Research on the River
My adventures in the Amazon

by Nicholas Bridgman, UC Berkeley

I flew to Lima, Peru by myself in late May, after a short two-week visit with my parents in Camarillo, California. When I exited the airport, a swarm of Peruvian men surrounded me, somewhat aggressively, asking if I wanted a taxi and motioning me towards their black cars. I felt a bit uncomfortable, remembering stories of unsafe non-official taxis, and foreigners being charged two or three or more times the price in poor countries such as Peru. But the car looked official and there were few other types of taxis in the area, so I got in.

From England to Peru
A year earlier, when I’d left Berkeley to study ecology abroad at the University of Kent at Canterbury in England, I had no idea how many places this experience would take me or how much I would learn about academics and about life. During my junior year at Canterbury, I learned everything from how to balance study and relaxation to how to cook healthy meals and had the chance to travel throughout Western Europe during school breaks. I earned all A’s and became part of the community of undergraduates and professors in the ecology department.
At the end of the school year Dr. Rick Bodmer, the head of Kent’s ecology department, invited me to accompany him and the other second-year British ecology students on a research trip to the Peruvian Amazon. I would spend six weeks during the summer living on a boat on the river, studying the underwater vocalizations of river dolphins, and getting to know the 40 or so British and Peruvian researchers, students, and crew on the boat.

Rick takes students each year to study animals in the Amazon, an area containing the greatest mammalian diversity on earth. Students gather data they later use for their theses during their third and final year at Canterbury.

Now, here I was in a taxi heading toward a hostel in Miraflores, a built-up area of Lima near the ocean, where I was to meet up with the Brits. The ride turned out to be safe and only slightly overpriced. However, I was forced to use the Spanish I had studied in high school, because very few people speak English—not even the taxi drivers. This surprised me; I had just traveled through Western Europe without once needing to speak anything but English. Nevertheless, I ended up speaking Spanish to all of the Peruvians with us on the trip. Becoming friends with some Iquitos University students as well as with some crew members, I had no choice but to joke and converse with them only in Spanish. By the end of the six weeks, I had become somewhat fluent. It was exciting to relate to people and talk about the world in an entirely new way.

After checking into the hostel in Miraflores, I met the group of 11 British undergraduates, along with Rick and another professor. The next day we flew to Iquitos.

Iquitos
In our preparatory meetings, we’d discussed everything from anti- malaria pills to maps of Peru. The map of Peru, however, could in no way predict what these places would come to mean.
“Iquitos,” a dot of a city on the map, was a place of poverty and dirt streets, as well as university students, bars, and markets full of Amazonian wares. “Rio Yavari,” a winding line drawn in chalk on the board during a meeting, became the heart of a fascinating, deep, untrammeled wilderness, unlike any natural area I had ever experienced. “La Nutria,” would become the familiar name of one of our research vessels, with its engine problems, small kitchen, bunks, and bridge.

Iquitos is a rainforest city located on the Amazon River in northeast Peru. Many of its 400,000 people once lived as ribereños, or river dwellers, but have come to the city in hopes of finding more money. We stayed in Iquitos for a week while the boats were repaired. We went to the local outdoor market to buy crackers, lentils, sugar, and other supplies for our trip, visited a zoo called the Quistacocha, which had many rainforest animals (capybaras, spider monkeys, macaws), and went to a lake where locals relax on the beach. We traveled around the city in motorcars, or three-wheeled open-air taxis. We also met many people at an outdoor bar on a popular street. During the evenings at the bar, we would look out at the dark, open expanse of the Amazon River and talk to people of various backgrounds, such as an English yoga teacher who had come to the Amazon searching for spiritual enlightenment, and a biologist from Cuzco studying snakes. We met Peruvian students studying at Iquitos University, as well as artisans, painters, and necklace-makers trying to sell their wares.

Continued...

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