We had four amazing days at Napo, one day our guide using scopes to show us birds and monkeys from the Lodge observation tower, another day paddling and walking to a different canopy tower with many storeys of steps winding up to a solid tree platform. (Jane triumphed over her vertigo.) We spied curious examples of the harshness of nature, including death by mushroom of a cricket, as the spores attach and gradually grow and consume the host body. The leaf litter toad looked exactly like leaf litter on the forest floor, dark holes in the skin and all! We also saw a sack winged fruit bat.

Around our cabanas and everywhere, were the oropendola birds, on tall trees hanging with their large, pendulous weaver nests. Also lots of yellow rumped cacique birds around those trees, and the perennial Ani, Greater and Lesser.

We visited the community one day, and were shown how they smoke their food, the Anangu people still living very traditionally, growing manioc and other vegetables and pulses. The manioc root is peeled, cooked and mashed, with grated sweet potato and water added, to make their chichi drink, which ferments and is drunk several times a day.

We paddled back into the main river one day and visited the clay licks with other tourists also there. Hides have been constructed at two of the clay licks of the Napo Wildlife Centre Reserve Area - the most accessible parrot and macaw clay licks in Ecuador.

The hide nearest the Napo (Saladero de Loros) is typically visited by hundreds of individual mealy parrots, yellow-crowned parrots, orange-winged parrots, blue-headed parrots, dusky-headed parakeets, and an occasional white-eyed parrot or cobalt-winged parakeet.

Each time we paddled up or down the creek from our lodge, we looked for animals and birds. We had delightful encounters with the monkeys as they leapt across trees above the creek, carrying baby on the back, or chattering and throwing sticks at us. One peed on Jane's akubra hat, much to her indignation! We got great views of the russet red howler monkeys, who also serenaded us at night with territorial howls from the alpha males. The squirrel monkeys with their cute white framed faces were noisy and aggressive (stick throwing) and we watched spider monkeys with their long limbs leaping through the treetops around the lodge. We also saw capuchin monkeys from the Lodge tower.

We paddled in a different direction from the Lodge one day and sat quietly while an anaconda slithered through the grasses within an arm's length. I did stand carefully to take a picture - I never did see the head nor tail as it slowly moved past, looking like a treaded rubber tyre.

Every day as we emerged or returned to our room, we had the funny looking hoatzins, or 'stinky turkey' in the bushes or on the railing, while a 'friendly' black caiman, about six foot long, eyed us up. When the rain came on Day 1, the water rose and flooded beneath the stilts of our room, and we found he'd come closer, and there were some small turtles playing Russian roulette down there with him.

On our last day we went looking for the giant otters, and found a group sun-basking, and a small one swimming with its head out watching us curiously. We were told the caiman can be eaten by the giant otters.

We spied a rare zigzag heron alongside the creek on our paddle out, and I got a decent photo. Our guide Louis also spotted a small anaconda, circled on a bank beside us.

The guides and local boatmen were amazing, spotting fauna however camouflaged, and inching the canoe close enough for us to see. Louis was our guide every day, a nice touch, and our clever paddlers Cheyenne and Oscar. The Napo experience these Anangu people gave us was out of this world, exemplified by an RT crackle as we paddled through the jungle, and a question relayed from our paddler - that was the Lodge, asking if we'd like our jacuzzi ready when we arrive back, and if so, at what temperature would we like it, given the steamy heat? Unreal!!

After said jacuzzi and another delicious dinner, we took an evening walk through the local forest trail and saw some tarantula spiders, and frogs. The rainforest frogs can be so small and so noisy!

But it is the remoteness, the seemingly endless forest, incredible sunsets every night, the smells and deafening sounds of the jungle, that together with the vision and service of the beautiful Anangu people, which makes Napo so special. The Anangu have until now successfully held out against the oil companies. They chose eco- tourism for their livelihood, instead. Every year they must endure another referendum, and with 90% of the Amazon being in the hands of Brazil, strongly pro petro-chemical, time could tragically be running out.