2008 Peru – Chappari Nature Reserve
Our next tour was to Chapary and the haunted mountain. I found it in a brochure at the travel agent and it claimed to have lots of wildlife, much of which was exclusive to the area. I was more interested in wildlife than ruins so I was looking forward to it. As the last part of the journey was on a dirt road we had to splash out on a 4×4 with driver but it was still only £50 for the whole day.
The journey alone made the trip worthwhile as we passed by rural villages and saw the way people lived. They built houses with clay bricks in the same way they had done for thousands of years. On many of the farms there seemed to be little or no machinery and we frequently saw people with nothing more than spades digging up huge fields. Instead of using combine harvesters, people were cutting corn and loading it onto large lorries. One man stood stark naked in a river, taking a bath in clay-coloured water, oblivious to the cars and buses driving past.
In one place, the river overflowed onto the road so for a hundred metres it looked like we were driving through the river. Some drivers stopped and used the river water to wash their cars.
I asked our driver to stop so I could take some photographs and when we got out, a man approached us with two large buckets of fish. He had made some sort of damn in the river so the fish were trapped and all he had to do was pick them up. He was trying to sell fish to the people around him whom I doubt had the money to buy them so he saw us as his only hope. He was so desperate to sell them that the conversation with Federika went something like this,
Fisherman — “You want to buy fish? I give you a special price.”
Federika — “I would love to but we are tourists and have nowhere to cook them.”
Fisherman — “But you must buy them. They are the best fish in Peru.”
Federika — ” I am sure they are but what do I do with them if I can’t cook them?”
Fisherman — “Where are you from?”
Federika — “England.”
Fisherman – “I will dry them and you can take them home with you.”
I had no doubt that his method of drying them would have involved wiping them on his filthy jeans, so hard as it was, we decided to pass on the offer.
The drive was only 50 miles but unlike most drivers in Peru who were in training for the Grand Prix, this driver was in training for the Snail Prix and drove 30 miles an hour all the way. We finally arrived at the village where a guide was supposed to be waiting for us but the place was deserted. We discovered that the tour agency had told him we would be there at 8 am which was the time we met our driver in town so we were two hours late. The administration of the nature reserve was done in a small grocery store where a friendly woman took our entrance fee and our driver came with us in search of the guide. We arrived at some kind of single-story, clay-built farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. A woman came out of the house and opened a makeshift gate. She told us to wait while she went to look for the guide but being fed up with sitting in the car we got out and waited in the hot sun. Half an hour later there was still no sign of the woman and we were wondering if she had abandoned us and gone home. Federika was all for going into the farmhouse but our driver said there may be a wild dog in there just waiting to eat us. I am not scared of dogs usually but invading the territory of a possibly rabid dog in deepest Peru had me slightly concerned. We eventually decided the only thing we could do was go through the farmhouse gate. The driver picked up a stick to defend us and I stood behind him so he was first in line for the dog’s dinner. Federika told us not to be so stupid and walked fearlessly to the front door calling out to see if anyone was at home. After a lot of calling, a friendly woman with a baby appeared and announced herself as the guide’s wife. Her husband thought we weren’t going to turn up so he went onto their farm to work and now the first woman was hunting for him. During the next half hour, I became acquainted with an elderly goat who couldn’t make up its mind whether I was worth the trouble of attacking or not when the guide finally turned up so we were on our way. It was another hour’s drive along potholes with the occasional bit of road in between before we arrived at the reserve. This really was in the middle of nowhere.
There were a few buildings scattered around the place and some very crude toilets we were advised to use before starting on our four-kilometre trek. In a yard just outside one of these buildings were two small tents, one of which appeared to be owned by a deer who was sitting half in and half out.
Behind it, standing on a large rock there was some kind of fox about the size of two cats glued together. It was very tame and came within a few feet of us. With two animal sightings within the first few minutes, we had great hopes of seeing many of the hundreds of species of birds and animals that the brochure assured us lived there. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The reserve was very big and the owners prided themselves in giving the wildlife complete freedom. Whilst that was brilliant for the wildlife, it didn’t really work for tourism. They could claim to have a family of talking penguins and no one could ever prove otherwise. We did see a small bear but it was very docile as the poor thing had been rescued from a circus. They couldn’t let it run free as it wouldn’t have survived on its own. We did see another bear high up in a tree but it was so far in the distance that all we saw was a small black blob moving around.
We enjoyed the day having accepted it was nothing much more than a nice walk in the country. The best part of the walk was at the end when we sat by a pond to eat our packed lunch. Standing on a rock just inches away from Federika was a fox looking pleadingly at her sandwich. It was so tame it accepted food from our hands and remained with us all throughout our lunch.
We had been warned about mosquitoes so both put plenty of insect repellent on but no one had told us about the huge biting flies that appeared to be attracted by my repellent. Federika was lucky that she had run out of clean shorts so was wearing long trousers which meant they homed in on me. They were a nuisance but I didn’t think much about it and they didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the day. It was on the drive home that I noticed that I had dozens of bites on my legs and they were beginning to irritate me. Although it was the flies that hurt, it was the mosquitos that had done the damage. Mosquito bites never usually bothered me but these must have been a different type. The drive back to town was even slower than going but unlike Federika I could fall asleep anywhere, anytime. Next morning, the bites on my legs were much worse and were itching so badly that they hurt. I must have had some kind of allergic reaction so we went to a chemist to get some antihistamine cream and pills. They didn’t help much and as with 90% of the ailments in life, the only cure was time.
Next day we flew back to Lima and arrived at our apartment around midnight. We were delighted to see that we had been upgraded to a much better apartment on the fourth floor. It was lovely to wake up in the morning and have such a glorious view of the Huaca opposite and beautiful sunsets.