Chachapoyas and beyond

Feet of Jungle Ella. Getting unstuck from mud in Chaco sandals makes very interesting noises.


Gocta Waterfall


Red drawings by peoples unknown in times unknown.


6 people in a 4 person tent trying to sleep...


Gocta


Kuelap petroglyph

Peruvian independence day recently passed and the schools get a two week break for the holiday. It's their break in between the semesters. Excellent timing for me because I get a good excuse to go on a little vacation. Six of us Peace Corps Volunteers set off for Chachapoyas, a town on the edge of the Amazon Jungle. It's an interesting ecosystem. People call it the jungle, but it doesn't look like the Amazon looks in Iquitos at all. It looks like a cloud forest, maybe with more mud.

We went to a pre-Incan archaeological site called Kuelap. We also hiked up to Gocta, either the 3rd or 16th highest waterfall in the world, depending on who you ask. It's so beautiful. Skinny-dipping was frigid and short lived fun. The waterfall was "discovered" in 2006, very recently. I say "discovered" because there are lots of little towns around there, but no one thought of it as a tourist destination and they hadn't really measured the waterfall. There's apparently another (larger?) waterfall sort of nearby in the same province, but it's more remote and more difficult to get to. In any case, Gocta is more than 700 meters tall. It's sort of like two waterfalls, one underneath the other. The first fall is just over 100 meters and the second is 600 plus meters. We hiked up and camped between the two falls. It's breathtaking, so unbelievably beautiful. The camping was an intimate experience with 6 of us crammed into a 4 man tent. Being one giant human spoon seemed like a good idea until we tried to sleep on one side without moving all night long.

On the way up we walked by some ancient red colored drawing on the rocks. The "guide" (I use that term very loosely) pointed them out, but didn't know who made them or anything about them. The next day we hiked down the other side and the whole time my hiking partners were very kind about the fact that I am as slow as Moses. After we got lost in the jungle on day 2 I know I was trying their patience, but in the end we found our way out of the jungle and had a great time. Then I went to another archaeological site called Karagia. It's these cool sarcophagi built on the face of a cliff where God only knows how they got up there. I still need to do some research on the archaeological sites. There isn't a lot of information or guides, even in the provincial archaeological museum in Chachapoyas. It's only slightly less comic than the American Museum of Natural History's North Atlantic People's exhibit with all Boas' artifacts where labels like, "stick with hook on the end" abound.