Heading to the Amazon

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The day has finally come! We flew from Orlando to Lima last night, with a plane change in Panama City. After only 2 hours of sleep, we flew on to Iquitos. This is a large city on the Amazon River and surrounded by the jungle. The only way you can get here is by boat or air. Edson, our guide from the Tahuayo Lodge met us at the airport and took us to our boat for the 3 hour speedboat ride to the lodge. We were so amazed by everything we saw. The Amazon is very wide, and only a few minutes out we saw our first pink dolphin! Although you usually think of dolphins and sting rays as saltwater animals, there are freshwater dolphins and stingrays in the Amazon and some of its tributaries. We have to continually remind each other that this isn't Disneyworld! If you see a big snake hanging from a tree, it's not audio-animatronic. Along the way, we stopped at a village to have our first personal experience with the locals. It's amazing how they live. Our welfare recipients live like kings compared to these people. The lodge is built on stilts at the edge of the Tahuayo River. During the rainy season, the boat takes you right up to the front porch. This is the first month of the dry season, so the water is dropping. Our cabin has several beds, and they all have mosquito netting. We don't have any electricity or hot water, so we're prepared with headlamps, and we're ready for cold showers. An adorable wooly monkey met us on the porch when we first arrived. She is free to come and go, but she chooses to hang around for attention and easy meals. She is charming, and could almost take the place of our sweet kitties at home! After an interesting lunch, Edson took us upriver in a canoe. There were interesting sites everywhere. Before we made it back to the lodge, we were caught in a cloudburst; after all this is a rainforest). Len and Edson paddled like crazy while Sally bailed out the canoe. Life jackets, what are those? After dinner, we went out for a nighttime boat trip to find caiman. Our guide tried to catch a couple of them by hand and was unsuccessful, but we were able to see them along the water's edge. What a day! We're off to bed on our first night in the Amazon jungle.

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