The Secret of Monkey Island

Arriving in the Jungle was a welcome relief after quite some time at altitude. The was thicker, but also much hotter and humid, so maybe not so much better as more like home.

We had to take a trip up stream for justy over an hour to reach our eco lodge. The eco part being that they didn't have mains electricity or heated the eco-pool (seriously that's what they called it). the river we travelled up was huge; by my estimation more than 100m wide in places. It was technically not the Amazon river, but fed into it. You can see from the plane when you fly in and out that the river snakes up and down, but on the boat it is so vast that you can't tell.

Arriving at the lodge we were greeted by the resident tapir, Karina. She was quite domesticated and was happy to have people around. Meredith even gave her a pat while she was taking a nap.

From the lodge our first excursion was a trip over to Monkey Island, which was on the other side fo the river. We have seen plenty of monkeys in zoos but never this close in natural habitat. Meredith goes "Hey I'll stand over here next to this four fingered spider monkey (one on a lower branch) and you take a picture to show how close we got". The monkey proceeded to launch on to her head. How close we got indeed!

It was a bit of a scary moment because neither of us have had rabies shots, but we are happy to report that she received no bites or scratches and the guide was able to 'coax' her away with a large stick. It also had really soft hands, like it moisturised its four fingers every day!

The next day we had a longer more involved trip deeper into the jungle. After travelling further up the river on our motor canoe, We grabbed paddles and peeled off into an inlet to the Lost Lagoon to look for wildlife. We saw quite a few tortoise families and a few caimen aligators. They were mostly juniors so not really big. The guide said they can grow up to 6-7 metres... Yawn, let us know when they are 17 metres and they can eat a buffalo whole like the boys back home and we might be interested!

On the way back the guide was able to coax a tarantula out of its hole which was cool, they are big hairy suckers, though mostly non-lethal to humans.

Here is a list of the other fauna we saw:

• giant guinea pig
• tucans and macaws
  
• anaconda (ok, so we only got to see a tiny bit of its body because it was hiding in the swamp, but it was still cool).

The food was surprisingly good at the lodge and the cabins were basic but very comfortable complete with our own hammocks! The cabins didn't have windows of course, just mosquito netting. Someone might have mentioned this to the local Peruvian couple staying nearby. They started their own 'jungle chorus' several times that night. We all enjoyed that a lot.