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Published: August 14th 2006
Most sane people do just a 2 to 3 days tour into the jungle, but in such a tour you stay in the same camp all the time, and unlikely to experience much. Thus we've decided to do a 5 day tour!
Just before the tour I read Yosi Ginzburg's book - Back from Tuichi, who described his experience of surviving in the jungle for more than 20 days, after loosing his companions.
It was amazing to travel in the same places as he did, and see that some of the things remain the same, although most has changed since his travel, some 25 years ago. His descriptions of the jungle were sometimes so accurate and after the tour I could understand much better what he went through, and that he didn't exaggerate at all.
In the tour we had with us a great guide, Hoze, who new every corner of the jungle, every trail and every tree.
But first thing first - The tour we did concentrated in the area between the Beni, Tuichi and Hondo rivers in the amazon basin.
On the first day we've arrived to the permanent camp, and did at evening a
hike into the jungle.
There we saw some animals including monkeys, termites, a tarantula and huge butterflies. I also had a personal encounter with a few types of the nicer insects - fire ants, 24 hours ants, and allot of mosquitoes.
On the second day we did a tedious 6 hours walk to our second day camp, on the banks of the Hondo river. The jungle wasn't as thick as I had expected, but yet it wasn't an easy stroll since we had to carry all our equipment, food and water with us, and it was hot and humid.
At evening we tried to do some fishing, which was unsuccessful.
On the third day we built our raft, actually 2 of them - one for us, and one for our equipment.
It was one of the more physically demanding things I got to do in my trip - First we had to cut down the trees, then pill them off, cut'em evenly into 6m length logs, carry them to the beach and finally tie them all together. We were 4 at the job, and yet Hoze did the same amount of work as we did.
Actually if I
First day camp
A 5 stars hotel compared to our other campsknew in advance what kind of havoc we'd do to the surrounding environment, I don't think I would've went to this tour in the first place. We cut down huge 12-14m high Bolsa trees, than cleared a path to the bank of the river to carry the logs. I don't recommend this kind of tour to anybody concerned about the environment. You can do equally good tours, without building a raft and probably experiencing more than we did.
The highlight of this day was when we ate lunch - our cook has managed to catch a really delicious fish - a local type of Salmon.
On the forth day we've finished tying up the rafts, and started our sail down the Hondo river. Surprisingly, Hoze decided that we were to sail our raft by ourselves, but actually we preferred it this way - so that Hoze and the cook could sail the raft caring our mochilas safely.
The water level was pretty low in many places, and we sometimes had to help Mr. T, our raft (yeah, we named it like you do with any ship), to get past the obstacles.
Needless to say, we with allot of previous
raft sailing experience, did a perfect job. Our poor Mr. T met almost every log in the river, and one time almost flipped over.
We wild camped this night at the banks of the river.
On the last day we continued our sail down the river, than at one point abandoned our rafts and visited an Indian family. This family lives alone in the jungle, in the middle of nowhere.
It was really interesting to see the way they live, in the middle of nowhere, surviving by themselves and living mostly from the jungle.
After this we did another hike from the family to the Beni river, where a boat was supposed to wait for us. But the boat wasn't there so we rushed to a different place and caught it there.
After experiencing some tiny part of the real jungle, it was awesome to return to civilization!
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