A Cabybara Love Story

Ah, I seem to have recovered relatively well from a bit of a "week of sickness". Sick! I mean, not sick, but sick as in bad ass. But not as in diarrhea. Hmmm, english slang is getting the better of me while oddly enough still keeping within the overarching them of my blog. I'm going to keep what I wrote, and if you don't like what I have to say you can just "return it to REI". He he.

The water and ecosanitation team made another amazing trip to the jungle, but this time as the total collective gringo circus! For the 4 days we were visiting communties, we were fortnuate enough to be staying at some pretty swanky lodges, built and maintained by Exporama Tours. We started with the most "rustic lodge first", and then ended our trip by staying at a lodge that had a pool, waterslide and AC. I keep thinking it's crazy and absurd to have AC in the jungle, but then am forced to remember a little place called Las Vegas (so many wasted nights...another pun).


The most rustic lodge was on the Napo river, and was duely named "the Napo Lodge". I'm pretty sure there is an Explorama somewhere in the name but lets just keep that implied. In this amazing lodge there was food prepared by awesome chefs, cozy open air rooms with mosquito nets and great bedding, bathrooms that made David and I wonder if we should hire the people who built them to work for us installing ecological toilets. --A cheeky little aside, David and I were enjoying a boat ride back to Iquitos aboard this huge ship named the "Queen of the Amazon". We met a few folks who had stayed at the fancy Ceiba Topps lodge, which was the end of our trip and the most glitsy of the different Exporama lodges. We explained the lodges that we had been staying at, and she was absolutely amazed at the fact that we stayed at the Napo Lodge. "You're crazy, I can't imagine walking down the path to the bathroom (lit by lanters spaced about 10ft on center), that place is just so rustic". David and I both shared the same thought bubble "man she should have seen where we sleeped the last week".

Anyway, at the Napo lodge there was great deal of animal life, ranging from talking parots to everyone's personal favorite, the Capybara. Capybara's are the largest animals in the rodent family. From the picture below, it really just looks like David was shrunk, ran into a mouse hole and stole the poor mouse's hammok. What a jackass.

The Capybara is a funny animal. It sounds like a video game as it walks around, making odd squeeks as it tries to suck the salt off your arm. I don't know if it's possible to put in words how adorable this animal is. It rolls over, it purs...it's just delightful. But aparently even adorable Capybaras have sad situations in their lives. Aparently this capybara had a mate at one time or another, but was abruptly left by her hubby for a sexier (larger?) capybara. They told me that these two would swim together and make lovey lovey noises to one another. Heartbreaking.















As we went to less rustic lodges each day, the semblence of "rusticity" became less and less noticable. Sigh.

The trips to the communities was enlightening. We gained a great deal of knowledge about why certain households have toilets and visa versa. It's truly a strange look at how people function as a community...where we might think that something like a toilet was important for a person, and for those around that person, a great deal of individuals would argue the contrary. It's facinating to me, but I suppose the fact that my white ass is walking around interviewing people and taking pictures of their shitters could also be considered "facinating" from their point of view.

That's about it... I have another story for a different blog, concerning an interesting event that took place during a trip to a community. I'll try to get to that tonight :).

Thanks guys!