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Rosamond Raymond Travel Bursary 2006
Rebecca Saunders

Rebecca was awarded the Bursary for a British Schools Exploring Society trip to the Peruvian Amazonian rainforest which she undertook in the summer vacation between Lower and Upper Six.
A group of 43 Young Explorers, myself and four other St. Catherine’s girls included, met at Heathrow Airport on the first Monday after the end of term. We were all decidedly nervous but desperate to make our first steps towards reaching our destination; the jungle. After three very long flights and an extremely long wait at Lima Airport, which enabled us all to get to know each other better, we arrived somewhat tired but very excited in Iquitos, eastern Peru. The weather was typical of what was to come - scorching heat and humidity, even at 7 o’clock in the morning! The next few days were spent resting and acclimatising to prepare us for a month as far away from civilisation as it is probably possible to be! We visited the shantytown called Belen, which was an eye-opening experience but very interesting to see how these poverty-stricken people live so happily in such basic and unsanitary conditions. We also watched the street theatre and wondered through the local market that sold anything and everything from anaconda skins and turtle shells to herbs and spices and flip flops!

Three boats took us upstream and after four days of watching the trees grow taller and the river become narrower, we arrived at our first base camp deep in the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve. Here were spent about a week and a half carrying out science research and population surveys on the local species, including dolphins, Caiman alligators, turtles, macaws and land transects, which involved counting primates like monkeys whilst trekking through the jungle, which is absolutely teeming with wildlife. Sitting out at night looking up at the starry sky is absolutely amazing and something I will never forget.
Leaving Iquitos
Leaving Iquitos
A beautiful sunset
A beautiful sunset
During the second half of the expedition we travelled further upstream to our second base camp, where my group (Caiman Fire) almost immediately set out on a 10km walk through dense undergrowth in the heat of the day carrying 20kg rucksacks and 25kg of water between two, which was hard work, to put it simply! Eventually we made it to wild camp - a collection of about a dozen tents by a beautiful but piranha-filled lake untouched by the hands of Western civilisation, until our arrival! We assessed the aquatic population by measuring and weighing the fish we caught from a metal canoe. We had some close encounters with snakes and spiders and heard some very strange noises under canvas during the night, the source of which I will probably never find out; but we survived and after three very hot nights we made our way back to base camp at top speed in order to meet our boat before it left to pick up the next fire. We also did some conservation work; from the guard station we set off to collect turtle eggs during the nights and in the mornings we planted them in artificial hatches in order to protect them from poachers.

It was a truly fantastic experience that I would thoroughly recommend to anyone and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Old Girls’ Association for awarding me the Rosamond Raymond Travel Bursary which was a most generous contribution towards my trip. We will be giving a presentation to the Peruvian Ambassador at the Royal Geographical Society in London using our work to prove the benefits of the National Reserve to the species diversity and wildlife conservation in the Amazon Rainforest to persuade the Peruvian Government to keep the Reserve running despite the large financial costs; which makes the trip yet more worthwhile.