Out of office assistant: Welcome to the Jungle

Can't say that I'm a big fan of Iquitos. It is a loud place - like someone turned up the volume and forgot. Cars are a luxury so there's a constant scream of motorcycles and mototaxis, much honking and, to compete with all this is people playing loud music. I kept hearing the voice of the Grinch in my head saying, "Noise, noise, noise"...I like quiet.

Amazon river

So, I quickly arranged to be taken away into the jungle! One day after my arrival I was being whisked down the Itaya river, which then connects to the mighty Amazon. And it is mighty...mighty brown - it looked like chocolate milk. It is huge and quite impressive, yes. The vast expanse of sky above it helps add to the grandeur - I'm glad that there are no skyscrapers to take away from its greatness.

After about 45 minutes, we turned left at at distributary river (it flows away from the main river) Rio Tapira. This river only exists during the wet season. It is here that the lodge that would be our home for the next three days is located. The lodge is a series of buildings on stilts that are connected by covered walkways. The common rooms, the dining and hammock rooms (oh yeah, you need a hammock room!), do not have walls - there is only mosquito netting so that you can look out.

The first thing you notice when the boat engine turns off? The silence. Well, the almost silence...The Bocho Locho bird is a bright yellow bird that makes nests shaped like giant drops of water - but that isn't why I dubbed it the Drop Bird. The male has a distinctive song that sounds like an amplified drop of water dripping into a deep well. Its very hypnotic.

When we arrived we got right down to business - we donned our standard issue rubber boots, in case of snakes...and mud - and went straight into the jungle. As soon as we passed the tree line we were assailed by a mass of mosquitoes. We had put on our 80% DEET insect repellent, but that didn't stop them from buzzing in our ears, that horrible whine that makes all humans flail their arms in panic. It wasn't so bad while we were moving, but Raul, our guide, stopped to tell us about the medicinal uses of many of the plants and when we stood still it seemed like all the mosquitoes of the jungle descended on us. Raul hadn't put any repellent on and he was basically the buffet at this banquet - it was quite frightening to see the back of his tshirt.

We caught sight of some squirrel monkeys, high above us in the trees. They are a small monkey so we were glad that Raul had brought some binoculars so we could get a "closer" look...those trees are TALL. We stood and watched them and they watched us as they passed way above our heads - they're very cute. We also saw some spider monkeys, who have really long arms, but they weren't as curious about us as the squirrel monkeys so they moved on rather quickly. Closer to the ground we saw some industrious leaf cutter ants all in a row with their leaf bits, and some massive army ants. Raul explained to us that the jungle people would use the army ant's very powerful mandibles as sutures...they just had to cut of the venomous segment of it's body first - he even demonstrated.

That night we did it all again; boots into the jungle to see the night creatures...which include mosquitoes. This time, in addition to the insect repellent, I put a scarf around my head so that at least I wouldn't have to listen to that sound. It was very effective, although a wayward moth, attracted to my headlamp, did get caught up in it.

scorpion spider

Raul wanted to find us a nice tarantula - sadly, we didn't see one, but we did have the pleasure of meeting a very big and long legged scorpion spider. Raul even picked it up with his bare hands! Yeech! As we turned around from that encounter, I saw a pair of glowing eyes in the dark...what the heck?? It was a giant bull frog! He didn't care one whit about us as we photographed him - he was huge - came up past my ankle.