As soon as I got off the plane I felt the heat. Stifling heat that only comes with a special level of humidity. As we flew in I peered out the window and saw the rain forest, stretching for miles. Miles and miles of thick, lush, trees. It was a while before I was immersed in the jungle. A bumpy car ride, a boat, and a ten-minute hike through the trees brought me to my jungle lodge.
When I closed my eyes that first night it was impossible to fall asleep. The sounds of the jungle permeated the room, they would have to since there were only three walls. Our rooms were open to the jungle. The sounds were so loud, a cacophony of insects and birds and larger animals slinking in the shadows. But what blew me away was the rain. But it wasn’t Seattle rain. It wasn’t even Bali rain that drenched me in five seconds. It wasn’t Kenyan rain in the height of the rainy season. This was something else. The sky erupted with the sound of thunder. A kind of thunder I had never heard before. It was deep and powerful but the most distinct part of it was how long it went on. Never in my life have I heard thunder that continued like this. I could literally feel the bed I laid in shake with the force of it. And then slowly and all at once it began to rain and the humidity was cut like a knife. The weather transformed, and the rain cleared the heat.
“It’s in the name” my dad said as he shrugged his shoulders at the state of the weather. It would be a shame to visit the Amazon Rain Forest without the rain, I think. The day went on and the rain let up and then poured and continued on and off like this for hours. Eventually we had waited long enough, and the group decided to venture out despite the rain. We donned our jungle boots and plastic ponchos and hats and trudged into the jungle. I say trudge in all honesty because with every step we had to pull our boots from the mud accompanied by the sound of suction. The goal was to reach a giant tree about an hour out from our lodge and we trekked dutifully forward. A couple people got stuck in the mud and went down. But they got up laughing covered in mud with a story to return home with. There were times when we had to slosh through water almost up to the edge of our boots and I wondered at this very moment if perhaps one of my boots had a hole in it. I think I was just overthinking things. The tree itself was in fact enormous, probably 50 feet in diameter and 300 feet high. It was inspiring to think that a tree that old still existed in the world.
The next day the weather was perfect. The rain had stopped but it left a blanket of cool to stifle the humidity. It was an early departure day to search for the giant river otters in the nearby Oxbow lake. We looked for quite a while stopping far too long for uninspiring birds and barely visible bats before spotting the otters. They were far away at first but even from afar I could tell they were much larger than normal otters. Our guide told us they were about six feet long. My favorite part of the Oxbow lake came later when our guide hooked a piece of raw meet to a fishing pole and thrust it into the water. There was a tug and up came a piranha. I don’t know about you but I grew up on cheesy science fiction movies and I would have sworn piranhas were bigger than this. Despite its size it lived up to its reputation with the sharpness of its teeth. When a leaf was pushed in its mouth it chomped it up like a windup toy, without thought. Our guide said their teeth were sharper than knifes. I was grateful to be in a boat rather than in the river itself, those teeth looked and sounded dreadful.
Another thing that astounded me about the Amazon was a specific animal living in it; the Howler Monkey. I’m sure you’ve heard of them, but until you have actually heard their calls you wouldn’t believe it. The Monkeys are not large, I would say maybe two feet tall at the most. One day when I woke up at 4 am to begin our journey into the jungle I heard a noise that sounded like a jet engine. I listened more carefully and was sure it was not that, but some sort of prehistoric monster. The sheer volume and intensity of the call left me speechless. I didn’t believe that sound was coming out of a monkey less than half my size. If I didn’t have professionals telling me that sound was in fact a Howler Monkey I would have been sure it was some kind of artificial recording. I could not believe that something like that monkey could make a sound like the sound of nightmares. Nature is incredible.
On the road in Peru I discovered a popular chocolate bar called Sublime, pronounced Sub-lee-may in Spanish. This felt like a beautiful connection from the universe to a class I took last fall at CSU, Literature of the earth. I purchased a chocolate bar for everyone on the tour and passed them out before we went into the Amazon. I explained the idea of the sublime that we had focused on in class and got them excited for the awe and subsequent discomfort we were about to experience in the jungle. The sublime as often been mis-explained as the great awe in nature when in reality the sublime is also meant to include the terror and reprehension of nature. My talk seemed to be spot on as I trudged through the pouring rain in the middle of the Amazon. I got attacked, and I mean attacked, by mosquitoes, cut by plants, and completely soaked in sweat from the humid climate. The jungle was incredible, but it was not easy. My talk on the bus hopefully prepped our people for the experience they were going to have, I sure thought it did. The jungle was beautiful, difficult, terrifying, exciting, and every word in between. It was in fact, sublime.
