Three Gruesome Months Living with Cockroaches in the Amazon

Last Updated on December 10, 2023 by Adam Watts

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Back in 2009 volunteered with a conservation company in Peru. Or to put it another way, I spent three months living with cockroaches in the Amazon Rainforest.

That’s where I lived for three months. No doors, no windows, no electricity, no phone lines, no hot water, no McDonald’s just round the corner. The photo shows one “dorm”, I suppose you could call it, with six beds up top and a bit of storage space below for muddy, wet clothes, where wasp’s nests may or may not have formed inside certain people’s trousers.

There were two other identical dorms. There was also a similarly-styled bathroom area and a “main pod” which was made up of the kitchen/pantry area connected to a dining/communal area.

We had a generator which we powered up once a week, through which we could connect a laptop to the Internet to email home to let loved ones know we hadn’t yet been eaten by a puma.

Being in the jungle, I expected snakes and spiders, and we had a few encounters with those too. But cockroaches were our main enemy on a daily basis.

More than once did I creep into the bathroom after dark to detect the slick surface of cockroach shell glinting in the moonlight on top of somebody’s toothbrush they’d left out.

The first time you accidentally left your toothbrush out became an initiation right because after your first slip up, you’d make sure to buy spares next time you were in the closest town, Salvacion.

New guys came and went all the time – scientists, researchers, new volunteers, hell, we had a whole film crew there for a month or so – which meant there were always new victims to tease at breakfast.

Being squeamish about the roaches passes the first time you grab the spray and go nuts screaming “die scum die!” while spraying the roach skittering away to a safe hole. The roach would eventually stop, flounder around a bit, then finally cease moving entirely.

I consider myself a very relaxed individual and I put killing things pretty low down on my list of favorite pastimes. But it’s amazing how fast such qualms fall at the wayside when you find a cockroach has nibbled its way inside a packet of Fruit Pastilles you’ve been saving for two months as a precious home comfort. 

(We still ate those Fruit Pastilles though, nibble-holes be damned.)

There was also the bugs, especially after dark. After we’d had dinner, we’d crack out the candles and sit around playing cards. There wasn’t much else to do.

After a few months, when the 27th hand of rummy for the night couldn’t cut it anymore, we started entertaining ourselves by torturing bugs in the candle flame.

I’m not mentally unstable, I assure you, and it wasn’t me who started it. Besides, the bugs mostly flew into the flame themselves, flapped a bit, then fell into the wax at the bottom. We just then encouraged them to make a return visit into the light.

It was a highly memorable three months. Here I am, updating this post many years later, and I still have bittersweet memories about living with cockroaches in the Amazon. Good times, good people, demonic cockroaches.

For those curious, I organized the trip through Travellers Worldwide, which it seems like is no longer functional as an organization. Sad times.

For more wild stories of my time in South America, read this post about cycling Death Road in Bolivia.