Home » Peru » It's a Jungle Sometimes

That is our boat home. And we're two kilometers from the dock. Uh-oh...I’ve had an urge to go to the Amazon Jungle over the past several years, and I finally got there. It was everything I had imagined: hot, wet, dense, and teeming with strange and dangerous wildlife.

It's a Jungle Sometimes

GringoAndGringa
2006-02-18 14:58:26

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a powerful force and people can’t really seem to affect it much (in fact, it seems like Puerto Maldonado was built on the jungle, but the jungle keeps on going inside it). On these hikes, around the centre, and on a one day trip we took to a nearby lake we saw lots of cool stuff, including a sloth (the weirdest damn thing I’ve ever seen, and it had a little baby on its stomach), a paca (a funny striped rodent about half a meter long)… Well I
Picaflor Full Image
This is the walkway leading to our room.guess a bulleted list is in order.

- Sloth
- Paca
- Tarantula (Kathleen’s reaction was predictably hilarious)
- Oropedula birds
- Porcupine (this one had a prehensile tail and was in a tree)
- Speckies goan (bird, a pet actually)
- Dusky Tete monkey (pretty small guys, saw about 5 of them at different times)
- A big-ass beetle (maybe four inches long - and, significantly, it barked)
- Mot-mot bird
- Night monkey (bigger than the Dusky Tete)
- Macaws
- Tucans
- Spider monkey (a captive of another Jungle lodge)
- Caiman (like an alligator, we saw a small one)
- Strangler Fig (this tree that starts as a seed on a leef of another tree, then slowly grows over this tree, killing and eating it. They are hollow, and have a wierd "braided" look to them)

Error is a card game. It’s a lot like competitive solitaire, and if either person makes a mistake they loose their turn and the opponent gets to yell “¡Error!” It is the only card game permitted at Picaflor.

Oh, and I guess I should mention that on Sunday we went to a nearby jungle lodge to participate in their weekly pickup futbol game. Let’s think about this for a second… Mike, playing soccer against
a bunch of South Americans… in hiking boots...

So now we’re on to Lake Titicaca. First, we’re going to Puno, which is having a big festival on the 5th according to the Lonely Planet, and then we’re on to Copacabana in Bolivia. After that we’re headed to La Paz, and then on to the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Salud,
Gringo