Rafting and Jungle Adventures.

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After Machu Picchu we met up with Jamie´s friend Crump and went rafting for a couple of days on the Urambamba river in the sacred valley. The rafting trip was great and on the second day we did up to level 5 rapids which is the highest you can do as a beginner. Crump fell in at one point which was a little scary but he was fine and seemed quite pleased with himself!

We also went on a day trip to Pisac to see the ruins there as Crump missed out on MP. They were almost as good and much quieter, and the market in Pisac was huge and quite interesting as well.

We have spent the last few days in the jungle, got a bus form Cusco to Puerto Maldonado (23 and a half hours.. ouch!) and booked a jungle trip from there as its much cheaper that way. It was just the three of us and a guide and a captain/cook. Like the pampas trip we were on a motorised canoe. On the first day we camped in a deserted shack, we set up our tents and went out for a walk in the jungle and then out in the boat to look for caiman. When we got back we noticed a 3m long boa constrictor in the roof right above our tent! It must have been there the whole time! The boat captian started throwing lemons at it from the nearby lemon tree, and then large pieces of wood. The snake coiled up then slid out the side of the roof and we heard it land with a thud on the ground.

After that excitement we were just starting to calm down again when we spotted a tarrantula, also in the roof, above the spot that we had moved our tents to in order to avoid the snake! It was bigger than my hand, but apparently not poisionous so we slept with it there and it was gone in the morning.

The second night we camped on a beach at the side of the river which was much less frightning althoug there were still hundreds of mosquitos and we are all heavily bitten. We saw a lot of caiman and turtles, some vultures, macaws, herons, squirrel monkeys, and some very strange birds called huacin which have claws on the end of their wings which they use to pull themselves out of the water!

We also visited a brazil nut farm and a native community on one of the islands on the lake. The boys made friends with the local kids as they bonded over construction and damming activites at a small stream runniong over the beach into the river!

On the last day we went to monkey island where a huge ammount of fairly tame monkeys live, a lot of them hybrids of a number of different species. We fed them bananas and threw stuff for them to catch. It was brilliant.. monkeys are definately my favourite jungle creature so far. Yesterday we got the bus back from Puerto Maldonado and arrived back in cuso around lunchtime today. Tomorrow we are off to Arequipa and then Colca Canyon.

xxx

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