Are you ready to go to the Amazon Jungle?

The Amazon jungle is some 2.1 million square miles of rainforest. It’s a wet, broadleaf forest and very hot and humid. The Amazon jungle covers around 40% of the South American continent and is about the size of our 48 contiguous states. The jungle covers parts of nine countries with 60% of it being in Brazil. Peru has the second largest percentage with about 13%.

The Amazon jungle contains over half of the world’s remaining rainforests. It’s the largest and most diverse tropical rainforest in the world with some 16,000 species of trees and perhaps around 390 billion trees in the forest. It also has 25 million species of insects in the forest.

This was the start of a long trip in October, 2004. We were still relatively new travelers but gaining experience quickly. The heat and humidity were ferocious in the Amazon. I kept my camera inside a sealed plastic bag and my camera batteries in a separate sealed plastic bag. I couldn’t take quick photos when the opportunity arose, but that was the price I paid back then. I also only had a 3 times zoom on my camera, so good photos were a challenge. But it was a great experience and I still carry the stories from this trip around with me.

This is me arriving by plane in Iquitos. As you can see, I was ready for the jungle.

Just to gain your interest, here I'm pulling in a white piranha out of the "black water".   

Rivers and jungle make up pretty much all of the Amazon jungle, and there is lots of both.

These are lily pads. Things grow big in the Amazon. One lily is in bloom in this photo.

Here is Vicky, my wife and lovely travel companion, sitting around in one of our jungle lodges.

If what's above doesn't intrigue you to continue on this blog, maybe this will. Our jungle lodge did not have electricity. It was a fair walk to the pit toilets, with only small oil lamps for light, like you can see in this photo - minus the camera flash. Anyway, read a section from my journal.

"We were talking in the dining room tonight after dinner. Bill Brookes, in our group, told us about a bathroom visit where he shined his flashlight into the pit toilet and saw a six inch beetle or moth flying around down there, so he didn't sit down. Vicky then said that just a bit ago when she was in the bathroom, a bat flew into her hair and was clawing the back of her head. Next, a woman from L.A., in the other OAT group, said that when she went to the bathroom last, there was a four-foot snake in there. She went and got the guides to go in and take a look. The guides told her that it was a boa constrictor and boas weren't poisonous, so she need not worry. After all those stories, I wasn't about to tell people about my little meeting in the bathroom with a three-inch hairy, ugly spider. I just kept quiet."

Iquitos

Iquitos, Peru, is part of the lowland jungle. It’s called the Capital of the Amazon. Iquitos was established by the Jesuits in about 1750 as a mission. Today, the Iquitos area has some 300,000 to 400,000 people in the area. You will still see Moorish architecture of Spain and other influences.

At Iquitos, the Amazon River is 2,300 miles from the Atlantic Ocean which makes Iquitos the farthest inland port city in the world. Iquitos is accessible only by boat or plane, not by road. It is the largest Peruvian city east of the Andes. We found it to be a bustling place to visit.

These are tuk-tuks, or motorized three-wheel vehicles, which are the primary mode of transportation in Iquitos. Our guide said there are 20,000 tuk-tuks in Iquitos. Gas was about $4 a gallon (in 2004) despite having their own oil and their own local refinery. Our guide said that everyone was upset with George W. Bush since the price of gas shot upwards after he started the Iraq War.

This was a fairly typical street but at a slow time of day. During rush hours, it was a madhouse.

This was the Central Plaza de Armas and one of my favorite places in Iquitos.

Here you can see some of the European influence in the buildings.  

Down River

The Amazon River is the second longest river in the world, behind the Nile, but it is the largest river in the world in terms of flow. The Amazon has 1,100 tributaries including 17 that are longer than 1000 miles. The Amazon has no bridges over it. The flow of the Amazon is eleven times greater than our Mississippi River. The Amazon river is one-fifth of the world’s fresh water flow and its daily water flow is 86 times greater than the Nile River. Explorers reported being able to replenish their fresh water supplies over a hundred miles off the coast of south America when in line with the flow of the Amazon river.

At Iquitos, Peru, the Amazon River is 2,300 miles from the Atlantic Ocean and it is already two miles wide. It sometimes seemed more like being on a lake than a river. The Amazon only drops about 400 feet over the 2,300 miles to the ocean. The height of the river fluctuates about 45 feet between the wet season and the dry season. In the Amazon, the river is the highway, expressway, residential street, bus route, and the only route. This is leaving Iquitos.

This is a short time after leaving Iquitos behind us. We were probably about the middle of the river when I took this photo.

This is to give a sense of the river. You can see that it's muddy and swirling and has debris floating in it. The Amazon jungle only has about 3-4 inches of topsoil. Below that is very pure clay soil. The clay is very hard and won't absorb much water. So even after days of no rain, the ground is still moist and muddy and the water in the Amazon is the same.   

The locals, including young children, all get around by boat in the Amazon.

This section of the Amazon river bank was thick jungle, like many sections. There was no way of knowing what, if anything, was behind the wall of vegetation. 

Jungle Lodge

Our housing in the Amazon was on the primitive side. For instance, we had no electricity. We had pit toilets. The showers were on platforms with bamboo screening for privacy. When someone asked our guide about hot water, he said that we could have all the hot water we wanted, as long as we only wanted a cup of tea. At night, they lit small oil lamps for us to find our way to wherever we had to go. In our rooms, we only had short walls with no windows and no ceiling except a bamboo roof up high to shield us from the rain. The animals came in at their leisure. But it wasn’t so bad. When I got the Amazon Flu and I could not make it out of my room, there were no windows in my way to the great outdoors….well, you get the picture. The interesting thing about getting sick in the jungle is that it causes a feeding frenzy. But what the heck, it was the quickest eight pounds I ever lost.

This is Vicky standing in our lodge room. Nice, neat, clean and close to the jungle.  

The jungle and the wildlife were just a couple of steps from our beds.

There was one platform in camp that was just for hammocks. We would spend time each day in a hammock mostly listening to the sounds of the Amazon jungle.

There was no getting too far from the wildlife, even in our rooms. You can see this parrot just waiting to grab a snack - or a camera case, or clothing, etc. 

Our jungle lodge wasn't devoid of amenities. Our guides and the lodge crew would sing and play local songs for us each night and they were really quite good. We joined in sometimes.

Yaguas Indians

We were fortunate to be able to pay a visit to the Yaguas Indian tribe, deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle. Our guide said that the Yaguas gave the Amazon its name. When the earliest European discoverers went up the river, to this area, they said that they saw “huge women on the banks”. That reminded them of Greek mythology and they used the connection to name the river the “Amazon”. In truth, our guide said that they probably saw huge men dressed in their customary grass (actually palm fiber) skirts. He surmises that the explorers were not that close to the river's bank to avoid getting hit with poison darts from the Indians. So from where they were out in the river, the explorers saw large people with long hair wearing grass skirts and they thought that they were women. Our guide said that he and his friends have been looking for huge women their whole lives but still have not found any.

This area was indeed a deep section of the Amazon jungle.  These trees were on the way to the tribe’s village. We saw hibiscus, poinsettia, ginger, alamanda, ficus, palms, and thick jungle. They get over 200 days of rain here a year. Our guide said this was the Yanamono area of the Amazon.        

This was a large sleeping hut where the Yaguas demonstrated some singing and dancing for us. It was stifling hot in their hut. I felt fine going in but was woozy on the way out.

This was a demonstration by the tribe's elders shooting blow-guns with non-poisonous darts. They were extremely accurate with their darts from  a distance of perhaps thirty feet.

One of my big disappointments in the Amazon was being offered to shoot a blow-gun and having to turn it down. I was struck by the Amazon fever by that point in time and could barely stand up. I would really have loved to fire off a couple of shots with a blow-gun.

Amazon Birds

We saw a lot of birds in the Amazon and they were some of the real wildlife stars of the Amazon. But they were not easy to spot and photograph in the jungle. We heard them a lot and saw many glimpses of them flying past but not often did we see one just sitting in a tree in the open.

In addition to all that, just taking photos was difficult. We never had electricity in the Amazon and I didn’t have enough batteries to last the trip. Our guide said to take out my battery and put it in a plastic bag. He also had me keep my camera in a different plastic bag. I had to do this before and after every photo to insure that I could still take photos for the whole trip. It was a trying process but successful. I also only had a three-times zoom lens. (2004)

We saw blue and red macaws, toucans, parrots, parakeets, kingfishers, storks, hummingbirds, flycatchers, woodpeckers, tanagers, and many more on our trip.    

This is a blue-and-yellow macaw that we saw in a deep section of the Amazon forest.                 

This is a toucan – if you can find him in the photo.

This is a scarlet macaw. I never got a photo of one out in the jungle.  

These are two blue-and-yellow macaws. I’m sure the food at the lodges was to help us get photos, but the birds didn’t seem to mind.   

This is a parrot. This was at breakfast, on our way out the door. The birds really were just about everywhere in the Amazon. This one was helping the staff clean up after breakfast.

Piranha Fishing

We went Piranha fishing one afternoon. Our guide, Basilio, said it would be the easiest thing we ever did. Basilio said we only had to remember one important thing, "which was to catch and eat them before they catch and eat you”.

We went up the Amazon River, then up the Napo River and then up smaller tributary streams. Our guide said we were in search of “black water”. The Amazon, Napo, and most large tributaries have very muddy, silt-filled, and brown water. We eventually reached water that was very black and very clear, which is where we went fishing.   

This was me pulling in a white piranha. You can notice the black water in the background. We just used sticks for poles with hooks wired to a short piece of fishing line. We used raw beef for bait.  

Our guide showed me how to take out the hook on my first catch, or rather how to avoid the piranha’s teeth when I removed the hook.   

This was a red piranha that I caught. Our guide put it on the floor of the boat because it would have hopped out of the boat if kept with the others. That also meant we had to watch out for our toes. We could hear the fish snapping their teeth while they lay around.

This is our small crew of intrepid piranha fishermen including on the left: Ron Weber, Doris Brookes, and Bill Brookes.  I'm in the back, down low.

This is our catch at one point in time. The fish on the left was my big white piranha but my big red piranha was even bigger than that and had to be kept on the floor of the boat.  

You might be wondering why you haven't seem Vicky, my wife, fishing for piranha. She was busy working on the original Amazon.com (com = Children Offering Merchandise)

Our small boat got stuck going up river to fish, but our guides pushed us through the low spots. I was worried coming back since the river had gone down. Sure enough, we got stuck and had to get out of our boat and walk through the piranha-infested water. It called for a strong belief in God, my family, and my country, but I was the first person out of the boat. That plus seeing a bunch of small children swimming in the river nearby.

Here I'm eating one of my piranha for dinner. They were excellent eating but did have lots of bones in them. They somewhat reminded me of eating perch.

Here are our friends Bill Brookes, Ron Weber, and Patty Weber also enjoying some piranha.

Canopy Walk

After breakfast one morning, we went for a canopy walk. After a hike through the jungle to get there, we steadily climbed up into the jungle canopy to a height of 120 feet. Once up in the canopy, it’s about a quarter-mile rope and cable canopy walkway. The walk goes from tree to tree and is like one giant inter-connected tree house walk. I felt like a little kid in a great big tree house.

This day was clear and warm with lots of heat and sunshine. We had hoped to see lots of birds but they had mostly settled in somewhere else during the heat of the day. We did see many butterflies, including blue morphos, monkeys, lizards, grasshoppers, and lots of ants (big black, small black, and big red) and lots of sweat bees buzzing all around. The sweat bees are like gnats. We also saw bats living in a ficus tree, tiger heron, mealy parrots, Tamarine monkeys, army ants, leaf-cutter ants, a clear-winged (see-through) butterfly, and a fer-de-lance snake.

This photo was taken from the ground looking up at where we were going on our canopy hike.

This is showing an area that was probably getting up close to 120 feet high.  

You can see that the canopy walks were not very wide, though Vicky looks very confident up that high. The tower to her left is a climbing tower to get up to the next higher walkway. 

This is our friends Ron and Patty Weber who were along with us on this trip.  

The top portions of the canopy gave us some great views. We saw rubber trees, many ficus and palms, mahogany, and trees from the bean family that were huge and the wood is used to make the boards for the platforms for people’s houses. The palm trees are used to make thatch for the roofs. We also saw secropia trees which look like many umbrellas from above. The great views were perhaps the real excitement of the climb, at least until the wind started to blow. It’s amazing how much a large tree sways in a good breeze.

Amazon Transportation

Our Amazon guide said that if we wanted to see the Amazon, we had to see it by boat. He said that there are no roads in the Amazon, only the rivers. He also said that satellite photographs have proven this to be true. Kids go to school in school boats, not school buses. Soccer players get to their matches by boat. People go to the market and back by boat. I didn’t get many photographs of this but I thought it would be good to post some to give you a flavor of this. 

One thing that is supposed to be causing great destruction to the Amazon rain forest is logging. I’ve read that clear-cutting the forest has caused tremendous problems. I don’t know about clear-cutting but we did see several lumber barges on the Amazon, so some foresting work is being done as you can see below.

This was a view of some fruit being loaded onto a boat on the edge of the river. They mostly had loaded papayas and bananas.

This shows where the people sit as passengers on many river boats. 

This shows both the plant crops on top and the human passengers down below. The local in the small boat is sending his crop of papayas to market. He threw one papaya at a time to the guy on the transport boat to load them. Passengers were helping hold his boat in place.

The locals use boats for transportation but also for fishing, such as the family in this photo. The put out nets, splash the water, then recollect the nets and any fish that get caught in them.

Amazon Animals

Animals, like birds, could be hard to spot in the Amazon. Still, over the course of our five days in the Amazon, we did get to see plenty of animals. They ranged from the Amazon pink river dolphins to fer-de-lance snakes. Monkeys were probably what we saw in the greatest abundance. But I would say that the Amazon is not so much of an animal trip as it is an animal-avoidance trip, such as avoiding the poisonous snakes and biting and stinging insects. 

One photo that we did not get was from our night hike. Our guide, Basilio, spotted a great big spider with very red eyes. But that’s the Amazon.

This was a capybara which is the largest rodent in the world. This one was about four feet long and over 100 pounds, so a big rat. It might not look that big in my photo but it was that big. It would have been a much better picture with something to reference its size, but Vicky flatly refused to go and stand next to it. I even offered her that she only needed to put her foot next to it, but Nooooooooo.  I’m telling you, it’s so hard to be a true photographical artiste when you don’t get any cooperation.

This three-toed sloth speaks for itself. At least it was not hard to get close and get a decent photo. He was going nowhere fast. 

The ants were mighty big in the Amazon, but this deer wasn’t much bigger than my cat.  In fact, my cat would send this deer running.

We found this frog on a night hike. A night hike in the Amazon means a pitch-black canoe ride. We spot-lighted the trees and bushes from our canoe with dolphins splashing water all around us. But this was a mighty nice looking frog.

This is a tapir. A tapir is a relative of the rhinoceros. It’s a large herbivore that swims and dives and can get up to 600 pounds. I had to be quick to get photos like this one.

Amazon Shaman

One afternoon, we walked through the jungle to an ethno-botanic garden or home of the local shaman or medicine man. A shaman is sort of a religious holy man that solves problems of people in the community and functions where the spiritual world meets the human world to keep people in balance and eliminate ailments, be the ailments spirits or diseases.

The shaman’s garden was perhaps an acre of land where he grows 250 different plants and he knows and uses all of them. The plants cure every illness. The shaman demonstrated many of the plants for us. One, gold-button, had little gold flowers that worked like Novocain, numbing our mouths. Other plants were smelled or touched, some he made into pastes or crèmes and many of them smelled quite good. His presentation went on for quite some time. I noticed that I have some of the same plants in my garden such as basil, garlic, lemon grass, and marigolds. His garden also contained cocoa (chocolate), coca (as in cocaine), and one super-hallucinogenic that the shaman counsels a person on before taking it and the ceremony for that only happens on certain nights and takes about four hours. I passed on that one. We did drink and eat cocona fruits. You can see the shaman (standing) and some of his demonstration materials. The guy sitting down is our guide, Basilio.

After his plant demonstration, the shaman asked for volunteers for “a ritual blessing or getting rid of the negatives”. He used a handful of Coca plants in giving us his blessing. Vicky and I both volunteered for the blessing. In taking the shaman’s blessing, I mostly wished to avoid getting any more jungle fever. I pass his blessing on to all who read this blog page.

Afterwards, the junior shaman offered to give us tattoos. Vicky and our friend Patty Weber volunteered to get tattoos. Vicky got a blue hummingbird tattooed on her ankle. The junior shaman did it with a hard pointed stick and the juice of some unripe fruit. I passed on the tattoo but Vicky’s was very nice.

Shortly after arriving at the shaman’s garden, we got a rainfall that was more like a deluge. We all agreed that back home, we would call it a gully-washer. To give you some idea, the creeks in the area rose about twelve inches in about two hours, it was that much rain. The surface dirt in the Amazon is clay soil and can get very slippery. I was trying to save a fellow traveler from falling in the rain, and the result was that I fell down myself. So in the end, the Amazon evidently wanted me to get a tattoo – and I got one.

School Visit

We visited a school one afternoon on our trip. It was probably the simplest, poorest school that we have ever visited. There were no teachers at school when we visited. Our guide said that all teachers had to go to Iquitos on the 29th of each month to get paid. Every teacher had to go and be there in person in order to get paid. The trip to Iquitos and back took the teachers the whole day, so the students were at school on this day with no teachers.

This was a primary school for ages six to twelve. Secondary school is mandatory in Peru but the school could be far away from the students and if the river is flooding, students could miss quite a bit of school.

This school was a platform building with walls, one bench, one small desk, a map and a few pictures on the wall. Other than that, the kids had nothing. Vicky is at the bench with our friend, Bill Brookes, to her left taking a photo. The kids had nothing to do this day. 

This was some of the school children. They were quite orderly considering that they were on their own for the day. There was quite a variation in age and size.

The school did actually have one amenity, a soccer field. Perhaps this is why countries such as this beat the US in soccer. Even the poorest of schools set in the middle of the Amazon jungle still have a nice soccer field.

Amazon Housing

This was typical Amazon housing, from what we saw in this area of the Amazon jungle. The houses are very simple. Houses are built on stilts, for the wet season when the river is running high. We were here in the dry season, so houses were not sitting over the edge of the river. The people sleep in hammocks which are hung from the rafters. The kitchen was a separate adjacent platform. Our guide said that everyone in the Amazon lives along the river because there are no roads in the Amazon, only the rivers. This family had a garden, fruit trees, chickens, ducks, and dogs. Life seems pretty basic for them, but they seemed content and happy when we visited.

This is the whole basic house but behind here on a separate platform is the kitchen. You can see the dad with some of his kids behind him. You can also see one of the hammocks hanging which is where they sleep. You can see a couple of their dogs sleeping under their platform. They had no furniture.

This is the kitchen platform. It had an attached piece for the fire pit. You can see all of their kitchen utensils. On the plus side, they had a nice view.

I was interested in the tool shed corner of the house. You can see all of their tools that they had in the photo. It was not much.

This is part of their garden. They plant right along the river as the dry season approaches so that they don’t need to water their garden. They have rice planted closest to the river and corn and other crops farther back. They do have problems with animals and birds getting their crops, hence the bare-bones scarecrows that you see in their garden.

This photo was with another family that we met along the river on the same day as we were out and about discovering the Amazon.

Amazon Jungle

The Amazon jungle is difficult to describe. Aside from all the statistics about it, the forest itself dramatically changed as we walked through it. It could be light and airy or dark and gloomy, all within a short distance. A walk in the Amazon was always an adventure in itself. We tried to look around us at all times, for insects that might bite or sting or for poisonous snakes. But we had to walk slowly as we had to look at the ground but also up into the trees and bushes. The layered vegetation could be 120 feet high. We could often hear a bird or an animal and might even know what it was, but we never actually got to see it. The Amazon is a real jungle that requires taking your time. Often times, we could not tell how big a tree might be since we could only see a small part of it. The upper portion might be shrouded in many other layers of plants. This tree happened to be in an opening so that we could see it in its entirety and see that it was a huge tree.

The same goes for this next tree. While we could not see the top, the trunk had a huge diameter. Vicky looks small standing near a basal root while the trunk is the width of the photo.

Trees such as these can also have tons (literally – tons) of epiphytes growing on them. This photo from our canopy walk will give you a better idea of the epiphytes on trees high up in the canopy. Very little of this vegetation is the tree itself, but rather is epiphytes growing on it.

The next photo is just to show that you are never far from water in the Amazon jungle, and the water can be very jungle-like as well. This was a pond not far from the Amazon river.

Our short Amazon adventure was a challenging trip in many ways. On my last full day in the Amazon, I decided to issue the Amazon a challenge. The local Yagua Indians wore only grass skirts while our guides wore only shorts, sandals, and maybe a light shirt. So I decided to dress lightly on my last full day and I didn’t put on any sun tan lotion, no bug spray, no bug repellant, no Deet, no nothing. I told the Amazon to go ahead and take its best shot. Hence the photo below taken on the bank of the Amazon River. I suffered a few mosquito bites but not much other than that. I survived just fine. Of course, it had rained hard the night before and the air was cooler and there were less critters out and about, so that helped.

Goodbye to the Amazon

This was a random entry in my journal after several days in the Amazon, “…Pictures of the Amazon don’t really tell the story.  Even film or video with all of the sounds can’t tell the story.  I think a person really needs to be here to feel the heat and humidity, have all the sweat bees buzzing in your ears and bugs crawling on you to get the real feel of the Amazon.  My clothes are all wet, the paper I’m writing on is damp, and the toilet paper is damp.  The jungle is alive with beautiful colored birds and butterflies and plants.  And as soon as you are enjoying seeing one, a six-inch flying beetle will strafe you, sounding like a B-52 bomber.  It’s hard to get good pictures of the animals.  They move a lot and there aren’t many large openings in the jungle.  The sounds are really great.  But you need to just enjoy the sound because you might never get to see what is making the sound.  I’m enjoying it.”

Another journal entry from our fourth day in the Amazon, “Ron Weber’s watch quit working last night.  He’s had a cracked crystal for several years, but the watch still worked perfectly.  After three days in the Amazon, it quit working.  Vicky (my wife) has had her camera for years and never changed the battery.  She put in a brand new battery just for this trip.  After three days in the Amazon, her camera quit working.  Basilio, our guide, has a very expensive pair of water-proof binoculars, but he said that they now have a fungus growing inside the binoculars.  Today, I pulled a hard plastic compass and some US coins out of my camera case.  They all felt very clammy and sticky like they were deteriorating.  This is really a harsh climate for many things.  I decided to wash one of my undershirts.  Everyone said that it wouldn’t dry.  I said that I’d rather have it wetter and cleaner than drier and smellier.  As I washed it in the basin, I noticed that the underarms were quite green.  This was a brand new white undershirt at the start of this trip.  After doing my best with a bar of soap, Vicky felt compelled to wash it again.  Then Vicky noticed that my underarms had a red rash.  I suppose there is a connection.  The Amazon can be pleasant with beautiful flowers, butterflies, and birds, but it can also bite you, sting you, and rot you.” 

Writing daily notes and keeping up my journal was a bit more challenging in the Amazon.  I had to deal with wet paper, no electricity, and you never get away from where you are, even for a minute. Here, you can see my concentration being tested.

The Amazon jungle is an incredible tropical rainforest.  I’m standing by a Ceiba tree.  These trees are used to make plywood.  It has a huge base with giant buttress roots growing in every direction.  There were also tons of epiphytes growing on the Ceiba tree.  Basilio, our guide, compared this tree to one of our California redwoods.  The ceiba tree is not that tall, of course, but it does grow to some 230 feet tall and it is an impressive tree.

You need to be some 120 feet up to get a good view in the Amazon, as Vicky is in this photo.

This photo is our last night of the trip, back in Iquitos.  We had dinner at Le Mason restaurant, overlooking the Amazon.  I ate alligator for dinner and Vicky had chicken.  Along with some good beer, we enjoyed our dinner and the end of a great trip to the Amazon jungle. Also note that we look none the worse for the wear...

This is the Amazon River one evening as we were on our way back to our camp.  I’ll end our trip with this beautiful photo of the Amazon.