Puerto Maldonado, it´s a jungle out there

Arrived in the airport in Puerto Maldonado (after travelling via Cusco), and were absolutely swamped in the arrivals hall.  Taxi drivers were literally all over us trying to get us to take their cab, it was insane.  Eventually we got two cars from the scrambled mess, and went into town.  Our hotel was basic, to say the least, but it was pretty cheap.  There was no hot water, but the cold shower was pretty refreshing - it was so hot and muggy there.

We put some washing in the laundrette next door, then went on the net to organise getting picked up for the trip the next day.  We went to a little cafe down the road, and were given a free meal-sized bowl of soup as soon as we sat down.  We also got a free drink of chicha morada, which is made from black corn.

After lunch we wandered round town, looking for ponchos.  We got tuk tuks to the market, and had a wander round there.  We were taking photos of some chickens in the corner, and some kids ran over to get in the photo, so we entertained them for a while showing them the photos.

We headed back into the town, and stopped in a little cafe on Plaza des Armes.  We then spent ages looking for shower gel, and could only find one shop that had any, and it was about 2 quid!

We went back to the hotel, got changed, and headed to Wasi Lodge, that Rick had read about, for dinner.  It was really nice lodge-type accommodation, but didn´t turn out to be that good on the food front - they only had 3 of the things on their menu!

The next morning we got up, collected our washing, and went back to the hostel for some breakfast.  Sophie and Louise had an unfortunate surprise after eating theirs, it turned out there were tiny ants in the bread.  Nice.

We got tuk tuks out to the office of the company we had booked the trip with - at one stage the road was so bad that Rick had to stick his leg out of the tuk tuk to get it out of a hole and get moving again!  We got to the office, and left our main bags there, as we could only take a small bag on the boat.

The trip to the jungle started with an hour long bus ride, where we met our guide, Betsy.  She talked to us about what we were going to do, and gave us some passion fruit, banana crisps, mini bananas (platas) and orange juice.  Nice.  We then got on a boat, and headed off for an hour and a half down the Tambopata river to our lodge.  The trip was cool, with jungle either side, and a mirky river ahead of us, just like you´d see on nature programmes.  We were given our lunch on the boat, which was a really nice chicken fried rice type mix, served wrapped up in banana leaves.  Rick did his fork trick when throwing his left overs into the water, and Nikki took the bait - "Rick!!  You can´t throw your fork...!!!"

After the boat ride, we got off at the ´port´, and walked about 10 minutes into the jungle to our pretty fancy lodge.  We checked into our rooms, and I had a bit of a lie down in the hammock.  A few minutes later, I heard Rick calling Mike into his room to check out the a moth.  I ran in to investigate also, and it was the biggest moth I´ve ever seen!  It didn´t seem to want to move, and didn´t even flinch at the flash of our cameras.

We lazed about in the room for a while, until it was time to head off into the jungle.  We stopped to look at some leaf cutter ants, which were pretty cool, although this wasn´t a good sign, and after looking at ants for 10 minutes, we weren´t too hopeful about seeing cool jungle animals!  We did see some walking trees, which grow loads of roots at their base, and actually move themselves over when necessary to catch the light, so they were pretty cool.  We walked on to the tower, which at 27m was right above the canope.  We got a cool view of the river, and saw some monkeys in the trees.  It was also a bit weird to see some parrots just flying about - I hadn´t seen one that wasn´t in a cage before!  But that was about it, apart from some maquaws, and absolutely giant wasps.  Rick was enjoying the view, but wasn´t loving being that high up.  Simon, another English guy who was there with Maria, his Swedish wife, was absolutely hating it though, he couldn´t move around the top without letting go of the rail!  The poor fella was a lot happier when we made it back down to terra firma!

We walked back to the lodge, had another little lie down in the hammock, and then had dinner by candle light, as there was no electricity in the evening.  We had to literally fight the ants off our plates, they were all over the table!  We sat around for a while, then went out to look at the stars.  It was so cool, you could see so many of them, since we were in the middle of nowhere, with no lights around for miles, except our candles and torches.  We were all tucked up in bed before 9, ready for an early start in the morning!

Betsy woke us at 5 am for breakfast, and we headed off for some early morning bird watching.  We saw quite a lot, and it was cool just sitting around on the catamaran on the river.  We sailed along, and did some pirana fishing, using small chunks of beef for bait.  Mike caught one and nearly hit us with it when he pulled it out of the water - Louise came off her seat and I nearly fell off the boat trying to avoid it!  The little fella got away in the end though.  One of the other lads caught one, and everyone started taking photos.  The poor fish was kept for nearly the full 2 minutes they can survive out of water!!!  After a while we moved further down the river in search for giant otters, but they´re quite shy, so we didn´t see any.  On the walk back to the lodge though, a group of monkeys crossed our path, and it was really cool to see them swinging about through the trees.

Back at the lodge, we lazed about (I loved that hammock!), and then had lunch.  Afterwards, back in our room, Nikki spotted a monkey in the trees (our rooms only had 3 walls), so we watched them jumping about for a bit.  They were pretty big, and probably the coolest thing we had seen so far!  We met up in reception to go on the next trip, but stopped to hear the local school children sing for us, they were so cute!!  We headed off to the clay lick, apparently a lot of the birds eat the clay, but no one knows why.  But we didn´t see any birds.  We did see a lizard though, so that was pretty cool.

That night, after dinner, myself, Louise, Simon and Maria headed off on a night walk.  I was pretty excited about seeing some really cool stuff, but when after 20 mins our guide pointed out a large butterfly, I began to have my doubts.   We did manage to see a tarantula, "something large moving in the bushes", and as promised, the leaf cutter ants still at work.  Not that great then.

Up early again the next day, around 7 am, had breakfast, then headed off to the airport.  We had to wait there for a few hours.  The airport was two halls - departures and arrivals.  So that was loads of fun!

Click here for all the Puerto Maldonado photos.