Finding Out How to Take a Vacation That Isn’t All About You

By Arianna Svenson

Sharp, swift, swooshes of a machete echo through the deep Amazon jungle as an overgrown path is cleared from ever-encroaching plants. Beads of perspiration roll rapidly down my face. Although I am a foreigner to this land, I pause with an accustomed ear to a series of bird trills. This is no three-day Amazon jungle tour where tourists fly in and out on the first and last days; this was the Picaflor Research Centre, an eco-friendly and simple complex deep in the Tambopata jungle, eight hours upriver from Puerto Maldonado by canoe, where I and a group of others were volunteering.

The Center was hand-built and designed by Dr. Laurel Hanna, a British Zoologist and her Peruvian husband Pico. While there we helped to clean trails, tended to the land to promote re-vegetation and oversaw the construction of a bird house intended for a unique type of Peruvian hen.

The Madre de Dios region of Peru is on the edge of the Amazon basin, and borders Bolivia and Brazil. Puerto Maldonado, the capital, is accessible by plane or by a tough three-day truck trip. Visitors to this remote region are encouraged to experience the jungle as volunteers rather than as
tourists. (more…)