Into the rainforest

 Sunday November 6, 2022

On Sunday morning we went with a local guide to the Larco Museum in Lima, which houses 45,000 pre-Incan pieces from across Peru. The elegance, quality of preservation, and sheer magnitude of the collection was overwhelming.  We ere amazed by two pieces of tapestry, from 900-1300 AD, sewn with 360-400 threads per inch, and still in good condition.  There was a vase with decorations that narrated the whole series of events involved in the ritual killing and subsequent blood-drinking ceremony when enemy soldiers were captured; subsequent excavations at a site from the same civilization uncovered implements and graves that matched the pictures on the vase. There were thousands of years of different civilizations before the Incas, and in many cases the Incas adopted the best of the technology and arts techniques from the civilizations they overtook.  

Most of the rest of the day was spent traveling — a 90 minute early afternoon flight from Lima to Iquitos and then a 2 hour van drive to Nauta where we boarded our riverboat.  We will be spending the rest of the trip exploring the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, which covers 2.08 million hectares (about the size of Costa Rica) and is home to 90,000 people who have found ways to sustainably live in this protected area.  There are 25 guests on our riverboat, which is elegantly decorated with hardwoods and local flora. Our room is at the port bow on the upper deck, which gives us a panoramic view as the boat navigates upstream on tributaries to the Amazon. 

Pictured:  golden mask, one of the tapestries and our cabin