Getting there: A one hour flight followed by two hours in a taxi, much
of it on a rough dirt road fording many streams. Ten minutes for a boat
crossing of a large river that has no bridge, then find another taxi
for another hour through the jungle. We finally reach the end of the
road, and get in a small wooden boat and head upstream for almost six
hours ...in the pitch black of night!
In case that isn't vivid enough, let me paint a picture:
One guy sits on the front with a flashlight and gives commands to the
guy working the motor at the back ...only he keeps the light off half
the time to save batteries, and the river has lots of giant exposed
fallen trees and even some small rapids. Very scary when the engine
dies and we drift backwards down the rapids while they change tanks in
the complete darkness! All we can see is the stars and a silhouette of
the shoreline.
Eventually we arrive at the lodge, a former research
station with no electricity -only candles and flashlights. We are very
remote: 30 miles farther up the river live indigenous naked people who
sometimes shoot arrows at passing boats - glad we stopped here! We see
lots of wildlife: Macaws, parrots, toucans, hawks, vultures, and too
many other birds to remember. We also saw cayman, snakes, frogs,
spiders, giant otters, and three kinds of monkeys - Spider, Squirrel,
and Capuchin (we also heard Howler monkeys, but never saw them).
One local oddity is the Tapir, the latest animal in the
Amazon - a funky waist high four legged hoofed creature with an odd
"snout." We waited in the dark for hours hoping to see these nocturnal
creatures at a remote clay lick they come to for salt. Kind of
surreal to be sitting under individual mosquito nets in the pitch black
listening for horse-like sounds deep in the jungle. We couldn't whisper
above the din of the insects, or use our flashlights, so after a few
hours we weren't 100 percent sure if the guide was even still with us.
It was a bust, but thankfully we saw a Tapir the next morning by the
river bank tromping thru the mud and eventually swimming across the
river in front of our boat. Cool.
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