Just Wild About Peru

Even then, we had the lodge, well-stocked with cold beer, wine and soft drinks, and our lovely bare-bones room, complete with mosquito netting over each of the single beds, a bucket if the trip to the outdoor bathroom seemed too far, a hook for wet clothes and fans for the middle of the day when it was too hot to move.

Papaya, pancakes and hot chocolate were staples for breakfast. A box lunch of rice-and-something was offered to eat out on the trail, and dinners were a just-below-gourmet variety of beef, chicken, fish and fresh vegetables, topped off with entirely satiating desserts.

But best of all, we had our fellow travelers, two couples who had been grouped with us.

Our lesson in biodiversity was not limited to the jungle.

Cindy and Susan were fiftysomething housemates from Northern California. They had rented mountain bikes in Cusco (an option from the tour company), gotten off 10 miles uphill from the first lodge and raced the bus in. Susan, a nurse practitioner with a personal pharmacy in her knapsack, had nursed my son back to health with her uproarious laughter and just the right medication when he contracted what he gamely named "El Flu de Peru."

(At that moment, I felt like a total flake of a parent, having brought only a bagful of expired over-the-counter pills for hay fever and the like. Same with the forgotten rain jackets. Thank goodness for the $1 plastic ponchos we had bought in Machu Picchu the week before.)

When Betty and Pierce arrived on a second bus, we all held our breath. She wore diamond rings as loud as her Texas accent. (They raise cattle on a 60,000-acre ranch in west Texas.) He had been appointed by then-Gov. George W. Bush to the Texas prison board. Cindy and Susan were die-hard liberals.

But we all bonded immediately. When politics came up on the fourth night, everyone explicitly and politely searched for the middle ground to every issue.

The four of them traveled together with their guide by day, and otherwise helped our kids keep count of the 15 capybaras, 57 caimans and 73 turtles they tracked along the riverbank.

We saw not one other tourist during the entire five-day stay in the jungle. And not a single scrap of trash, either.

When we went looking for black caimans one moonless night, I spent most of the time with my head rested against the railing of the quiet catamaran, listening to the water brush by and taking in an entire galaxy of stars, the likes of which I have never seen, and can still see now.

To be honest, the trip out of the jungle became a little too harrowing when the outboard motor on our dugout canoe faltered and 12 hours turned into 15, the last three in the dark and without the life vests promised in the brochure. The harbor in the tiny outpost called Laberinto, near Puerto Maldonado, where we finally docked at 10 p.m., reeked of marijuana.

When the kids returned home to Washington, they declared they would never go into the jungle again. I worried about blowback.

But after six months, they began begging for another adventure vacation. Thinking tame , I suggested Costa Rica. "Costa Rica!" the 8-year-old frowned. "I want to go somewhere really different. How about Cambodia?"

"Yeah!" added my 13-year-old. "Then on to China."

Dana Priest is a reporter on The Post's national staff.