AlternateRoute

We are in a lodge in the Amazon Rainforest, 30km by boat from Puerto Maldonado. We flew into Puerto Maldonado with a stop-off at Cusco. We joined a bus of 32 Québécois for the journey to the boats, then joined a long canoe full of Germans and two Californians.
We sat at the front and one of the guides demonstrated a whole hearted commitment to the tour guides creed and did his best to crack onto the two apparently single Californian girls. We arrived at lunch to a welcome cocktail, and meal of chicken, vegetables and rice wrapped in a banana leaf. It is only about 25C but at 90% humidity the sweat is soon flowing. We will shortly be visiting Monkey Island.

There are five species of monkey in this part of the forest and we saw four, the Tamarind Monkey, the Black Spider Monkey, the Black Faced Capuchin Monkey and the White Faced Capuchin Monkey

The guide had a bag of bananas and called out to let the monkeys know that food was available. On one hand this breaks an ecological code of ethics, on the other hand, without it, we would not have seen the monkeys.
Later in the night we took a boat ride along the river (Rio Madre de Dios), spotlighting wildlife. We saw 2 caiman and some illegal loggers smuggling wood down the river under cover of darkness.
After this we had a few beers and went to bed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 1150 and is filed under South America 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.