By Richard Munday

Only just in to the second month of 2008 and already Taricaya has had a little excitement but a major inconvenience.

On February 2nd The Reserva Ecologica Taricaya found itself going underwater. Now this has already happened before all the way back in 2002 but we still found it a huge shock and a big inconvenience, worrying about all the animals, how much deeper it was going to get and of course what to do with the volunteers was all flying through our minds when we realised what was going on…

Leaving Taricaya on Saturday morning, we saw that the waters were worryingly high, but didn’t think to much more of it having already made preparations for a minor flood like moving generators and all the electrical items to higher levels, making sure all the volunteers in lower rooms had moved their things to high shelves and making sure all the staff knew what needed to be done and where everything would be going if things got worse. We arrived in Puerto and with Fernando and Stuart both in Cusco it was left to me to take things under control in town with emails to check, making sure coordination’s were made for supplies for next week and two new volunteers to pick up that day, I found myself a little tied up to say the least!

With everything finished by about 3:40 Saturday afternoon, I headed back to Fernando’s house (where I stay in Puerto) and quickly found myself confronted with Maria Fernanda who had been checking the water levels at the port. Hearing from her that the water had risen another 50 cm I quickly got things moving to get a boat ready and head off to the lodge. But as we all know things in Peru don’t move quickly, it took us about two hours to get everything organised, from getting some of the volunteers down to the port to help us, finding all the staff possible and of course coordinating things with Fernando, Stuart and Willy.

Going down a fast rising river in the dark wasn’t really fun, but of course we managed it with no problems with thanks to Gigo and Sr Wicho (A carpenter of all people who has been doing a lot of work for us but has a lot of experience on rivers)

Arriving at the lodge we were glad to find that we had arrived in time. Although the waters were high, they were not high enough to be a serious problem; even our little Donkey house for Baby Rambito was still dry.

Panic over, we sat down and began coordination for the next days work, moving everything we could find to top rooms, with the water rising about 2cm an hour, we knew that by tomorrow night we would be deep under the water.

Over the course of the next 5 days the river rose to a maximum height of 1M (measured from a high point near the new kitchen – These measurements were taken so we had reference of what the river was doing) then gradually dropped back down to zero again…

The fun wasn’t over though as we had to clean up the mud that was left over, which was great fun! We used a huge water pump to blast the mud from buildings and then repairing all the damage that the waters had caused.

Thankfully no one was hurt over the course of this excitement but unfortunately we did loose one of our Blue and Yellow Macaws, who had fallen into the water during the night.

We are now back to normal work and life in Taricaya, in fact the flood at the start of the month seems like a crazy dream, here’s hoping that our next “El Nino” cycle (The weather system that causes global flux’s in weather) is a little more friendly…still we have another 5 years to prepare for that one!