Puerto Maldonado will Celebrate the San Juan Bautista Festival Next Week
The lazy town of Puerto Maldonado, on the confluence of the Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers, is the perfect base for those tours of the Peruvian Amazon we wrote about. We’ve also dedicated some blog space to activities to do in the town itself, rather than solely visiting the surrounding rainforest.
Next Tuesday, June 24th, the communities of the Amazon will celebrate the San Juan Bautista Festival, honoring the rainforest’s patron saint John the Baptist. For millennia, the rivers have been the lifeline of the Amazon, allowing for travel amongst its cities and communities, offering food in its creature and those that gather to drink at their shores.
This is an excellent time to sample the local and regional dishes of the Peruvian Amazon, especially the Juanes, named after the festival’s namesake (ostensibly because they resemble the saint’s head on a plate). The spiced mixture of rice or yucca with hen, eggs, and olive is steamed within in a tied bundle of bijao leaf. They are the main food associated with the festival. You can find them on sale in the streets and at the town’s market, Mercado Modelo, as well as deliciously simple heart of palm salad and pan de arroz (bread made from rice). Of course, there’s also a pleasing array of tropical fruits and juices on offer. Food is quite inexpensive in general, and other dishes you are likely to find in town include canga chicken, patrashca (fish roasted in a bijao leaf), and pig’s head escabeche.
This is also the optimal time to browse the rainforest’s arts and crafts and to watch some traditional dances. One of the dances you might see is the emphaiba, a Machiguenga tribal dance which speaks to the force of the feathers of different tropical birds, which are honored in local traditional. It relates the legend of a shaman who captured two suns (both children of the moon) while they bathed in a lake, and brought them home to fit them with various crowns of feathers. The sun overheated with red macaw feather and cooled down too much with greenish yellow parakeet feathers. After many attempts, he found the 
crowns which gave both their ideal temperature, and hung the suns back in the sky. One sun shines during the day, and the other only in dreams and visions, but both light our way throughout our lives. Other dances you might catch sight of include the Tobas and the Caza del Tigre (Tiger Hunt).
Almost all families will head to the riverside to bathe in the water and to picnic along its shores, making for a relaxing afternoon.
To arrive in Puerto Maldonado, you can take a short flight from Cusco and then a taxi from the Padre José Aldamiz airport to the center of town, just under 5 miles away. You can also arrive by car, as Puerto Maldonado is only 5 hours from Cusco, but the trip is quite uncomfortable and thus it is not the first choice of most travelers.
Once in town, we hope that you’ll visit us at Pirwa Maldonado Hostel, where we offer both private rooms and shared dormitories, all of which have flat-screen TVs, wi-fi, and overhead fans.