Last week, I finally had a chance to visit Tapiche Ohara’s Reserve, and spend a week there at the lodge with a nice Dutch couple who had been staying at the hostel. My partner in the hostel, Tucandeira, is the manager of the lodge and also the chief guide. But Tucan could not make the trip that week, so I went instead to serve as translator.
I’ve been meaning to make the trip for a long time, and while it’s quite a journey to get down there (twelve hours by fast boat to get from Iquitos to Requena and finally up the Tapiche river to the lodge), but it was well worth it. Tapiche Ohara’s Reserve encompasses some 3,800 acres (1,500 hectares) of pristine, protected rainforest, including at least five distinct ecosystems. There’s a lot to see. The jungle is massive!
the lodge at Tapiche Ohara’s Reserve
And it contains so many wonders, such incredible creatures of strange variety, each with its own ingenious set of adaptations to its environment. Anyone who doubts the logic of natural selection should take a trip to the deep jungle. Every niche in every corner of the jungle is occupied by a creature specially designed to fill it. And all things are food for something else, ourselves included. Every moment of the day and night, the jungle devours itself, over and over, and all creatures within it evolve to escape death a day at a time. It teems and seethes with life and spills over with it everywhere you look. To spend a few hours walking through the jungle is to experience oneself as an alien visitor to the far side of a strange paradise.
The resident guide at the lodge, Segundo, lives there with his wife. He and his brothers, who live with their families just around the bend of the river, are indigenous Matses. Segundo proved to be an excellent guide. It was quickly obvious that he was wired into the jungle on a neural level, plugged into the subtle nuances of sight and sound and attentive to every hint of movement, every whisper and rustle of branches. He was our eyes and ears. He pointed out a host of creatures that we never would have seen. As we walked through different ecosystems, Segundo would imitate the sounds and songs of different animals, and many of them answered him, including a black caiman, to our amusement. He grunted at it, and after a pause, a low guttural dinosaur groan came from across the lagoon. Later, in the night, he would catch both caiman and fish by hand from the boat.
Segundo doing a little night fishing
The Reserve was particularly rich in bird life. We saw several dozen varieties during our stay, and Segundo identified them all. Their Spanish names—camungo, picaflor, ayaymama, huapapa, tuhuayo, shansho, buduc!– have a lovely lilt to them; the names themselves are like poetry.
On that first day’s walk, we saw tracks of the sachavaca (tapir) but never the animal itself, which gets up to 500 pounds but is quite shy. The undergrowth of the primary forest where we walked was shot through with butterflies slashing among the foliage like shooting stars. Most butterflies only have a few weeks to live in their mature form, and they seemed to be making the most of it. We ate fruit off the ground that had been cast down that morning by herds of grazing monkeys, and later we came across a little fleet of squirrel monkeys making their leisurely way through the canopy, maybe forty of them, pausing to peer down at us with quizzical expressions.
the mata mata, possibly the world’s weirdest turtle.
Back by the river, we saw turtles called taricaya, as well as an ancient one known as mata mata, and egrets and herons and hawks, and many dolphins. The Tapiche is practically crowded with pink and grey dolphins. I have never seen so many in my life, nor been so close to them. Segundo said that they had lairs beneath shelves under the water, and that they left to go hunting for fish during the day. At dusk, right from the lodge, you could see them headed back home, one after the other down a lane in the middle of the river, in no particular hurry, kind of drifting along with the current, almost as though they were commuting home from their workday. At night, when we would cut the engine and drift along in the current, they would reveal themselves when they surfaced and breathed through their blowholes, sounding exactly like a swimmer who has come up for a breath of air. At night, when all else is quiet, it’s quite funny to hear this sound right behind you.
Another day’s walk was a long trail through an aguajal—a stand of enormous aguaje trees. The aguajal was damp and boggy and choked in lianas and interwoven fingers of renaco trees. The aguaje fruits are a favorite snack across many species in the jungle. and I collected several dozen ripe ones that the monkeys had tossed away, and ate them myself. So yes, I ate the discarded leftovers of some monkey’s brunch, and they were delicious. Segundo pointed out a bird called in Spanish ‘Victor Diaz,’ so named because its song is an onomonopeia. I thought that was great.
There were many scattered stands of acai palms as well, and from the reference book at the lodge I learned that the botanical name of the acai palm, Euterpe precatoria (Martius, 1823) was named by him as an homage to Euterpe, who is one of the nine Muses of classical antiquity. She’s the Muse of music, and so not surprising that, while all of Zeus’ daughters were hot, she was a total knockout. She was known as the ‘giver of delight.’ The elegant aspect of the acai palm inspired Martius to that tribute, and an excellent one it is. And I’m willing to bet he never even tried an acai smoothie, which is also a giver of delight.
Another day’s walk took us five hours, starting at dawn, through an ancient primary growth forest of truly incredible variety. We saw a great many fruit trees, but not much fruit. Segundo said that a lot of them, the uvos and charihuelos, anona and grenadilla, would not start fruiting until November. Along this trail were more resonant, poetically named trees. I repeated them to myself as we walked along: caoba, cedro, capirona, renaco, remo caspi, capinuri, tanaranga (don’t touch!) We passed an absolutely massive ojé tree, a couple hundred years old at least. It has a caustic, milky sap that can be drunk to eliminate all parasites and worms in the body. The fingers supporting its trunk ran along the ground in all direction and snaked out of sight through the undergrowth.
There were several grand old caucho (rubber) trees along the way as well, and you could see from the grooves in the bark where, many decades before, very likely during the Rubber Boom, the trees had been harvested repeatedly for their rubber. Segundo, smiling, pointed out that the men who had done this had been dead for some time, the harvested rubber long interred to some distant landfill, but the trees themselves were still around.
A living veteran of the rubber boom
But the pinnacle of the day’s walk, for me, was the sight of a 200 year old lupuna tree, one of the crowning giants of all the Amazon, with a footprint as big as a cottage, and fruit bats living among its crevices. It was absolutely enormous, so big that photographs did it no justice, as it wouldn’t even fit within the camera’s frame. It resonated like a drum when you slapped the fins of its long wooden knuckles. It was a patrician, an aristocrat among trees, rising sternly into the canopy and gazing all about with noble bearing and excellent posture.
Lupuna: even taller than Dutch people.
The trail led ultimately to an enormous lagoon that struck me as prehistoric, almost outside of time altogether, where black caimans shared space with huge paiche, the largest fish in the Amazon. I passed the time hunting little frogs and bugs while Segundo barked at the caimans and the Dutch couple rested by the lagoon in repose.
It was then that I began to really look closely, when my gaze slowed nearly to a stop. Everywhere I looked, when I looked long enough, I eventually saw something. And some of the creatures I found hidden in plain sight were astonishing in their mastery of camouflage.
There were these moths tucked into a nook in the lupuna. I didn’t even see them at first.
There was this praying mantis, who was stealthy as a ninja. I didn’t see him until he moved.
There was this cicada, who had a great camo pattern on its wings, the photo here doesn’t really do it justice.
But the creature that really blew my mind, out of everything I saw, was this little tree frog. Segundo spotted it, I never would have seen it, and he said it was very rare to see one, as they are notoriously difficult to spot in the wild. You can see why. This photo was taken when we first walked by. Can you see it?
Nature loves to hide.
Here’s a closer look:
The little frog hopped around to the other side of the tree, and in the direct light you can really see the ingenuity of its camouflage, in texture and coloration:
Finally, Segundo picked it up so I could get a more detailed shot contrasted against a neutral background. Simply amazing. I am admittedly a total geek for all things camouflage, but encountering this frog in the wild was like meeting Yoda for the first time. Master… I didn’t recognize you!
And of course, if Jedi mastery of mimicry is not your thing, and all else fails, you can always just stand someplace where they can’t see you…
maybe not the greatest hiding place…
I have many other examples of this, I took hundreds of photos, the wealth of discovery in the Amazon really made me feel like a kid again, seeing new forms of life with fresh eyes and enchanted by wondering what else is out there. When I returned to civilization after a week, it felt like a very short amount of time to be gone, but I was energized and refreshed.
The rainforest has the privilege of evolving in geologic time. We are not accustomed to seeing the results of such prolonged efforts and exposure, in the prefab world that society has constructed for itself. The Amazon has had nothing but time to hammer and plane out the specifics of its forms, and time is really the key to it all—so many of those plants and animals do resemble a kind of aesthetic perfection to my eye, in the way each fills its niche.
Seeing the whole tableau up close feels like taking a tour of God’s own laboratory, and I don’t know where you’re more likely to encounter such an intriguing variety of life forms up close. To conceive of the forces at work behind such staggering biodiversity is difficult for me to put into words. Darwin really was the great prophet of our age, the bearer of the torch at noon. And he was a devout Christian. I totally get that. Darwin saw no contradiction there and neither do I. Bearing witness to those preternatural, non-Euclidean jungle landscapes simply makes me want to point and say, look! Just look at it! It’s so very like paradise. How magnificently skilled is the slow and steady hand of the Designer!
I occasionally startled myself with the thought that, on a planetary scale, all these creatures are in fact our neighbors. I don’t care if that sounds trite or sentimental or makes me sound like a tree-hugger. For me it had the force of revelation.
Having returned from this alien land, or rather this land in which I was the visiting alien, the problems of the world as well as the problems in my personal life now seem scaled to their proper proportions once again. Yes, the Middle East is afire with anti-Western vitriol, my native land is bitterly divided against itself, people everywhere are suffering, and the world’s in a hell of a state. All of it will fade. The curtain will close on all those petty human dramas, and today’s crises will be swallowed up whole and forgotten tomorrow in the epochal time of that elemental wilderness, provided we do not destroy it first.
Jungle Love 