Amazon Jungle, Peru

Today we fly from Cuzco, high in the Andes, to Puerto Maldonado, deep in the lowlands of the Amazon jungle.

We will travel by motorized canoe to our lodge in the Tambopata Rainforest Area, which holds the world record for the most bird sightings in one area. About half of Peru is located within the Amazon Basin, however, due to its isolation, not a lot of it is available to the casual traveller. Our lodge is an eco lodge with no electricity, primitive cabins with lots of mosquito nets, and delicious local food.

Puerto Maldonado is the region’s principal city and is situated at the confluence of the Madre de Dios and Tambopata Rivers, and is a bustling, booming tropical frontier town. Its principal activities are gold mining, Brazil nut collecting, timber extraction, agriculture and ecotourism.

After arriving at the Cusco airport we found all flights had been cancelled because of the transportation strike, but after most people left the airport, they decided to reinstate a flight and we negotiated our way onto it. We arrived and took a two hour afternoon boat trip by motorized canoe to our jungle lodge.

We had the chance to see bird species typical of the river or forest edge such as Black Skimmers, Pied Lapwings, Capped Herons, Jabiru Storks, Roadside Hawks and several species of kingfishers, swallows, and flycatchers.

The Tambopata area includes habitats ranging from the Andean highlands around the rivers' headwaters through some of the last remaining intact cloud forests to the lowland rainforests of the Amazon basin. The area is renowned for its diverse plant and animal populations and include over 1,300 bird species (including 32 parrot species - 10% of the world’s total), 200 mammal species including 4 species of primates, 90 frog species, 1,200 butterfly species and 10,000 species of higher plants—all protected within the reserve.

Some of the more famous residents are the Harpy Eagle, the prehistoric looking Hoatzin, tapir, peccary, jaguar, ocelot and playful river otters who live in the area’s oxbow lakes.

While we never saw a river otter, we did spot lots of red howler monkeys, small tamarindo monkeys, and we even went cayman spotting at night. Caymans are small alligators and they can be spotted from far distances by their reflective eyes. We took a 9 pm boat cruise down a pitch black river and our guide used one strong flashlight to spot five caymans and a HUGE land rodent called a capabarra (sp??) that weighed nearly 60 kg!!

Our guys played another friendly game of soccer with the kitchen crew who reluctantly agreed to each take 3 gringos on their teams, and by the end of the weekend we were all good friends.

My favorite part of the jungle journey was being woken by a huge tribe of howler monkeys, the world's loudest land animal, who sounded like a mix between gurgling water pipes and eerie ghosts from a horror movie.