The Amazon

(click on any of the images below to bring up the full-sized gallery)

Leaving Cuzco, I caught a flight to Lima and from there to Iquitos, a city lying on the banks of the Amazon, whose official nickname is The Capital of the Peruvian Amazon.

On the approach to Iquitos, my first views of the magnificent snaking, glistening Amazon river appeared below us…..

On landing in Iquitos, I was driven to Nauta, a small town about 62 miles upstream, where I boarded the M/V Aria for a 5 day cruise along the Amazon and some of its tributaries….

View from my cabin window

One of the four expedition boats – our 8-man team was named the Pink Dolphins

The next five days were spent exploring the Maranon and Amazon rivers. The Amazon has more than 1,000 tributaries, some of which are more than 900 miles long. We started early the following morning with a sighting of an Iguana trying to eat a particularly annoying bee….

Before starting our exploration, we all needed to sign the guest book…

Continuing along the Maranon, we passed through the Pacaya-samira National Reserve, and a number of small villages….

The next sighting of any impotance (or even importence – thanks spellchecker!) was a rare Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth. We actually saw two or three of these wonderful creatures during the next few days and this video is a collage of those sightings…..

We were all told to be on the watch for Pink Dolphins – whilst sightings are fairly common, they only break the surface of the river for a few milliseconds – as can be seen by these somewhat pathetic attempts to capture them on film….

We continued to see indigenous – and in some cases endemic – birdlife along the banks of the Maranon and Amazon as we continued our exploration as silently as possible…..

Next on the agenda was a spot of fishing…..for pirañas!

Got one!

While moored by the river bank, we also made friends with a couple of other little creatures…..

….I think!

…or so I was told – I didn’t get near enough to check the colour!

As dusk started to descend, we passed by a few more indigenous villages – the setting sun providing some wonderful photo opportunities….

She’s feeding him what..???

 

The moon soon rose, and proved a spectacular sight…

On the way back to the Aria we managed to catch us a pretty lively little Caiman….

 

Early the next morning we set out for a trek through the Amazon rain-forest….

A Poison-dart Frog

Bullet Ants (highly toxic!)

Pink-toed Tarantula

A baby Boa Constrictor (honestly!)

On the way back to the boat we came across a village beside the banks of the river….

The kids loved pushing the boats back into the main stream of the river – they’d obviously done this before – but I don’t know what the ‘ealth & safety inspectors would have made of it…..

Sometime over the next couple of days (I’m losing track now) we visited another indigenous village, but this one had been alerted to our arrival in advance, and had assembled all the children of the village together to greet us…

I even had to learn a couple of words in Spanish in order to introduce myself to the kids….

 

The final morning on the Amazon took us to the infamous ‘floating village’ of Belen, on the outskirts of Iquitos, where the houses are built of balsa wood, and the only means of transport is by canoe…..

My final stop before catching the flight back home was at the Manatee Rescue Centre in Iquitos. Manatees are freshwater mammals that live in the Amazon river and are extremely important to the eco-system by eating – and therefore controlling the spread of – water hyacinths, which if left to grow naturally can completely choke a slow flowing river. Manatees have been hunted almost to extinction, and the Rescue Centre adopts orphaned Manatees, raises them to adult maturity and releases them back into the wild after around 3 years…..

…. having tempted a manatee with a morsel of banana, a wild Capuchin monkey suddenly appeared and tried to muscle in on the act….

 

And so ended THE most amazing trip. Quito and the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador, Lima, the Nazca Lines, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley and the Amazon in Peru. More experiences ticked off on my bucket list……

Next stop: Africa, Botswana, Zambia & Egypt in October – stay tuned…..