Freezing in the Amazon...basin

We spent one glorious day of rest in Cusco before jetting off to the jungle. Truly the worst turbulence I have experienced to date. One unfortunate member of the extended geckos group spent the whole flight and bus ride to the lodge throwing up into a paper bag. It's times like this one misses the smooth travel of the M4.

Upon arrival to Puerto Maldonado we were handed a banana and informed that no we were not actually visiting the amazon, but the amazon basin. Meh, same same. Either way it was stinking hot and nice to be back at sea level after the breathlessness of Cusco. So we chilled in our room for a couple hours before the first nature walk. if you can call it a 'room'. Well it had 3 walls. The other 'wall' was floor to ceiling - nothing! We were at one with nature and using the hand fans to keep cool.

The group re-convened that afternoon for our first amazon experience: a short jungle walk and climb to a lookout post. We are warned to tuck our pants into our socks. Our group consisted of James, Denny, Tom, Susan and myself. The mit was taking a breather, recovering from a bit of a cold. Really, we are hilarious. First, the killer bees attack Tom, who does the "aaarrgh they're biting me dance". After which Susan and I start squealing at anything that moves. I send james ahead to break spiderwebs and ward off evil. There were army ants, leaf carrying ants and other miscellaneous ants. The whole time I can feel stuff crawling on me. Ick. The monkeys and birds were an afterthought. We arrive at the lookout and look up. Its a rickety contraption but still we climb. I wonder why there is a constant stream of wasps that hover around us and am told that previous tourists have sweated all over the 'lookout' which is honey for wasps. Denny spends the next 20 mins fending off the wasps while I quietly freak out. Oh yeah, and the view is pretty nice. I am such a city chick.

Dinner was interesting, well it was bananas. Banana mains and banana dessert, and just in case we were hungry later, bananas in the snack bowl. We went to bed sweating and woke up shivering. A cold front came through in the middle of the night which we were all unprepared for, with all our warm clothes in luggage storage at the geckos office. So cold. That 4th wall would have been so handy! No more showers were had past this point, hot water being non-existent in the lodge.

Piranha fishing was next, with hopes that the rain would hold off for the morning. Alas no. It rained but we caught piranhas so it was ok. The macho need to catch one prevailed amongst the extended gecko group with the girls giving up pretty easily but the guys perservereing after the first one was caught. Check out the Mit's glory moment. We continued to do the bird watching from the catamaran. Please don't picture anything fancy, we were cowering in our ponchos on what looked like an oversized raft from huck finn.

When we got back, I felt a cold coming on and stayed in the hammock with a book for the rest of the afternoon but the rest of the gang visited the witch doctor. As far as I know, no one purchased the herbal viagra but we did enjoy a nip of the herbal red bull while playing cards a little later in the evening.

Our bizarre amazon experience was capped off with Denny shaving off the Mit's hair in the middle of the lodge dining room. We all held our breath (me more so than others) when battery ran out on the electric razor, but all was well when we found a power point and the number 1 was completed all over. Hot! All photos of the head shave appear to be lost....

The next morning we were up early for a flight back to Lima and a teary goodbye to the geckos group. Sigh.