(01-10-2019, 01:06 PM)Drunk Monk Wrote: I had a similar luggage kerfuffle leaving China once. I was told my bag was checked all the way through.Our baggage claim stated that it was checked through to Puerto Maldonaldo. Like you, we interpreted that as meaning we'd just pick it up there. But I guess "checked through" doesn't mean what we thought. Even JJ had this problem once when traveling from Norway to England.
2018-12-28: Part 1
In the morning, Mohsin walks us to the market area. There's no haggling, and the vendors pretty much ignore us, with little eye contact. No one hawks their goods. In fact, Mohsin says sometimes vendors will decline to sell something simply because it would be too much effort to retrieve the item from a high shelf. I buy a children's notebook to use as a journal because my tiny notebook is too difficult to write in.
One other odd thing about Puerto Maldonado. I never see anyone smoke. Then there are the mannequins. Many storefronts, especially clothing stores, have mannequins spilling out onto the sidewalk to display various wares. There seems to be as many mannequins as locals living in Puerto Maldonado.
At about 11 am we load up a rental minibus and head out. JJ follows in his pickup that has 4-wheel drive. The later portions of the road are ever suspect; if the minibus can't make it all the way, JJ will make as many trips as necessary to get us to our destination.
We head NE across the Madre de Dios river on what looks like the Golden Gate Bridge, only it's much shorter, called the Continental Bridge, a controversial project that completed the Transoceanic Highway through the Amazon. Before it was finished, it would take three days to reach our destination. Now it's maybe six or so hours. After a couple hours driving on the highway past slash and burn fields with lone and dying Brazil Nut trees standing (because it's illegal to cut them down, but now they're doomed without the other vegetation), we turn left, pay a family a toll to use an old logging road, and head northeast on it. It's a bumpy clay road with lots of ruts that force the driver to zig and zag and sometimes inch through them. Sitting in the back, LC and I are bounced all over the place.
An hour into this we stop for a meal. Mohsin hands out banana-wrapped bundles of rice, meat, etc., in a banana-leaf wrap. He tells us to eat with our fingers and use our pants as napkins, because this will help prepare us for what lies ahead. We finish and continue the tortuous drive. The vegetation all about gets ever more more jungly.
Another hour into this drive, our driver suddenly stops. He makes several back and forths to turn around. JJ stops his pickup, gets out, and asks him what's wrong. The hired minibus driver has had it; he won't go any further. We all get out while JJ tries to persuade him the road is okay. But the driver offloads all our stuff, which we put in the back of JJ's pickup. Then the driver abandons us . I see a trail of thick black oil on the road and realize that, whether or not the driver knows it, all that bottoming has given his minibus a nasty oil leak. Some of the group climb in the back of the pickup and JJ takes them onward.
I'm nobody's pony.