Sittin' in the Fifties (Shan)

We´re in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, trying to find a boat to Picaflor research center, www.picaflor.org where we have volunteered to help monitor a bio-diversity project in the rainforest, if we ever get there, grrr. No one wants to motorcanoe upriver today, and mañana is the same as hoy round here. Now they´re all coming home with boatloads of brazil nuts and giant papayas.

PM is a mining town in the jungle of eastern Peru, near Bolivia, between 2 rivers that lead to the Amazon. It´s the kind of place where the general store stocks sacks of grain, bolts of cloth, shelves of cans, giant candy jars and an old-fashioned scale. To call Picaflor we have to go to a radio office where a man shouts into the microphone under an old wooden fan. Taxis are motorcycles with a covered bench in back, and they have the strangest manikins we have ever seen.

We just saw Motorcycle Diaries in Cuzco, and this looks like the South America Che explored in the 1950s, interesting till we can catch a goldanged boatay.