I am sitting in a wooden hut on stilts in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. The lodge is comfortable. There is a small sleeping area and a bathroom with cold shower and a balcony area outside which looks out to the river. There is a hammock on the balcony, but it rarely gets used because it is a sticky 42 degrees during the day and at night there is an onslaught of a million different types of biting bugs and mosquitoes the size of my hand. I have been virtually eaten alive by all sorts of creatures. Hopefully I'll build up an immunity soon. Warning - 100% Deet does not make a blind bit of difference. Every bit of flesh, exposed or otherwise WILL be eaten. Last night the little shits bit through my jeans! Tight layers worn with baggy clothing on top helps. The only problem is that sweat is itchy too - especially by the gallon.
To get here we took a boat from Iquitos - the world's largest city that cannot be reached by road. We’d had a choice to get to Iquitos by plane or boat. I wished we could have taken the boat trip but apparently it takes days to get there, and we are fast realising that we’ve got so little time to do all the things we want to do. The plane we came across in was more like a private light aircraft than a proper plane. Slightly bigger than the one that took us to Los Roques – it seated about 60, but it was really old and knackered. I’ve never liked turbulence, regardless of how much I know it’s not supposed to be a problem, but this was silly. At one point the plane just dropped – I’m not sure how far down – I was too busy having a minor heart attack at the time, but it felt like one of those stressful nights when your brain is too active to sleep and you suddenly feel yourself dropping into the mattress – only we dropped a lot further. We were the only foreigners on the flight and no-body else even flinched. In fact the air stewardess laughed at me. Tim tried to explain that it was all down to the plane bouncing from one thermal to the next. I decided I was too jittery to get onto the subject that that was my idea of paragliding, not flying on a plane and spent the rest of the flight staring out of the window.
I remember reading that 1 ½ acres of rainforest are lost every second due to deforestation. The article was written about the jungle in Brazil and stated that you could see huge chunks that had been torn down to make way for soya plantations and the like. Not here or at least not yet, thankfully. I have never seen anything like it. One of the advantages of being on a toy plane is that we were flying quite low. For an hour and half we flew over nothing but trees, millions of them. I tried to look out for the river that would have taken us in by boat, but I didn’t see a single crack in the thick expanse of green. Let’s hope people manage to open their eyes before they reach to destroying this part of the forest too. Suddenly, any fears of our toy plane crashing vanished. It seems silly, but it had only just hit me – we were flying over the Amazonian rain forest! And what’s more, we were about to land in it too.
Once in the madness that is Iquitos (more on this later) we booked a 4 day trip into the jungle and we were off the next day. We travelled up the Rio Itaya which sits at the back of Iquitos, and then about 50km up the Amazon to Rio Yanayacu. We were with two really lovely girls, Kay and Nicola from Leeds. I am completely charmed by this place. Speeding down the Amazon was cool – knowing that we were on one of the greatest rivers on Earth, but it was when we got onto the Yanayacu that we entered Wonderland for real. We left the large speed boat that had taken us so far behind and hopped onto a tiny wooden fishing boat. With us came boxes of eggs, vegetables, gallons of water and a couple of chickens – live ones. We all knew what we’d be offered to eat that night, but nobody said anything. I guess you can’t get more fresh and organic than that can you?
I really don’t believe that my writing skills are good enough to properly describe what we saw next. Maybe it’s just me, because I am a London girl and I don’t get to flavour the beauty of the countryside enough, but I was gob smacked. Up till that moment we’d been swigging on Tim’s Venezuelan rum and swapping stories of things we’d been up to, but suddenly all of us fell silent. The atmosphere was so calm. It was really bright and all you could hear was birds rustling in the trees, the buzz of the dragonflies and the soft lapping of the water as our little boat struggled its way down in the meter or so of water that was left in the river. Trees of every description and every single shade of green imaginable. Some rising meters into the sky with huge thick trunks and then branches that looked like the trunks of normal trees. Others with hundreds of vine like tentacles dripping into the river. Since it is dry season the river banks are really high and quite bare - bar the hundreds of holes that are home to the catfish that plop in and out of them and the explosions of yellow and orange butterflies that group on the shore to eat the minerals then puff into the air, like a natural firework display. They fly around for a while before regrouping again on the bank to feed on a little more salt then explode into colour again. I don’t think I will ever forget those butterflies. The dragon flies are HUGE and they are everywhere! I’m a bit embarrassed to say this, but I was a bit scared for a second at first, because they fly millimeters away from your face. What the hell was I thinking?? They are so beautiful. Bright blue and red, they hover rather than fly. Now and again a bird would flutter out of the tress. None of us had any idea what they were and they were too quick to check out properly. Our guide was asleep so we decided not to ask. I found myself thankful that we’d decided to pick up a set of binoculars the night before.
At one point I looked down into the water and nearly screamed. A toothless massive grin was looking up at me. The local tribes fish for catfish by sinking under the water and catching them with little nets or by hand. I think the fisherman found my surprise quite amusing. I didn’t take my gasp long to turn into laughter. He rose from the water and waved. My first Amazonian friend.
When we first arrived at the lodge we dumped our stuff and went for a walk in the jungle with our guide, Naycer. He grew up in this jungle and has studied the area extensively. His English is also really good. I have a bit of a snobby gripe about using guides and a romantic image of always trying to communicate in the local language, but it would be horrible not to be able to understand any of the names of the birds, plants and animals, so I'm really glad of it.
It was raining (or course). We were wearing long shirts, long trousers, wellies and our raincoats. I cannot begin to describe how hot it was in there. The sweat was dripping from my brow and the bugs were horrendous. There are literally millions of them swarming around your face. I've started to get used to it now, but at first I was holding the collar of my raincoat so tightly to try to stop anything getting down the back of my neck that I could not balance.
The jungle is amazing. There was no trail. Naycer was hacking through with a machete. Hundreds of different trees, that I regret I cannot tell you the names of. It's the home of 11 different snakes, 8 of which are poisonous. Apparently they only bite if you step on them. We were warned to check all branches before touching them as many of the snakes look exactly like twigs or branches. As I hope you can appreciate, this rendered me too frightened to touch, or more importantly hold on, to any branches at all. That along with clutching at the collar of my raincoat and trying to swipe away a million mosquitos, horseflies and God only knows what else made for a rather difficult trek. Remembering the 15 meter long skin on the wall of the Iron House pub back in Iquitos I asked about anacondas. Nacyer laughed. ‘Yes’ he said, ‘but they don’t come out very often’.
That day we saw monkeys, spiders and termite nests (the residents of which, when crushed apparently make a good mozzie repellent, I've decided I like termites), and lots of mozzies. Back at the lodge we settled down for dinner (yup – you guessed it – chicken). The building is a wooden frame on stilts. There is no glass in the windows or plaster on the walls, just netting to keep the bugs (and the rest) out. That means that whether you are sat eating dinner in the main room, or having a shower, or lying on your bed it feels like you are in the middle of the jungle (which you are) having a meal/ shower etc under a huge, green mosquito net. It’s simply, simply fabulous.
That night we went out on a river trip looking for caimans. It was a fantastic boat trip. The 'dark' is hardly dark at all. The moon shines so brightly it seems like 4am on a June morning rather than the 'dead' of night. We all had our flashlights and searched the banks of the river for about an hour. Unfortunately no caimans in sight. You have to look for red eyes. We spotted quite a few pairs of red eyes but they always turned out to be either frogs or hawks – not that we were complaining – the frogs were really cool too.
In addition to an encyclopaedic knowledge of the jungle and good English the guides here all have x-ray vision as standard. Naycer spotted a frog in the distance and asked the boat driver to stop. We turned the boat and paddled a good ten meters to a spot on the river bank. After fumbling in the bushes for a few seconds Nacyer pulled out the frog. It was bright green and about 2cms long - a glass frog I think. I know that they do this all the time, and that they are looking out for the reflection of their eyes in the distance, but we were really impressed – especially because he told us what type of frog it was before we got to the riverbank and picked it up.
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