Conservation of the Central-East Peruvian Amazon

Captain's Log, Day 138: Pucallpa to Curimana to Bello Horizonte to Esperanza Verde. Motocar, taxi collective, boat, pickup truck, boat, forest walk. Making that journey twice gave me the chance to talk with locals about their lives and how they interact with the forest and animals around them. Researching and experiencing Peru has been an exercise in expanding how bad my impressions of the animal trade can be...

The owners of Esperanza Verde, Olivia and Douwe from Holland, have had over a decade's worth of animal rehabilitation experience in the Amazon. Though we're fairly secluded on the 58-hectare plot that houses the conservation center, talking with the two of them, the locals in Pucallpa and Curimana, and vets I know from Ecuador who have come into contact with trafficked animals from Peru, I've been painting a fairly grim picture of the national wildlife trafficking situation. 

The work that Olivia and Douwe are beginning at Esperanza Verde (a refuge for seized animals and a center for community education on sustainability) is crucial for the surrounding Amazonian communities. Centers that strive towards local involvement and education can really make a big difference for the conservation of the area (bringing new laws and awareness of environmental issues), but as Olivia warns with a decade of experience, such centers can also bring the bad along with the good. So-called 'western' ideals and lifestyles are not so common in this area, so centers like Esperanza Verde can often encourage development and materialism while they speak of sustainable development and the importance of various ecological roles played by Amazonian animals. Olivia and Douwe have not only a comprehensive understanding of the forest and animals they're trying to protect, but they also have a realistic sense of how their work may be perceived, as foreigners to the land. All centers have to be very careful about the messages they're sending to the community, and from what I've seen, Esperanza Verde is doing an excellent job of this.

Conservation is wildly complicated.

As is travel, sometimes. So when I last left off, Genny and I had just gotten into Pucallpa after adventures in passport application in Lima...

This is Maria, Genny and I in a motorcar in Pucallpa. Somehow we managed to fit some 100kg of gear and ourselves into a single one. 

From the motorcar, we hopped a ride with a taxi collective to Curimana. Keep in mind that any postal services, large pharmacies, hospitals, and legal services are in Pucallpa. 

And Curimana is almost three hours away from Pucallpa by taxi....

Extremely packed taxi, when everyone comes from the countryside to do major shopping only once every month or two. 

Genny and I were packed in with three other passengers and the driver. That's my guitar obscuring the photo. 

The roads are pretty wild here...

...and they also have national gas companies here. Unlike Ecuador, the Peruvian government doesn't subsidize petroleum prices, so they're much higher here. 

Sleepy in the heat and humidity. 

There was a lot of slash-and-burn clearing going on along the dirt road to Curimana. 

A handful of smaller towns, turning into villages as we got further from Pucallpa. 

Almost 800km from Lima. Thank goodness. Still trying to get over the shock of the massiveness and poverty of the city...

A lot of agriculture: planted fields and palm oil plantations for miles and miles. 

Everyone had their houses painted with various political ads. This one was the most common. 

A boat from Curimana to a pickup truck we'd take to Bello Horizonte, the village across from Esperanza Verde...

And then we were there. And everyone was speaking...German. What?

Turns out the majority of volunteers are Swiss-German, old friends from the center Olivia and Douwe used to work for in Ecuador, Amazoonico.

The main Esperanza Verde house! 

The main kitchen. The woman in the picture is named Teres--she's been working with Olivia and Douwe in Ecuador and Peru now for some time. She made Zopf and Knopfle the first days we were at the center. 

Genny, translating Harry Potter in the room off the kitchen!

Multi-lingual. Olivia and Douwe's kids, Marlon and Kayla (4 and 9, respectively), speak Dutch, German, Spanish, English...and bits of other languages, as well. It's incredible. 

Where we were housed for our first week at the center! Mosquito nets for our surprisingly comfortable beds in the toolshed-attic. 

Home sweet home. The windows are all netted against the bugs, but they still seem to find Genny somehow. They do love her...

This is Mika, one of the two black-faced capuchin monkeys rescued at the center. 

A bread oven, improved upon by Teres: another layer of reddish tropical clay. 

Laundry hanging out to dry by the trail-clearing machete. 

This is Camilla. She's a cheeky, fearless squirrel monkey. Also rescued by the center. 

The bar and lounging area in the main house. 

Washing clothes!

Kayla, Olivia's daughter, showing me the flood-line in the main house from about a year back. 

Sorry that some of these pictures refused to rotate! Internet cafe problems. Olivia put together these yearbooks for Esperanza Verde. Here are some pictures of the flood. 

So, with the trek that Genny and I took from Pucallpa in mind, try to imagine the work it was for Olivia and Douwe to buy this land, begin to re-plant what had been cleared as ranchland, both find and bring all the necessary construction materials and tools from the city, and then make weekly trips for food....

They really love their work, here. It's a life's passion to work for conservation in the capacity that Douwe and Olivia have chosen, and it's far from easy. Sometimes it can even be far from rewarding. 

Whereas other times, you get to swim with the tapirs you've rescued, and it's more rewarding than you could begin to imagine. 

This is Rinkay, the tapir, when he first arrived to Esperanza Verde. He would have likely been sold and eaten if they had not gotten to him first. 

Camilla as a baby!

Rinkay snuggling with Pepito, the land tortoise. 

Elmo, the two-toed sloth, as a baby. 

Pepito being weighed in the vet's office. 

Esperanza Verde is coming up on its third year of existence in Peru. They've done a lot, but as Olivia and Douwe are well aware, there's much more to do. Currently, they need to apply for their Peruvian vias so they can become an offically recognized wildlife rehabilitation center. 

Olivia and a tapir in Baños, Ecuador. 

Olivia has quite a store of tales about what animals she's encountered here in the marketplaces. Giant anteaters, hundreds of tortoises, tapirs, guatusas (agouti), peccaries, monkeys, parrots...

If you want to see what Peruvian animal trafficking is (still) like today, take a few minutes to watch this video. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is the reality. Animal Trafficking in Peru

There is a lot of construction yet to be done at the center. Kayla and Marlon are helping Judith, another volunteer from Holland, make a wooden table here. 

I didn't see the kids use this swing too many times. Too many trees to climb. 

They had salted beef to cook into afternoon and evening meals. No electricity, no fridge here! The delicious produce more than makes up for that, though...

One weekend afternoon, Kayla decided we should all go on a waterfall picnic. 

So we did. Pasta salad accompanied by what Kayla called a 'vainilla juice cocktail'--vainilla and lime. 

Jumping water spiders. So cool!

Marlon, swimming alongside us. 

More shades of green than you could imagine. 

We walked about ten minutes upstream to get to this beautiful little cove.

Yara, the center's trusty canine sidekick, came along too!

The fruit of the cacao plant tastes a lot like guanabana. We chewed it off and spat out the cocoa nibs. Yum!

Genny, playing ball with Kayla and Marlon!

On our way back, we got a lesson in leaf-collecting for Elmo. Every afternoon, we give him a mix of about twenty leaves from six or seven different plants he seems to prefer. 

Kayla taught us how to use immature heliconia leaflets to become birds. Squawk. 

Genny, Kayla and me. As rare heliconia toucans. 

Sirina and Men, two other Swiss-German volunteers, brought some chocolate back with them from Pucallpa to make a cake our first weekend. 

The night-insects are incredible. Early morning moth. 

...and if the night insects are awesome...

Check out the worms that come out in the rain! They can be up to three feet long. And here I thought these were only in Austrailia...

When huge trees fall on the property, the wood is put to good use. 

Kayla took me on a special nature hike one evening, on my day off. Each volunteer gets one weekend day and one weekday off of work. 

Yara uses her time off to lay on the just-warmed bread oven. 

Meet Willow, the young male wooly monkey at the center. 

...and Elmo, the two-toed sloth!

My sister would love to meet you, Elmo. 

Esperanza Verde has an Aviary built and waiting for more avian arrivals. These will be numerous once they have their permit: birds are trafficked in great numbers in Peru and Ecuador. 

This is Quintisha, the white-collared peccary. 

Pepito!

If you've never seen a turtle attack tomatoes...

....you're missing out. Adorable. 

Rinkay, more grown up! 

He's still got his wild blue eyes. They're supposed to change to brown as he ages...

We also have a trio of mouse opossums, found fallen out of a nest and abandoned in the vet office. 

They get fed five times a day, and spend the rest snuggled up in old tshirts with a hot water bottle. They're nocturnal. 

In the first week, Kayla showed us how to lasso guava pods down from trees, prepare mature sugarcane, eat cacao fruit, find palm fruits and 'jungle lettuce' and a radish-looking vegetable from the forest floor...

She's completely at ease ten meters from the forest floor in a tree that's bending under her weight, and with a machete half her height. She can climb, run, and jump her way around the Amazon and its rivers, identify plants, and speak over four languages. She offers jewelry she makes from anywhere between ten and seventy cents, and gives one heck of an awesome backrub after a long day of work.
Total jungle princess. I'm in awe. 

Bonus photo: aguaje, a palm fruit with reptilian scales that fall away when peeled lightly, offered to me by a passenger in the Curimana taxi collective on our way back to Pucallpa. 

Peru.

From what I've seen, there's even -less- control of wildlife trafficking in Peru than there is in Ecudor. It would seem that the Peruvian government is trying to change this, as they have tried to pass legislation concerning support for stronger law enforcement concerning trafficking as a criminal offense with the UN's backing in summits of world leaders as recently as August of 2013. As of now, though, the locals in Pucallpa still believe that turtle meat fights cellulite; giant anteaters are still being sold in Lima. My friends in Ecuador tell me that a large portion of the animals they see are reportedly brought in from the Peruvian Amazon.

There is much to be done...and many challenges and complications to navigate on the way there.

All we can do is keep trying and learning. Keep up the good work, Olivia and Douwe.

Until next time,
Nikki