Today we woke up at six, like the rest of the animals of the jungle, and we enjoyed a delicious Peruvian breakfast. Once we had happy bellies, we disembarked in a fish farm, whose owner has turned it into a protected park, with boardwalk trails and a series of eight tree bridges to visit the high canopy. We were conducted by our guides towards two small wooden local catamarans powered by our Peruvian breakfast, by means of local wooden paddles. We raced with each other and crossed a small lagoon, with the encouragement of our naturalist guides’ cheering. We hiked for two and the half miles along a “terra firma” area, never flooded by the river. Our guides made several stops to teach us with the complex ecology and the ancestral knowledge of the rainforest. They explained to us about the medicinal properties of almost every plant we encountered, and we learned about the ones that were deadly poisonous, and we should never eat by ourselves.
After we walked along the swinging liana bridges and enjoyed the spiders and other creatures that live there, we learned about the rubber tree, and the economy that supported for some thirty years in the Peruvian jungle in the early nineteen hundreds. Also we had a heavy, muscular tree snake dropping from the upper canopy on one of our bridges, which stop all the groups in their march. As I was the first one to find the large olive wipe snake dropping from the sky in the middle of my way, I took the opportunity to shoot some great pictures, right after screaming like a little girl.
As the river is receding, the water level is decreasing and the watermark of most of the trees is left high up. This allowed us to explore with our skiff boats the little still flooded creeks, locally known as “caños.” After a typical Amazonas lunch, we explored a small river branch on board by skiffs and also by kayaks. We enjoyed the rich biodiversity, including squirrel monkeys, monk saki monkeys, saddleback tamarins, hauler monkeys, hawks, turtles, herons, white-winged swallows, green iguanas, sloths, parakeets, and many other creatures. A heavy rain was the happy end to a wonderful afternoon.
Our final activity after dinner was a photography talk. It directed the group to fantastic composition tips, and conservation consciousness, and a set of pictures taken during the day. This was another day in the jungle paradise!
