Wednesday, November 22, 2017
In the jungle you have to get going early in the morning to miss some of the heat. Breakfast was at 6 am, and by 6:30 we were headed back to the river.
Mom very happy to be with her kid. Kid tolerates it.
After a 20-minute boat ride we disembarked and almost immediately came upon a troop of squirrel monkeys. I didn’t even have my camera out yet. Not that having my camera out helped me later in the trip. We came upon monkeys a number of times, and I never got any good photos.
We took a nice 7-km walk through the jungle. Lots of insects, birds, and butterflies.
There were some pretty strange plants too:
You might hazard a guess about what body part that one is named after.
Dave and I were both still sore from Machu Picchu Mountain, but I really only felt it when we had to climb up or down. Below, me with the English girls, Chloe and Rebecca, after Julio made face paint from a plant leaf:
We reached an oxbow lake (formed when a river twists so much that a piece of it splits off into a lake), and Julio bailed out the canoe that was waiting there. I was very happy to spend several hours paddling lazily around the lake, especially because I didn’t have to be the one to paddle.
David was pleased that he got to see an item on his bucket list: an anaconda. It was just a baby, but still:
I was amused watching everyone else be amused:
We also saw tons of macaws, especially David’s favorites, the blue and yellows:
These are my son’s feet. He’s been living in the jungle for five months, and it shows in his feet, which appear to be permanently cracked and dirty:
Above, through the wonders of modern technology you get the back of the canoe and the front in the same photo.
After the canoe trip, we ate lunch in a wooden pavilion near the lake (stir fried chicken and rice wrapped in plantain leaves…pretty tasty for a picnic). There was another group eating there, and it took us a while to figure out what language they were speaking: Russian. An interesting feature of the Amazonian jungle was that there weren’t tons of Americans around. Refreshing.
The hike back featured a big tarantula, which Julio lured out with the leaf:
That night after dinner we went out on the boat looking for caimans. I didn’t care at all whether we found any caimans; I just liked being on the boat. The stars were spectacular, and it couldn’t have been more pleasant on the water. I paid little attention to the caiman spotting until we came upon one on a bank and my son started making noises like he wanted to jump out of the boat and try to grab it. Julio gave him the nod, so next thing we knew he had hopped out of the boat and leapt after it. The crowd on the boat gasped in surprise, then everyone whipped out their cameras. The caiman made a successful escape, however. David returned to the boat, flannel pajama bottoms covered with mud, and was a bit bummed that he hadn’t performed for the crowd.
I debated whether to include this, but it was such an annoyingly big piece of the trip that I shouldn’t leave it out. Remember the bites I discovered Monday night? By Wednesday they were even worse. Below is a small sample of them. “Itchy” does not begin to describe these bites. I figured out that my agony had been delivered by sandflies. Julio told us a horrible story about getting leishmaniasis from sandfly bites, so that was something fun to ponder.
