The jungle

Amazing, damp, gritty, stunning, thrilling, buggy, slutty. All adjectives that spring to mind for our 10 days just completed in the Amazon jungle. We descended as low as 1000 feet of elevation on the Rio Napo, with about 1500 river miles left before the mouth of the Amazon in the Atlantic. It’s been a dream of mine for 30 years to see some of it, and now we have. Hooray!

Some of the good, bad and ugly of the trip: One nice thing about the jungle is it’s nice and hot. Our intown hotel had a pool.

We were definitely the local color on the bus from town towards the jungle lodge.

(minding the bags at the scenic Tena bus station. Icky.)

Loading up on the canoe …

… with our wonderful guide Freddie (our Spanish pays off again. Freddy speaks Kichwa and Spanish). He took us touring, swimming and tubing in the river.

















We canoed to an animal rescue spot: toucan, capybara, ocelot, jaguarindo, macaw, peccary, anaconda, hooray! Sweet as pie log book entry.

Rosie’s poor calves beckoned the no-see-ums (we were able to ward off the (malaria-carrying) mosquitos with repellent, but the tiny gnats seemed immune).

Ro with an improbably huge fruit (guaba) that we watched Freddy's cousin scramble up a tree to pluck with a tool constructed on-the-spot from a pole, a branch and several palm strands.

We all tried our hand at the blowgun and Rosie brought home the parrot with her dart.

A great voyage, glad to be home (the busride last night was supposed to the 5 hours, it was 7. Oof.)

All well. P