nearby waterfall on Sunday, which is often listed as one of the most interesting things to do around Tarapoto. Unfortunately, we got halfway there to discover that President Alan Garcia was visiting so they had blocked the road.

The purpose of our trip was to meet with an organization called the Centro de Conservación, Investigación, y Manejo de Areas Naturales (CIMA) which administers the Parque Nacional Cordillera Azul. The park itself spans the border of 4 Peruvian departments. CIMA works with 89 communities around the park to determine the amount of their resource use and implement monitoring and control for the park. Since PROCREL wants to do similar things, we wanted to talk with some of their staff and join them on a trip to a community where they are implementing a newer version of the social survey we used for a model when developing one for PROCREL.

We left in the wee hours of Thursday morning, throwing our stuff in the back of a Toyota 4WD pickup truck and cramming ourselves in the backseat. We met our equivalent in the CIMA organization, a guy from Spain now studying in New Zealand, who is here doing graduate research for a few months. The first part of the journey turned out to be the most dangerous, as we passed through an area where the road had been cut out of the cliffs and several couch-sized boulders had found their way onto the asphalt. The asphalt eventually ended, and the next hour took us over bone-jarring stretch of gravel roads until we reached a tiny town on the edge of a river. We were supposed to pick up two more team members, but they took one look at all the people in our vehicle and decided to go on their own with a motorbike. After fording the river, the road turned to clay, and even though it hadn’t rained for nearly a week, parts of it were still pretty muddy and rutted out. We were grateful for the abilities of both our truck and the driver. But even they couldn’t get us through our next obstacle- two log trucks and a giant bulldozer/monster-machine blocking the path (see videos). And that was before they dropped another tree across the road! Eventually, the monster hauled up the lost cargo, pulled out the trucks, and pushed the new tree out of the way so we were only stuck for an hour and half or so.

The town of Nuevo Loreto is reminiscent of our home communities in a few ways (houses clustered around soccer fields, lots of kids and chickens), but very different in most others (mountains looming all around, new crops, roads instead of rivers). The community was bigger, and had several sawmills working around the clock to produce furniture and better-constructed houses. The people were friendly, although like any new community we go into for the first time, it’s hard to connect with anyone outside our group of visitors. When the sun was out, tarps covered with cacao and rice would mysteriously appear in spots between buildings to dry out the harvest. Little kids led horses around and there were a few more pigs tied up in backyards. Once again we slept on a porch, although with a tent this time, but instead of music going until late in the evening, it started at 3:30am and went until dawn. Between that and the wall clock which played a song at the top of every hour, I was not a happy camper. The actual social inventory started the next day at the school, which was empty because the kids were celebrating “Flag Day”- which celebrates a noble (ie pointless) sacrifice of a Peruvian flag-bearer in the war against Chile. The inventory dialogues involved representatives from several neighboring communities and went for the full day and most of the next morning. We learned a lot from the process and got interesting ideas for new activities, although we came away with the feeling that the methodology we came up with is better suited for the circumstances of our organization.

We returned in the truck to Tarapoto without too much more excitement (only 1 bag fell off). When we stumbled into the hotel with sore lower halves and dusty bags, the uniformed attendants looked a little surprised. The last day in the city passed uneventfully as we recovered and waited until our late evening departure (we had built in some extra time in case of road delays). This time, there was no direct flight, so we spent the few hours of our layover on the couch graciously offered to us by Pam’s Aunt in Lima and arrived back in Iquitos at 7 the next morning. It was a fun trip, but we're glad to be back home for our last 3 weeks as we wrap things up.