Amazon Day 2 - Singing in the Rainforest

After the exertions of our solid day of travel and quite a decent sleep considering all of the little friends who shared our room we were ready to intrepidly reach out into the jungle and see some wildlife.

The first small stumbling block was that the rainforest decided to live up to it's name and as soon as we got out of the motorised launch it pelted down, on with the rather fetching ponchos for a 3 and a half hour walk through some of the most inhospitable woodland on the planet!! The continuing precipitation meant that most of the sensible animals and birds buggered off and hid for the afternoon but thankfully we did manage to see some rather poisonous frogs who yum up the rain. After about 2 hours I lost my sense of humour and started coming up with suitable Facebook profile updates...Simon is wet, Simon now has one wellington boot full of water, Simon now understands that they call it the rainforest for a reason and won't be so silly as to come back again... My morning however wasn't quite so bad as a German woman with us who upon entering a particularly swampy bit misjudged the depth and went knee deep with both boots which rather quickly filled not just with water but mud and bits of dead tree!!


Frog


Gandalf and I in our ponchos

After a cold shower and some lunch we settled down for a nice siesta (which are now a solid part of our day...I think BP should include them into the working day!!) and a bit of a play with Pancho. Our next outing was blissfully dry and involved heading first to the nearby lake to see pink dolphins (they have pink bellies and don't jump like Flipper but are kinda cool anyway) and then on a nightwalk to find some of the things that had gone bump the previous night. The walk was very very cool, we all had our little torches and played follow-my-leader with Nasir our guide...Cath and I initially had a little trouble as our lights were headmounted and when you are walking towards bug that fly towards the light you either keep your mouth closed or have an early dinner. The highlight of the evening was seeing a tarantula as big as a man's fist (I won't say my fist as it is more girl sized) sat near it's pad waiting for dinner to trot past, the spookiest part was when we all switched off our torches and stood in the dark looking at the luminescent mushrooms and listening to the forest come alive around us.


Before the bug sandwiches


Big spider!!


Caiman attack...well actually it was only a baby and about 50cm long

After that it was off to bed after another slap up meal and a snooze in the hammock.