Jungle

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This here is a little tribute from our four day trek into the Amazon. The jungle was a ten hour drive from Cuzco on a narrow, cliffside mountain road with nasty switchbacks and sickening drops. The first night we spent in the jungle town of, Pilocopata. Just before Pilocopata is a little town, Patria, which is one of the largest producers of cocaine in Peru. Peru supplies the world with 30% of it's cocaine, second only to Columbia. The following day, out of the van at Atalaya and into a thirty-foot river boat for another three hours down river and away from civilization. We tented two nights on a platform built to keep the snakes out of your sleeping bag. To follow were bats, spiders, monkeys, and night treks into the Amazon, wading chest deep, with merely flashlights and machettes to fish and track down caimen (little alligators to you). During the day you have to be quiet and patient to appreciate all the inhabitants of Manu, but at night the jungle comes to life. We've never been in an environment so foreign to us before. One of the coolest parts of the whole adventure, Hudson missed out on as he slept off a fever in the van. We were held up, on the return to Cuzco, by a landslide across the road which we got to witness. All in all, a wild time. Machu Picchu is next!

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