The Amazon Jungle

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I woke up pleasantly surprised to find I had been able to sleep through all the crazy bird, monkey and whatever else noises in the night! I think everyone in our group was excited about seeing monkeys and luckily during breakfast, one of the guides came in and said there were monkeys right out side. We rushed out and spotted them climbing up the trees, they were really tiny and cute!

After breakfast we took another walk through the jungle to an ox-bow lake. On the way there we stopped at a tree with a huge hole in the bottom. The guide started to poke around in it with a twig and eventually out came a massive tarantula!! It was so strange being so close to it, I thought id feel really scared but it was just really cool to see it. I guess because the guides were there and they knew what they were doing it meant I was safe, if id seen it on my own I would have legged it! We saw loads more walking palm trees and strangler palm trees, and some very phallic looking trees as well!!! On the lake we spotted different types of birds, swallows, Macaws, and one of the guides spotted a toucan. We were all trying to look for it, I saw something in a tree which looked bird-like and started pointing it out to everyone saying it was the toucan and it turns out I was looking in the wrong place and what i saw was a completely different bird altogether! Whoops! The guides were impressed with my spot though! I never found the toucan though!

Back on dry land we took a different route through the jungle and found a huge strangler tree which you could climb into. We all went in for a look and it had some vines outside which you could swing on so we all tried doing our Tarzan/Jane impressions! One of the guys on our tour, Mike, decided to climb up the middle of the tree on the vines inside. He ended up getting a bit stuck and it took a while to get him done. The guides ended up swinging the vines outside over to him and he just ahd to reach over a grab them and hope for the best! Luckily for him he got back to the ground safely but i think most, if not all, of the group were thinking he was going to fall and break something.

We headed back to the lodge for lunch and again spotted more monkeys but they were in the distance. The options for the afternoon were either do nothing, visit a farm or take another walk to spot monkeys. I figured doing nothing was lazy, the farm didnt really appeal so I opted for the monkey walk. We managed to see some different kinds of monkeys which was great, its one of the main reasons why I wanted to go to the jungle to see them! The guides were great, they had such a good eye for things, they could see things so far a way with just the naked eye that I couldnt even spot with binoculars! They did a really good job though of finding different animals and were really patient in pionting them all out.

Back at the lodge we watched some of our group playing football against the guides, they lost but hey it was a ridiculous temperature and the guides are used to it! The lodge had a resident bird called sophie who kept running around on the pitch after the ball. She kept running over to us as well and trying to peck at our feet, not great when your wearing flip-flops! I thought id got used to her a little bit as she followed us all the way round the jungle on the monkey walk but she still scared me quite a bit!

Last night in the bungalow we had two cockroaches which we chased around for a bit with a glass but it was moving to fast for us and then went into hiding somewhere. We had to just climb under our mosquito nets, tuck them in everywhere and hope that it didnt crawl on us. We had another one in our room tonight but this time I was much calmer about the situation. Its amazing how quickly you get use to things when you have no choice!!

The jungle has been really good fun, so much better than I thought! Will miss it loads!

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