Mi Vida S.A.

I arrived in Lima two days ago for a week-long vacation scheduled to really get under way tomorrow with the arrival of my family in Peru.  Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a speed bump this evening.

While sitting at an outdoor cafe right off Parque Kennedy in Miraflores around 8:30pm, catching up with my friend Maike, my little drawstring backpack was stolen.  In the space of just a few minutes between us ordering and receiving our drinks, a man managed to use a knife or something to slit the straps of the backpack, which was slung securely over the chair I was sitting in, and carry it off without me feeling it.  Maike–who was sitting right next to me and looking at me the entire time–didn´t notice a thing.  Neither did the couple who was sitting right behind me, nor the security guard standing just feet away.  Inside my backpack was my trusty Canon S90 digital camera, and more consequentially, my laptop.

While in the States I make use of an external hard drive to backup my files, that is a luxury I have not had in Tarapoto.  I just lost all of my photos from 6+ months in Peru, the entirety of my Technoserve work files, all of my music, personal documents, Photoshop, etc.  While many things are replaceable or replaceable at a cost (guess I know what my just-received 2011 tax refund is going toward), the first two items are mostly not, and that is truly a crushing blow.

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The alarm clock went off on Sunday morning at what seemed like mere minutes after my head had hit the pillow.  After a late night dancing at the discoteca my beauty rest was being sacrificed because Yun, Vero, our Liman buddies Fernando and Jean, Vero’s visiting friend Camille, and I had made plans to visit the nearby Catarata de Huacamaillo — a scenic local waterfall that we had been told would be a pleasant 45 minutes with a hired guide.

We met up at the colectivo station near my house, squeezing the 6 of us into one taxi by having Fernando and I sit in the trunk.  The ride to the town of San Antonio de Cumbaza actually wasn’t uncomfortable, though along the way we encountered yet another one of the vigilante groups in this area manning a makeshift roadblock.  It’s pretty customary here to see these groups, often featuring a few armed men and some assorted hangers-on, stopping all cars and asking (demanding) for small donations (bribes) before they let you pass.  The vigilantes claim they are providing security on the road — the idea being, I suppose, that legitimized highway robbers are better than the alternative.

Fording the River > Caulking the Wagons and Floating

The hike itself was a lot of fun, reminiscent in many ways of Great Falls back home in the D.C. area with big rock scrambles and a trail following a river.  That said, it was very different from what we were anticipating, thanks to us not hiring a guide and the route being entirely unmarked and often difficult to make out.  Also, the previous two days of torrential rains had turned the tiny stream intersecting the trail in several places into something else entirely — we had to wade through waist or even chest-high water during multiple crossings of the Cumbaza River, clambered over huge and slippery boulders, squelched through mud, and frequently lost the proper trail.  Luckily, the nearest we came to an Oregon Trail-style disaster was Yun losing a sandal and Fernando falling headlong into the water during separate crossings.  But after roughly 3 hours, we finally reached our destination.

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