Looking Up at Lima

Things are looking up.  The day before I left, I was able to make contact with an experienced amazon guide, Cho.  I had been trying to coordinate with him for over a year and then poof, out of the blue he emailed me and gave me his number to call when in Lima.  Because of the difficulty of being able to connect and then at the last minute, I really did not know what to expect and figured we will just try and meet and see what happens.  It was a good meeting.    The picture to the right is Cho and I at Plaza de Armas in Lima.

The time with Cho and our interpreter, Marlene was well spent.  Both are great people.  Cho is from Satipo and Pucallpa.  He came to Lima last year in hopes of improving his English.  As he says, there is no one in his area of the Amazon river where he can practice English, so to learn and practice he needed to come to Lima.  For being self taught, he speaks good English - although broken and difficult to understand.  Better then my Spanish!  This will be a challenge to communicate.  Cho was Ed Stafford's amazon guide when he walked the entire Amazon River.  See http://www.walkingtheamazon.com/ (Ed also just did a series called Naked Survival).  I understand Ed spoke good Spanish, so communication was not a problem.  It seems that Ed had a team and spent a few years setting up for supplies and support.  When they ran out of supplies or needed something, they waited in a village until things arrived.  Still impressive, but I am winging it and going with what I have.  A handheld GPS, GoPro and camera is the only real technology I have.  Marlene was Eds support person in Peru for his Amazon Walk. Cho and Marlene met after Ed and Cho completed the Amazon Walk and have become good friends in Lima.

Cho and Marlene were gracious enough to meet with me to see if they can help me make my adventure a reality.  Cho is very confident in his abilities - which is a good thing - and I have confidence in him as well.  As a result of our meeting, I have hired Cho and he has agreed to go ahead into the Kimbiri and Ene region to see if he can coordinate supplies and a boat that we can hire to take us all the way to Pucallpa.  He believes it will take him around 5 days or so to get home and figure out the boat possibilities.  He and I are then to meet up outside of Cusco in Abancay on June 28th.  The goal is to leave Abancay north to Kimbiri on June 28th or 29th to start the river adventure.  In the meantime I have bought a phone for Peru so he and I can coordinate as we both run around the country (my son and I are doing the typical tourist stuff in Cusco for the next week).  He assures me that traveling by river, even through the red zone, is the fairly safe and I should just wave to the natives (what Cho calls the Amazon people in his region) as we float by! 

On that note, we are owning the fact that we are gringos and stand 2 ft above everyone.  Jay and I can be seen from a mile away.  The taxis give Marlele and Cho one price if the cab is for us and another when we stand apart from them.  So we stand off to the side and then once the fare is established we get in.  Sometimes the taxis have tried triple the fare.  No doubt that out of the central tourist areas, gringo means money and no one is shy about taking advantage of us.  It seems when we are with a local person, the people are friendly and we are enjoying Lima.  Marlene took us to a local restaurant and we had traditional Peruvian food.  Very good, including a drink made from blue corn! 

In addition to Plaza de Armas, we went to Museo e Iglesia de San Francisco and into the catacombs. Yesterday we were at the Ocean in Mira Flores, very upscale part of Lima.  The catacombs was very disappointing but probably something a tourist should do.  We leave for Cusco tomorrow.  So far all is good ... except this key board, I cannot figure out how to get punctuation to work in English and all the words are showing misspelled, so excuse the grammar and spelling.

Oh, Young Ellie was wrong!

Nos Vamos!