Amazon Eco Park Jungle Lodge Amazon River

We'd agreed the night before to get up at 4am to do some animal spotting and a different type of spear fishing, but it was a bit of a struggle after only a few hours fitful sleep! We stumbled down to the boat in the dark and half asleep and set off paddling. Ceciliano was a pro at spotting the fish asleep near the banks and managed to spear a couple of fish from the front of the boat. He got me and Caz to have a go ...

... net across the breadth of the canal, at the start of the canoeing, which had a about 6 fish trapped in it when we came back, and also showed us some spear fishing. At one point he stood up on the front of the canoe, nearly tipping it, and fired a spear from a bow, and managed to spear a large catfish... needless to say we ate well at lunch!

Following our morning activities and lunch, we packed up camp and headed off by the motorised canoe, deeper ...

Pokrotce wiec o dzungli bo robia sie zaleglosci i zaraz nie spamietam o czym mialem pisac;) 3 godz. busem, 2 godz. lodzia motorowa i o to jestesmy w campie, Drewniane bungalowy z lozkami, wiata na rozlozenie hamakow (jak kto chce to spi tam),sanitariaty z woda z rzeki, swieczki jako oswietlenie, kurczaki i zlowione przez nas (czytaj glownie przewodnika ryby) na obiad, owoce jakich nie znamy (w smaku bo oglnie to te same ananasy ...

... then return to Manaus. Everything around Manaus floats....there are floating gas stations to fuel the fish boats and river boats....there is a floating ice-making plant so the little fish boats can fill up with ice each morning when they head out to catch the fish and transport them to the market we had seen the day before. There are over 2000 species of fish in the Amazon...most of which are edible. Back to the river. Manaus ,in fact, is not on the Amazonas River, but ...

... in, which is why we hired a car with an English-speaking guide (and why Deb learned to say "How much?" and "thank you!") The belle-epoque wealth of Manaus was thanks to the rubber boom - you saw the pictures we took outside of Santarem, of the old gent tapping latex from the rubber tree? Well, before scientists figured out how to produce synthetic latex, but after the world figured out how cool rubber could be, Manaus became the harbour city for a very ...

We left for the Amazon River after about 4 days in Manaus. The river was a lot wider than I expected - in some places, it's 3 miles across! It's nothing like those PBS or TravelChannel pictures with claustrophobic jungle. In fact, the majority of the river is populated or otherwise cleared to make it inhabitable. Our three-hour boat ride turned out to be more like nine because we got lost! Once we arrived in the ...

Let's see if I can do this different. In five sentences (so what if they end up being long!)... Dolphins that barely surface, sounds whose source remains surreptitiously concealed, and camouflage that maybe even God might have trouble seeing through, the Amazon and the enveloping rainforest reveals its secrets only to a select few - those that are most driven, patient and not to undermine its importance, lucky. As fortunate as we were in its generosity, the incomprehensible truth is that ...

... finding your way to your hammock late at night is quite a hilarious task. First you have to calculate how many people are in each possible route and the fewest number of disturbances you make. If there was someone else also out of bed it was a good thing, but I resorted to sliding like a snake under about 4 people and once even between a hammock and a bag before gingerly stepping in my hammock, trying not to swing and turn the whole row into one of the desk toys ...