Our jungle adventure

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Arriving to our hotel in the middle of the jungle following a 2.5 hour boat ride from Manaus (main city of the Amazon), we do the usual “Heena and Inna” thing and upgrade ourselves from a normal room to the top suite. We have spent the last night in Manaus at a hostel with shared bathroom and pretty much no window, so suckers that we are, when we are offered the upgrade at 1/3 of the normal price (and told Bill Gates stayed there), we don’t hesitate. Backpacking…..hmmmm….

The upgrade is worth it though, even if only for the fact that we have a private rooftop balcony - as soon as we come out of our room, we are surrounded by wild macaws (large very colourful parrots) and tiny little monkeys that couldn’t be cuter if they tried! We are impressed!

Our hotel is a tree top hotel and we are perched on top of a 25-30m structure, with a bird’s eye view of the amazon rainforest. Since we visited right at the end of the wet season though, about 12m of this height was completely consumed by water - its hard to imagine 6-18m of water cover the otherwise dry land for almost 6 months a year!

Day 1
Our group for the next 4 days consists of only 4 people - us 2 and a South African couple. Our guide, Juan, takes us to a native home on the first afternoon of our stay. We are introduced to a native family, consisting of husband ad wife and 15 children!!!! Apparently they are trying for more….beats us… Their life is completely self sufficient from farming, fishing and hunting and we are treated to a number of local delicacies including Inna’s favourite Tapioca (see week 2 in North East Brazil), majority of which we politely chew and spit out;-)

On our return to the hotel, we are excited to discover that there is a group of 15 cute American army cadets staying at the hotel and keep our fingers crossed for some company at the bar that evening….turns out that we may be too intimidating (sans make up and with frizzballs instead of hair!) to the 22 year olds and only end up talking to their supervisor who immediately informs us that he has fought in Iraq…we don’t know whether to be impressed or scared! We also befriend the local drunk - a macaw who can’t fly and hence lives in the bar! He is sipping our caipirinhas and starts wobbling down the bar pretty soon - ooops!

Day 2

Another early wake up on day 2 (again - isn’t this meant to be a holiday?!) and we head off on a boat ride through the flooded jungle area, with our guide literally cutting our way through the trees with a machete - this is fun until he accidentally disturbs a termites nest and we spend the next half hour slapping ourselves silly, trying to avoid at least some of the angry bites! We also see a 4m boa constrictor snake wrapped around a tree…couple of hours later, one of the guides brings it into the hotel and Heenz braves holding it for a unique photo opportunity….Innz wont go anywhere close!

After lunch, we lounge around the hotel, totally mesmerized by dozens of monkeys playing around in the grounds. They run completely free and try to steal food off everyone…watching them is not at all different to watching a bunch of kids playing around - well, may be there is a little bit more of biting going on here! There are baby ones here too and they desperately try to hitch rides on the adults backs, who wont always have it. You wouldn’t believe it but Innz actually feels her first pang of maternal instinct as one of the monkeys grabs her finger much like a new born baby would do! Thankfully this emotion does not last long.

We are then taken piranha fishing for the afternoon! We are given our fishing equipment (well, a bamboo stick with a hook attached to it!) and cow heart as bait, and Juan explains that contrary to popular fishing techniques whereby one needs to remain as quiet as a mouse, piranha need to be attracted to bait by loud bangs on the water imitating something (a human??) falling in. We successfully catch our dinner (well, we do, catching 8 out of the 10 caught by our group). The guy on the boat has much less luck and sulks all the way back, even though we do wonder how the hell we are going to eat these tiny fish! It turns out to be quite tasty (or it may be because we knew we caught it ourselves!), although it still looks pretty hideous on the plate - you can still see the sharp teeth and all.

The day is not yet over as after dinner we go nighttime cayman (crocodile) spotting. As we sail out in the dark, the guide watches the dark water intently, trying to spot the cayman eyes…finally we kill the motor and quietly edge to the river bank…before we know it, one of the local guides on our boat jumps into the water (is he mad!?!) and re-surfaces holding a cayman in his hands! As the animal is brought on board, Heenz bursts out with laughter at the sight of Innz’s face which has turned a ghostly shade of white! Never seen her so scared! To be honest - everyone had suddenly lost all their tan at the sight of the crocodile.

The poor thing (we say that now!) then spends uncomfortable 10 minutes on the boat while we examine it….turns out to be a her - poor woman! We are impressed to find out that caymans have a see-though eyelid which allows them to go underwater. We each take turns holding the cayman for photographs. On Heenz’s turn the cayman suddenly jerks in her hands and she almost strangled the poor animal just trying to hold it! Now its Heenz’s turn to go white! Apparently caymans grow to 6m in length, but thankfully the one we “fished” out of the water is only about a meter long! Having suffered enough psychological trauma to last a lifetime, the cayman is finally let loose back in the water.

So excited by the cayman find, Heenz suddenly lets out a cry asking Juan what the two red glowing eyes are in the top of the trees. The boat erupts with laughter as Heenz realizes that it is just two red lights on top of the hotel’s satellite tower! DOH!

We head back to the hotel (spotting an owl on the way!) for more caipirinhas with the macaw drunk and our new friends Henrik and Paulo - Henrik is visiting Paulo all the way from Denmark and they have flown over to the jungle for few days to chill out from partying in Sao Paolo.


Day 3

More jungle fun today, but this time we head off into the dry parts on foot. Our guide takes us on a trek showing us different fauna, each with different healing powers, eg the natural cures for malaria (also an abortive drug!), stomach cramps, diabetes, the natural chewing gum, blood de-clotting, etc. You have to wonder how they discovered it in the first instance! We then get an opportunity to eat the “Survivor” grub - the big white worm that lives inside a nut shell. We polite decline - we had a hearty breakfast! 2 guys in our group sample the delicacy and manage to stay alive. Yuk!

No rest for the wicked sees us doing yet more in the afternoon - we cant pass on an opportunity to swim with the pink Amazon dolphins! As we feed them, they nervously poke their noses out of the water and we try to make them jump, whilst nearly screaming ourselves! Some of the dolphins get up to about 2 meters in size and really are pink! They are powerful creatures - we can feel the muscles as they swim between our legs trying to get to the fish we are dangling at them!

We are exhausted by the evening, which is not a bad thing, as all our friends have gone back to Manaus and since its Friday, the local families arrive for their w/e break, so we are happy to retreat to our penthouse to escape the kids.

Day 4

On the last day of our jungle adventure, we are taken to the so called “meeting of the waters” phenomenon - this is where Rio Negro and Rio Amazonas meet and join into one river which flows all the way down to the Atlantic. The 2 rivers are completely different in their chemical composition (Rio Negro has a ph of 4.2 and possesses a deep brown colour). Amazonas on the other hand has a normal ph and hence colour. The 2 rivers also have c. 6 degree difference in temperature - all these factors means that when the 2 rivers finally combine, you can still see them flowing side by side and not mixing, until much further downstream.

Then comes the pain….we arrive in Manaus at midday, and our flight does not leave until 4am the next morning…we spend the day eating, sitting in the cinema and having goodbye drinks with our friends from the jungle, who are leaving the next day as well. As they wave us goodbye at midnight, we are well aware of the 4 hours we still need to kill. Getting to the airport, we are obviously too early for check-in and painfully wait for it to open. Once we finally check in we go through to the gate looking for a quiet corner to sleep! We are getting too old for this. At 3am we are rudely woken up by passport control (you can imagine how scared we are as very large man is standing over us and shouting in Spanish - its not our fault that passport control was closed when we went through!). Finally as we manage to understand what all the shouting is for, our nightmare wait is over as we board the plane to Venezuela. Only 1 week left in South America, and 6 weeks to come home!


Links to the jungle videos on Youtube:
dolphins -

monkeys -

cayman -

sounds of the jungle -

worm eater -

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