A lazy weekend

Last weekend, I headed 140km upriver on the Rio Amazonas to a lodge on the Yanayaku River--the lodge partners with a local community, giving them a part of the proceeds from the company in exchange for conserving the large birds and mammals in the area that have gone extinct in other parts of the Amazon. As a result, this expanse of the Amazon is one of the few places closes to a major city where you can still see caimans, dolphins, sloths, monkeys, jaguars, and more.

It was a lazy weekend of hiking, sitting in a hammock with a book, or canoing out along the riverside to observe wildlife. We would go out first thing in the mornings at around 6am and watch the birds sing and hunt and fly from tree to tree--vultures and falcons, herons and egrets, kingfishers and woodpeckers. At night, we floated along the river under a sky blanketed with stars, the trees lurking, dark giants on either side of us, with lightning bug flashing off and on like christmas lights--and the jungle alive with the sound of millions of insects as we watched the guide run his flashlight through the reeds, looking for characteristic glint of red from the eyes of the caimans lurking in the marshes patiently waiting to hunt its prey.

One night, our guides took us to the nearby community--it was a Saturday night, so one of the homes that doubled as both the community store and the community discoteque, had its boombox pumping cumbia music (the community of San Juan just had a generator installed two months ago for electricity).

And on Sunday, we headed back into Iquitos--I had one day to prepare my things to head out for one week in the community of Mazan.

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