Welcome to the Jungle, baby!
We’ve discovered that the more you ask around, the more varied the answers you get are. The road from Chachapoyas to Pedro Ruiz is closed from 6am to 6pm everyday, making getting out of Leymebamba a pain, unless you want to spend another full day in Chacha (which we do NOT). Talking to one of our students the other day, she mentioned that the road is open on Sundays! We double checked the info around town and some said it’s open, some said it’s closed. We made our escape plan and spent Saturday packing and saying our good-byes. Luckily the new volunteer arrived and we were able to give her pointers and a tour of town (note to all: the only green vegetables in Leymebamba are found uphill from the cemetery by a nice guy named Max. I bought his spinach crop in one day, but he also has swiss chard and broccoli. Score!) In the morning I taught Cely (the only good cook/restaurant in town, also one of our students) how to make tofu and her family loved it! They ate it raw with honey from sugar cane. I also taught her how to make coconut milk and she treated us to lunch.
So, another kink in our plans surfaced as the usual 3am/5am bus out of town doesn’t happen on Sundays. The big market in Yerba Buena throws everything off and we bargained for a shared taxi to the market (1 hour, sl. 4 per person) and then found a combi to Chachapoyas (2 hrs, sl.8 per person). We arrived in Chacha, once again (but luckily not all day) and our bus driver told us he was going to Pedro Ruiz, but wanted to stop and have lunch and we could leave our packs strapped to the roof and to meet him in 30 minutes. We trusted this man, went and had lunch, came back to the plaza 45 minutes later (peruvian time, folks) and sat on the bench for 20 minutes. I was trying not to freak out that all our stuff was gone and people were buying our underwear in another town…but Matt wrote down his license plate number and we just waited. Matt took off and went to look for the combi station while I waited in the plaza, and as usual, within 5 minutes of him gone, the guy showed up! So eventually we were all reunited and inside the combi to leave town…but not yet. We went to the driver’s house to get his family (and they do NOT live in town). Then we went to get his friend and his family, then a stop at the drugstore and a stop at the market and finally (less than an hour later) we were on the road.
We got to see the construction they are doing that makes the road inaccessible 6 days out of 7. They are making one narrow dirt road into 2 lanes and most of it involves blasting at a mountain. When almost everyone uses hand tools, this will be quite a long project. But the scenery is beautiful and there’s a few caves to go through. Sooo we ended up in Pedro Ruiz, where the big bus companies pass through who knows when. You just have to wait on the road and flag them down and if there’s room in them, they’ll let you on. Matt did a little investigative work and we instead took a shared taxi to Nueva Cajamarca (with a child sleeping on my shoulder most of the ride) and then a combi to Moyobamba. The guide book says the big bus takes 5 hours (steep switchbacks, narrow roads) but in the car we were in Nva. Cajamarca in 3 hours and 30 minutes later in Moyobamba.
So now we are in Moyobamba, enjoying the jungle. It is a humid here, but not too bad and I’ve only seen a few mosquitoes. (We’re taking the malaria pills…it’s a risk zone) Moyobamba’s a pretty big town with a movie theater and lots of stores with modern clothing. We’ve been eating lately at the Olla de Barro, which has a lot of jungle-style food like ocopa (a creamy peanut sauce on potatoes), cocona juice (sweet but refreshing, it looks like a giant persimmon) aguaje juice (ok…kind of chicha like but looks like giant lychees). And they have lasagna that’s not only vegetarian, but has broccoli, mushrooms and hearts of palm in it. Hooray!
We’ve been hiking around town, looking at miradors and botanical gardens (lots of pretty orchids and bromeliads). We visited a coffee factory (Rio Mayo) and took a tour and drank some good coffee (me! liking coffee!). We made it to the hot springs today, which I’m happy to say is all outdoors and there’s about 5 pools with varying temperature of hot water, some pipes cascading cold water and 2 lukewarm pools. It’s quite beautiful and they have a semi olympic pool (it was drained) and a jungle gym as well. There’s a restaurant (all meat) and it’s only sl. 1 (30 cents us) to get in and soak. It’s sl. 1 more to rent a locker, which is necessary. It costs sl.3 to take a mototaxi there from town, or you could walk…it’s pleasant and an orchid preserve and the coffee factory are on the way. So it was beautiful and relaxing (except for the typical extremely loud non-stop cumbia music and my bathroom experience (you thought this post would be without a rant…ha!): I went to the bathroom to pee and there was a hand written sign that says I have to pay, but no one manning the door (all I knows is that it’s a guest making money)…so screw that, i go in, pee, get out and a woman is walking towards me demanding money. All I’m wearing is my bikini and I point to myself, how shall I pay you? oh, i keep change in my top….please. and she was like, you have to pay and I told her I’m not paying to pee. Why can’t they up the entrance fee by 10 cents or something and let people use the bathroom? A situation like that only ENCOURAGES people to pee in the pool…which I hope no one was doing…but I also didn’t see anyone else going to the bathroom while I was there. The place is set back in the forest, at least there’s plenty of trees to use if the bathroom police gets too pushy. But I’m proud to say I didn’t pay her and I didn’t get beat up or yelled at. But really, that irritates me. You pay to enter then you have to pay for a hole to pee in?! Ok, I’ll stop talking about el orinar.) There was this lovely woman at least 90 years old at the springs, hobbling between the hot water and cold water. She made me smile, as well as the butterflies doing their thing around the pools. There was a tiny tunnel between two pools (for the water to pass through) and at one point a guy surfaced! He shimmied through the tunnel which was about 10 feet long but 10 feet under the ground…and it’s all hot water! We didn’t try his stunt, but I was impressed.
Moyobamba is a pretty town and we’re enjoying it a lot. Tomorrow we’ll head to one of the waterfalls (more swimming!) and go to Tarapoto, deeper into the jungle. The newness of travelling is upon us once again.