Welcome to the jungle....
Trip Start
Aug 31, 2008
1
8
13
Trip End
Nov 03, 2008
Puerto Maldonado, Peru
Thursday, September 11, 2008
How 'bout that for a song then!! Quite impressed with my lyrical talent today. I'm rivalling Nomes for song writing right now....
So we went to the jungle, by plane then by motorised canoe up the river. (Did I mention I like boats??) Tried to find a good song to sing while on the boat but all we could really come up with was 'Rock the boat, don't rock the boat baby, rock the boat, don't tip the boat over...' Which got a bit boring by the 40th time... (Not like Lake Titikaka....)
The jungle was hot!! 34 degrees and humid!! Yuss!! And they had hammocks. Double yuss!! And we climbed 36m up some rickety scaffolding to see the canopy of the jungle.
Unfortunately we had not finished with the 4am starts. Those of us who were not too hung over made it out of bed to go by motorised canoe up the river to visit a lake where we were paddled around on a slightly decrepit looking catamaran. We saw the giant river otters (from a distance) then went fishing for piranhas... in the rain (always good fishing in the rain...). Except that I caught a sardine. Bitterly disappointed. My reputation as Fisherwoman Extrordinaire is now in ruins. But the piranahas were really cool - our guide put a leaf in the mouth of one that was caught, and it had an amazing reflex bite that took out a chunk of leaf like a hole punch.... can see where their reputation comes from!!
Early morning starts necessitated hours of sleeping in hammocks on our return to the lodge.... it's such a hard life this being on holiday.... Afternoon visit to the Ethnobotanical centre where we were painted up with official Amazonian warpaint and taught all about the medical qualities of various plants used for centuries by the people of the Amazonian jungle... most interesting. Nomes and I felt this visit fully justified our extended holiday period. Useful potions included Cats Claw - for livers, prostates, kidneys, cancer and general immune system wellbeing; and Parapara - Amazonian viagra.
Final goodbyes that night to a few members of the group who were the following day to be taken into the deepest darkest jungle to be shot. Official prize-giving saw Nomes win the prize for the person you least wanted to sit next to you on any form of long distance travel (due to her vomiting tendancies), and me the prize for having the worst lying voice (my skills at bullshit didn't get any better, and all other participants in the game came to know my lying voice as well as Nomes does).
Watch out for the next exciting installment of this dialogue: 'Galapagos Galapagos, we're going to Galapagos!!' (That's a song...)
Comments
Jungle songs
So you haven't yet got into the 'Whoa, we're going to the jungle' (Sung to the Vangaboys' Ibiza song tune), or the famous 'I saw the snake' (to the all-to-easily-forgotten-(and-so-needs-to-be-reminded-to-hungover-fellow-bus-adventurers) Ace of Base song 'I saw the sign' -Lyrics exist, but I may have left them somewhere in Lima, in deepest darkest peru...