Deluge

April 9, 2026April 14, 2026 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Bonanza Lodge, Manu NP. 14.00.

After a full week of clear skies, Peru has decided to remind me that we are still in the rainy season.

When Sirius, the Dog Star, disappeared beneath a looming dark shroud and the first drops of rain began to fall, I knew we were in for a tropical storm, but I underestimated both its ferocity and its stamina. The heavens opened around eight o’clock last night and it was well past nine the following morning when it finally stopped. The reprieve was brief – brief enough to see us up the Madre de Diós river to our base camp at Bonanza Lodge, at any rate – before the rains returned with a vengeance. As I write, I do not know how long this spell will last, but I can only pray it is a passing tempest.

If it rains this hard again, our chances of seeing anything at the clay lick tonight are next to zero. We may even have to swim there.

This explains the look of concern on the manager’s face and her repeated plea to stay positive. I knew I was chancing it coming here in the rainy season, but the driest season is also the busiest, and I did so want to avoid the crowds. Besides, it’s not like I had the economy of choice. As a teacher my hands are tied when it comes to holidays.

So here I am, deep in the Amazon, bracing myself for a long, dark and probably very wet night.

Mary, mother of God. The river that brought me here was named for you. Show mercy and spare us from this endless downpour.

Fourteen Hours Later

The rain has returned. We were spared for the afternoon and most of the evening, but shortly before midnight it came down hard. It’s not torrential, but it is constant, beating down upon the iron roof of the lodge like a thousand furious fists.

But we did it. We saw the tapirs. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t worth bringing the camera, but I wasn’t to know. They’re tremendously skittish for such great beasts. A couple of seconds of Rive’s flashlight beam was enough to send them lurching off into the trees.

I’ll need to be up and ready to leave after five, so there’s little point in sleeping now. I might as well write and record.

After docking at Bonanza Lodge, we had an hour or so to prepare a night kit and then we set out into the forest after Rive, our guide. He packed light: a couple of strong torches and a machete. I don’t suppose you need much more to cut a path through the forest, day or night.

The rain had swelled the river considerably, so naturally it had a similar effect on the creeks between the lodge and the clay lick. Some of them had makeshift bridges laid across them. Others didn’t. The water was never as high as we had feared – that is, chest height – but it did reach well above the tops of my boots, so as well as wading through the water, we had to stop after each crossing to empty out half the contents of the creek.

All around us was the forest. In the dying light of the afternoon, it is a truly magical place. The flash of electric blue of a morpho butterfly. The eerie descending trill of an ant-thrush. The hooting call of some kind of monkey, faraway, indistinct. The ominous croak of cane toads and the repeated growl of a crested owl from somewhere high up in the canopy. Crickets – everywhere. Every now and again, the enormous roots of a magnificent kapok tree, the true lord of the rainforest, towering above the canopy.

I often needed to remind myself to look down at the path ahead, which was perilous – if not for the thick, sucking mud around the creeks, then for the armies of tropical insects all about. Leafcutter ants marching in single file along branches that might have acted as guide ropes. Spiders the size of butterflies lurking in webs strung out across the path. At least once, I saw a bullet ant, a fearsome denizen of the forest, recognisable by both its size and its solitary habits. Their bite is what gave them their name. A creature best given a very wide berth.

We reached the clay lick shortly after dusk, just as the light was beginning to fail. The watchtower sits well above the forest floor, overlooking a muddy clearing, pockmarked with the sunken wells of animal prints. A large bird – like a guan, but even bigger – kept us company as we laid out the mattresses and mosquito nets and laid out for a long vigil. Rive said it was a blue-throated piping-guan. I couldn’t see in the dark, so he showed himself once again a bloody good guide.

I might have got some sleep here or there. Or I might not. I’m not sure. I know I was woken when the first tapir arrived, and that I was already awake when the second appeared. I know that my camera struggled to lock onto the great beast, despite the brilliance of Rive’s torch beam.

Rive gave us the order around three o’clock to return to camp. Leading the way with light and knife, he escorted our sodden party back through the woods. I cared little for wet feet this time and simply plowed through the creeks up to my thighs. When the rest of you is already soaking, wading through a river isn’t as bad as it sounds.

We made it back to camp within forty minutes or so. I’ve left my boots out to dry on the steps, upside-down, and have used my shirt to dry their insides as best I can – they’ll be more useful from here on out than my hiking shoes. In a minute, I’ll need to be up and dressed again. The rain hasn’t let up, and it’s showing no signs of doing so, but we still have a long way to go. Two days of travel around its border and we aren’t even in the reserve yet. That’s just how big Manu is.

Was it worth it? To see a tapir – a secretive creature of the forest? Absolutely. To have even a glimpse at what Vietnam must have been like? Of course. But for me, the best of all was the soundscape. No YouTube video could ever recreate the all-encompassing magic of the rainforest at night.

Dawn is here – but I can’t see it. Maybe the deluge will stop before midday today. All I can do is hope. BB x

Into the Jungle

April 8, 2026April 9, 2026 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Rainforest Lodge, Manu NP. 17.57.

I probably didn’t get enough sleep last night. I woke up several times between eleven and four and, in the end, I gave up trying to get to sleep. Honestly? I genuinely haven’t been this excited for a very long time.

Let me describe it to you. I’m sitting in a very comfy chair in Rainforest Lodge, on the edge of the Amazon Rainforest. No – within that rainforest. We hit the Amazon when the stands of eucalyptus trees died away on the southern slope of the Andes to be replaced with mile after mile of endless indigenous forest.

Frogs croaking. Crickets chirping. The shriek of macaws flying in to roost. The heavy wingbeat of a guan, a kind of Amazonian turkey. I can still see its silhouette up in one of the trees above the main lodge. Earlier, I heard the piping song of a toucan, and the quiet hoot of a faraway tinamou. And up above, enormous banks of cloud, like I’ve never seen before – unless it was in wildlife documentaries about this vast forested part of the world.

Rive, our guide, picked me up from Casa Tunki shortly after five thirty. It was a fairly quiet drive out of Cusco, as we had a lot of ground to cover. We passed Huacarpay early doors – I’m glad I’m not shelling out 180$ for a private tour to that place. It looked like a bit of a step down from Lima’s Pantanos de Villa (which, though a whim decision, really was top notch).

We made two stops. One in Paucartambo for breakfast, and another just before at the Chullpas of Ninamarca, a collection of pre-Inca tombs the Spanish ransacked years ago – but that the locals still visit with offerings in memory of their ancestors from time to time.

The Manu Road is famous for the quality of its birdwatching. Of the more than a thousand species that can be found in Manu, some five hundred or so can be encountered along the road. We didn’t see anywhere near that many of them, but that’s mostly because of the rain that came down hard during our passage of the long and winding road down through the mountains.

The forest seems infinite, and we haven’t even reached the reserved zone yet. These are what are known as the “habitable quarters” – the zona cultural. Already, in the last hour alone, I have seen more species than I could ever hope to see in Taunton in a single year.

This is a very special place.

We took a short walk along the road (as the rain came down) in search of cloud forest species. Most of them kept well hidden, though our guide did locate an Andean guan watching us from the side of the road.

We had a lot more luck after lunch with the hunt for Peru’s national bird, the Andean Cock-of-the-Rock (in case I didn’t already have enough Andean birds on my list). The breeding season may not be for several months – kicking off in September – but the local males keep a strict routine at their lek, cleaning their favourite perches and practising their dances for when the females come looking.

They’re fairly hard to miss, being a shade of orange so loud they might well be visible in the dark. I’m going into Manu without expectations – the thing I wanted to see most of all was a condor, and I was truly blessed on that front – but it was really special to see a bird so important to the Peruvians that they made it their national bird.

The lodge itself is an explosion of rainforest life. I’m having to lean heavily on the Merlin app to help me identify what I can hear: toucans, tinamous, tanagers, parrots, macaws, honeycreepers, earthcreepers and oropendolas. None of which I’ve ever seen or heard before.

I can’t see any charging stations, so I’d better leave it there. We set out early tomorrow for the Madre de Dios river at Atalaya. I have signal, which I wasn’t expecting (a begrudging thanks to Elon Musk’s Skylink) but I might run out of power at some point. So I’ll stop writing now and enjoy the sounds of the rainforest for a while. Dinner isn’t until seven – and I know it will be incredible, because our chef Bernardino is an absolute legend.

Wish me luck! BB x

N.B. Dinner was amazing, the night sky is even better (I saw a shooting star!) and there’s a changing station in the lodge – but not tomorrow, so I need to be prepared. But right now it’s raining with biblical proportions out there, so I’ll wait a bit for my phone to finish charging before making a break for it to my cabin!

Wildwood

May 15, 2023May 15, 2023 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

With the summer exams afoot, we’re entering “gained time”. Assessments replace lesson plans, trips take kids out of circulation more frequently, and savvier colleagues do a stock check on their red/green biros (delete as appropriate) for a lucrative summer of script-marking. Since my job description covers not just every year group but also all the conversation classes for the exam years as well, my timetable takes an even larger hit than most at this time of year. As of today, I’ve lost an enviable eighteen hours a fortnight. A man could go mad with that much idleness – so, as I do every year, I set myself a project to fill the time.

This one’s pretty straightforward: read a chapter a day of any book – just one chapter, no more, no less – and reflect on it in less than a thousand words. That way, I’m hoping I’ll develop a better reading habit, as well as keep my writing arm flexed well into the summer. It doesn’t pay £3 per throw like the exam scripts do, but it’s good practice. And who knows? One of these days, when I finally manage to convince somebody to let me try teaching English again, all of this reading might pay off. But until then, I have time to kill and a library to devour.

Guy Shrubsole, The Lost Rainforests of Britain

Here’s a book I’ve had my eye on for a while now. Shrubsole knew what he was doing when he hired the illustrator Alan Lee, of Tolkien fame, to design the cover of his paean to the vanishing temperate rainforests of Britain. The gnarled, mossy arms of Wistman’s Wood might as well be an early sketch for Fangorn Forest. Even the choice of a jay for the single flash of colour is inspired – for what bird could be more evocative of the deepwoods of the British Isles than the oak-sower, a creature almost singly responsible for the very existence of our oak forests?

There’s a medicine within the woods that has few equals. If I close my eyes and let my mind wander, I can picture the trees I sought out when my heart was in a bad place. Brabourne, Canterbury, Durham – and even as far as Plasencia. Now I think about it, those “healing trees” were invariably oaks, every one of them. I’m no spirit of the New Age – I live just a little too far north of Brighton for that – but I can’t help but draw something from that coincidence. Is it because they’re the largest trees in the forest? The oldest, and thus the wisest? Is it because their thick branches reach closer to the ground than other trees, like outstretched arms? While the regimented conifers bristle from trunk to treetop with their arms held high in a stiff salute, the oak tree is a serene creature. Motherly, almost.

Shrubsole’s passionately written text takes the reader by the hand into the soaking air of the last remaining rainforests in Britain. I confess I never really thought of rainforests as a British entity, though I would be the first to admit that, when living abroad, my fondest memories of England were of grey skies and the sound of autumn rain over an English wood. I’m incredibly fortunate to come from a line of amateur botanists: my mother was brought up knowing all the different plants and flowers and their uses (as well as which fungi were best avoided), and though I was stubbornly fixated on my animals, she did her best to pass on what she had learned to me. Consequently, I don’t need an app to tell my beeches from my birches. However, I know I’m on an island in more ways than one in that regard.

Since the last Ice Age, Shrubsole writes, we have cut down a third of all the forests in the world, and half of that in the last century alone. In that time, while we awakened to the plight of the shrinking rainforests in the tropics, our own green treasures have been quietly slipping over the edge and into oblivion. The ancient Britons revered the forests that once covered this island. Most of us, however, are a lot less likely to meet a druid than we are that one person who says something along the lines of “such a nice view, shame about the tree” – as though this land were ours to sculpt.

“Plant blindness” is a reality we must accept. Put simply – in the words of Tolkien’s Treebeard – “nobody cares for the woods anymore”. It’s easy to get excited about conservation when it’s got two shining eyes that straddle the line between beauty and vulnerability, but it’s that much harder to extend that zeal to the silent world of plants. Lack of knowledge leads to lack of empathy. As both a naturalist and a teacher, one of my cardinal rules is that once you can put a name to something, it means so much more to you. Perhaps the reverse is true: if you know nothing, your heart won’t bleed when you tread on a bluebell.

Recent studies showed that only 14% of A Level biology students could name more than three British plant species, while an even more alarming survey indicated that 83% of British children were unable to identify an oak leaf on sight. I suspect if I brought in a few leaves tomorrow and asked my Year 9 students to identify them, I’d fare little better. And yet, they’re very aware of the deforestation in Indonesia and the deleterious impact of the palm oil industry. The grass is always greener – or at least, it would be, if we could tell it was grass to begin with.

I’m learning to drive this summer, and I’m not ashamed to admit that one of the only things that genuinely excites me about having a car of my own is the freedom it will give me to explore even more of this country on foot. I appreciate the irony. But with avian flu decimating our seabird populations last year – an article in The Guardian put the death toll at 50,000 – and more and more common land disappearing under the pressure for affordable housing, I’ve never been more conscious of the need to see our green and pleasant land – before it’s gone. Before the baseline shifts, and we learn to accept what was once unacceptable.

I had a couple of hours between lessons this afternoon, so I took myself for a wander through the estate. I found a toad beneath the remnants of a tarpaulin from the old forest school I used to run three years ago, and a merry carpet of bluebells in their dying days followed me to the deepwoods where a chalk stream gurgles southward on its journey to the sea. A silent pool of rainwater sparked into life as the sun came down, drawing three tadpoles into its warm gaze. Chiffchaffs sang at various intervals, and somewhere overhead, unseen, a buzzard mewed. I didn’t hear our ravens today, but I often do.

The druids were onto something. There really is a medicine in the woods. If only the whole world could see it! BB x