Trekking through dense jungle is much harder than it looks.
The heavy damp heat in the Peruvian rainforest strips you of all energy, and then there is the ankle-deep mud, sucking your boots off your feet.
Think Glastonbury but with hot sweaty weather.
You can’t reach out to grab the branches for balance as the myriad of viciously stinging ants and aggressive fauna can really bloody hurt.
As a trainee herbalist, I was one week into learning about permaculture, conservation and habitat protection when our rainforest bubble burst.
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On Friday 13 March, our eco-rainforest lodge got a text that Peru was going into lockdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic and all foreigners had to evacuate.
But there was one huge problem: the lodge was a half hour jungle trek, a boat ride and a two hour drive through more jungle to get back to the city of Puerto Maldonado and I had just badly sprained my ankle. It was now throbbing and twice the size, with no wheelchair access to get back to the city.
Some of our party left immediately on 14 March and are now safely back home in London, but because of my swollen and painful foot, it took me another day to leave.
To make the journey back to a town at top speed and beat the newly-enforced curfew, someone else had to carry my bags and I used a broomstick handle as my makeshift walking stick.
We lugged 30 pounds of luggage in 33 degree heat through thick vegetation and it truly felt like an SAS Who Dares Wins deployment.
As we arrived in the nearest town to this part of the Madre de Dios region of mostly untouched rainforest, police stopped our car and said: ‘Go back to your domiciles and stay there’, leaving us in no doubt that we had missed the opportunity to get back to London.
I was stuck there for a month in total.
Peru has enforced one of the strictest coronavirus lockdowns in the world, which also includes a 6pm to 5am curfew (4pm in some regions) and even gender segregation.
This means that men are allowed out for essentials, banking, food and emergencies on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, while women get Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays – nobody on Sunday.
The usually huge market and noisy streets are now empty. The shops are shut except for pharmacies. It’s like a colourful ghost town.
On the country’s first lockdown day, over 200 women were very publicly detained for flouting the new rules. It appears they weren’t taking the lockdown seriously. Things escalated in the days after the lockdown officially began, with several protests across the country.
Peruvians are super chilled people and the country still has one of the lowest contagions in the world, but the authorities know they can’t afford a pandemic.
There were nine of us stuck in Puerto Maldonado, the gateway town to the southern Amazonian jungle.
The police arrived en masse the morning after our arrival and checked our temperature, pulse and details. These stringent measures have meant there are no cases in Puerto Maldonado and still under 6,000 cases in Peru as a whole.
Despite being virus free and staying in a beautiful lodge on the river, I made an enormous effort to get home, which initially came to absolutely nothing.
Most people couldn’t afford to pay for their London home and a full board hotel indefinitely, so the nine Brits were all hoping for government assistance to get a flight home, with another 100 or so British nationals or residents around the country.
Unfortunately, no flights for us came forward.
Despite emailing the foreign office, the government, my local MP and the embassies twice a day, every day, I had absolutely nothing back of any value or use this whole time.
We couldn’t get the first flights out of Peru because the foreign office would not answer our emails.
I actually first found out about the government’s plans to fly Brits home via Twitter. I constantly emailed them for info to get on this flight but did not hear anything back until the day of the flight.
They said: ‘Please go to the muster point if you want to get on the flight’ – the muster point was in Lima, which is two days drive away. There was absolutely no way we’d make it in time for that flight.
A WhatsApp group and the hashtag #stuckinperu kept us informed to the help other Brits received (they got actual buses to the airport), but their photos of empty plane seats was disheartening.
Still, life got into a pleasant rhythm in our little Amazonian prison, with the occasional visit from a sloth and her baby clinging to her chest, just outside my hotel balcony. A local lady even made us all Peruvian style medical masks.
It was idyllic, but at the same time, we were acutely aware of our dwindling bank accounts, and lack of work, plus the misfortune of others in Peru who have not landed in such easy or virus-free places.
We knew we had been lucky in so many respects, however, the Americans, Canadians, French, Australians, New Zealanders, Spanish and one lone Swedish lady (who we heard had a whole plane to herself), all got flown out of the local airport there, within days by their respective governments – all on separate flights.
We found this out through the WhatsApp groups, but also because the accommodation we were all sharing slowly emptied with everyone but us Brits.
Couldn’t our government have done the same? Couldn’t all those countries have gotten together and put everyone on one flight to Lima? What a complete waste of plane seats, money and eco-footprint.
On 3 April, we finally received some positive news.
Through one of the WhatsApp groups, we found out that the Dutch Embassy had opened up flights for all travellers from Cusco to Lima (£180) and then Lima to Amsterdam (£790).
All we had to do was get a bus to Cusco.
I was in one of two buses travelling for 11 hours to get to Cusco – cramped at the back with all the suitcases in over 30 degree heat and 90 per cent humidity and no air conditioning. The bus climbed the Peruvian mountains as we started to freeze in sweat-sodden clothes.
Even though we didn’t have the right permit to travel through security checkpoints, we managed to get through with the help of a Spanish-speaking British resident in our group. She made up stories about us to convince various authorities that they had to let us through because we were British botanists.
Miraculously, we made it to the airport in Cusco at 6am for the 10:30am flight to Lima. But by the look of the long queue of people sitting on the kerb outside the airport with their backpacks one metre apart, my heart sank at the slight possibility we were not going to fit on the plane.
Thankfully, we did and then we managed to get our connecting flight to Amsterdam. From there, we took the Eurostar and I was never more happy (and slightly tearful) to see the British uniform at UK border control in Brussels.
After landing back on British soil on Thursday, I can’t help but think how lucky we got and how many people are still trapped overseas with no way of getting home.
I went through an ordeal, which could have been so easily remedied but no help came.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing james.besanvalle@metro.co.uk
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/11/im-stuck-coronavirus-lockdown-peru-12516518/?ITO=squid
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