Blogs from Manu National Park, Cusco, Peru, South America

Manu National Park (dschungl) was a great experience - with the boat along the river, walking in the rain forest, staying in nice wooden houses, watching beautiful birds and other animals,etc. (The only thing was that I was sick the first days..)... read more

AMAZON (MANU PARK) THOUGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Our trip to the Amazon (Manu Biosphere Reserve or Manu National Park) was a decent experience, but was somewhat lacking. We had a 4 day/3 night tour, but most of the first day and all of the last day was spent in a minivan travelling over some of the roughest and most perilous roads you can imagine. If we had it to do over again, or ever decide to visit the Amazon again, we would pay the considerable extra to fly in and out. Our driver was very professional and the expedition company, Expediciones Vilca, was very competent, but the experiences in the jungle were not worth the trip there and back. I can't compare Manu to the other jungle experiences such as Iquitos, Boca Manu, or Puerto Maldonado destinations. ... read more

AMAZON - DAY 3 Saturday, August 21st Today was to be an even longer day, so its a good thing we both slept well... in our mosquitoe netting. I should say here that so far we have not been bitten by any insects, inside or out, with or without insect repellent. Thats not to say there are never any mosquitoes, just that we apparently didn't encounter any. We woke up quite early again for a cruise down river to watch the clay licks that the macaws especially like to use every morning. They have a sort of blind set up across the river from the clay licks so we don't disturb them. The rules of the blind is that you have to arrive by 5:30am and depart no earlier than 7:30am. We sat there for a ... read more

AMAZON - DAY 1 Thursday, August 19th After abour 4 hours of sleep, I woke uo at 4am to do our final packing for our trip to the Manu Reserve in the Amazon jungle. We c hecked our extra luggage with the hostal folks, having to wake up the night clerk, the headed down the steps to meet our guide. The evening before, a guide/representative from Vilca Expeditions (I guess subcontracted by All Trek Cusco), named Jamie, told us he probably wouldn't be our guide, but he wasn't sure who it would be. We had decided to bring Manoli's smaller backpack as a daypack and use my smaller luggage for all the stuff we might need for the 4 day/3 night trip. We reached the bottom of the stairs below the hostal to wait for our ... read more

Thankfully we have survived our 9 day tour in the jungle with a mear few mosquito bites. No jaguar attacks, snake or spider bites, but a few funny encounters with the wildlife! It wasn't long into the trip before I felt the adrenalin pumping! The road we travelled on was probably the worst I've ever been on in my life. A narrow dirt road, really uneven from loads of landslides & a complete sheer drop to the side with about a 1000 metre drop. I had to close my eyes for most of the journey! We travelled throught the cloud forest & stopped to view the "Cock of the rock " birds performing their "display" for the ladies. Beautiful birds but obviously the display was not good enough as no girls showed up! We enjoyed our ... read more

Just got back to Cusco from the Manu National Park, in the rainforest. First.... Obama won! Huzzah! Great news, we were nervous in the forest about the elections before we got communication at some point the next day. I had figured it would be crazy in the states, but I´m hearing from friends it was more than I imagined. Moving on.... My group included a Swiss couple, a Spanish couple, and another traveler from San Francisco. It was a good group of people along with our guide and other help. Unfortunately I still know only a little Spanish, while everyone else knew Spanish, Since some didn´t really know English, Spanish was usually the language used. Still, I heard some great stories from these folks and had some practice at least listening to conversation. Everyone had been ... read more