In Leticia – on the way back to Amacayacu after a month in US, with bits in Bogotá coming and going. Buying monster food to take back to the monsters and URGENT – a new baby bottle for Pauli, the reddish sea monkey; going to the bank, running around, and greeting/ debriefing/updating intensely before catching the public fast boat early this afternoon. This’ll be quick.
Leoncio called yesterday and said Surba, the adult woolly who has the most seniority in the troop (she was confiscated in the Leticia airport as a baby) has disappeared. I wasn’t worried; she’s reached the age of dispersal and has clearly been restless. Too bad she couldn’t have waited until we could give her a boost into the interior of the park where the wild woollies won’t be quite so remote, pero bueno. Last night, I find out that he called another friend with a heads-up about somebody who’d been in Macedonia (one of the communities near Amacayacu), looking for monkeys to sell…or something….the jungle telegraph leaves a lot to the imagination. Ack. She’s not a cute little baby, but a nice fat adult – as in, “tastes a lot like chicken!”
I go to the port to check out the balsas where people from the communities tie up and bump into a friend from Macedonia, whom I ask for information. Turns out there’s a baby woolly in Macedonia (where supposedly they don`t hunt woollies any more). This news doesn’t exactly make me happy, but it’s a less dire reading of Leoncio’s message than what I was fearing. Later he calls – forgot to include laundry soap on the list – and I ask what’s going on. He says there’s a guy from the kilómetros (the communities along the road that goes out from Leticia) who’d been looking for monkeys to buy to have on hand for tourists, and that they’d gone back to Leticia through the forest and not on the river.
So… I’ve got to go the bank before it closes or the world will come to an end. Surba is no dummy. I hope she’s avoided them and any stray harpy eagle, and that the baby in Macedonia will survive.
Paradise it ain’t. And I am really glad to be back! As a billboard in the Boston subway put it: “Why be cold and wet, when you can be warm and wet?” Why ever?
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