After our rainforest experience in Peru, we just couldn’t pass up the chance to see the real Amazon with our own eyes. Seeing is actually an understatement, you simply experience the Amazon with all your senses, but first things first…
We land in Leticia around noon, the starting point for the Amazon region from the Colombian side. But borders don’t really matter here, Peru is on the other side of the river and a few hundred meters down the road you end up in Tabatinga in Brazil. In the afternoon in Leticia we book a 4-day tour into the jungle, walk briefly to Brazil and are surprised twice by torrential rain – luckily we are prepared and always have umbrellas with us.
Our jungle adventure is supposed to start the next morning. Before that, at breakfast, we get to know our two fellow travelers Ruth from England and Alexandra from Spain – which will be very useful. First we take a small boat to Brazil and then we continue with a speedboat along the Amazon until we reach the tributary “Rio Javari” in Peru. We follow this for a few more kilometers to another small tributary, where our accommodation “Zacambu Rainforest” in Peru is located.
You can tell that there is water everywhere and it takes a while for us to really internalize the dimensions. There are simply unimaginable amounts of water that meander through the jungle here. We are here at the beginning of the rainy season, so the water levels are still low but are constantly rising until the Amazon will reach its highest level in April/May and will be several meters (!!!) above today’s level. And we experience for ourselves how the water level rises by several 10 centimeters within these four days.
From our accommodation we do many activities over the next four days, some of which we already know from Puerto Maldonado. Here the focus is more on extensive hikes through the rainforest and boat trips along the rivers. We swim in the river (there are piranhas here, by the way), look for caimans and pink dolphins, spot a variety of birds and even spot an anteater fleeing up a tree when it hears us, and a sloth. Since our guide speaks almost only Spanish, Alexandra first translates for us or we communicate with hands, feet and the few fragments of Spanish that Ruth and Kerstin get together.
On the second day, a group of Americans and two people from Zurich join them and we go piranha fishing. At first, Ruth is so hysterical that she caught something that she almost throws the fish at Tobi’s head. Then a piranha escapes from someone’s hands and jumps through the boat and finally one of the Americans is so fascinated by his catch that he takes his eyes off his piranha for a moment and promptly gets his finger bitten – he’s missing a piece of his fingertip afterwards … We’re quite happy that we content ourselves with watching, and Tobi and one of the American women discover fun feeding the piranhas with chicken skin from the boat.
On the third day, Ruth and us have a 6-hour hike through the jungle on the program, here we again see some fascinating animals, two toucans, tarantulas and beautiful birds… and we get into a rain shower about an hour halfway through the hike. After that, the rainforest shows itself with a completely different face, everything shines mystically and you can see how the animals slowly dare to come out of their hiding places.
On the last day we paddle a canoe through the lake next to the lodge (which is connected to the river during the high rainy season) before we are brought back to Leticia and board the plane towards Cartagena and there to digest the eventful days..