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."