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Slept the best of the whole trip and it was in the jungle with no A/C! It must have been the exotic jungle noises!
Breakfast was at 8am and our excursion at 9am. We chose the all-day terra firma hike. We had about a 1-1/2 to 2 hour boat ride to our trailhead. Along the way, we stopped to watch a three-toed sloth.
We stopped often and learned a lot about the vegetation and wildlife. We managed to find three different types of frogs and toads (a red poisonous dart, a yellow poisonous dart and a black & green toad that pretends to be poisonous by showing its bright orange belly).
Under a mimosa tree, we found some beautiful black and red seeds that are used to make jewelry. We learned that the seeds are only found this time of year. We picked up over 60 of them and planned to take them to a local woman in the village for stringing.
We also saw some beautiful huge blue morph butterflies. We hiked through the jungle for about three hours with a stop for Weny to make a cut in a rubber tree and then make us
rubber band bracelets. He also gathered some palm fronds that he brought back on the boat and later braided into great headbands that we wore on our hats the rest of the trip! It surprised us that this area is not flat -- it actually had some hills.
Another stop was the bat tree where many different species of bats live. Dave and Weny went about six feet into this rotted out tree (about 40-feet long) and saw spear-nose, vampire, cac-wing and fruit bats. After the first fly by, Dave was okay and enjoyed watching them. We hope Weny got some good pictures!
When we finished our hike, Samuel, the boat captain had stayed behind and prepared lunch on an open wood fire. It was a delicious chicken stew, rice, potatoes, cucumber/tomato salad, oranges and bananas.
The adventure did not end; on our way back to the lodge we saw a toucan and woolly monkeys. The woolly monkeys were all rescue monkeys. One was actually a pet of a family in a local village. One was tame enough to come onto the boat and we fed her bananas and oranges. A second one fed as it hung
from a branch over the boat. The third, the alpha female, was left bananas on a tree stump at the edge of the water (she was the most aggressive and never came near the boat). We later learned that she bit one of the guests that was currently staying at the lodge. Although it is fun to feed monkeys, we don't think they will ever assimilate back into the wild when at least a boat a day stops to feed them. Our guide had a hard time getting the one on the boat to leave and she seemed to be crying as we left.
We met two new people at dinner, a father and his college-age daughter with roots from Minnesota. They now spend half their time in Hawaii and half in Los Angeles. The daughter had caught a barracuda earlier in the day and showed pictures as well as the jaw which they presented to her. They had eaten it for lunch!
Following dinner, we were sitting in a screened in sitting room when Weny came looking for us saying he had a reptile to show us. We followed him to a walkway with a thatched roof
to see a four-foot Amazon tree boa in the rafters. He said not to worry or have nightmares, it was the bats who "hung out" there who needed to worry!
Enough adventure for one day -- off to bed!
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