Day 6 We woke early as usual and had to pack up all our stuff and put our big bags on the boat, we then set off with our day packs for a long walk it was drizling so we had our anoraks, soon after we went into the forest the rain started heavily, even under the canopy where its supposed to take 11 mins for one raindrop to hit the floor. We were drenched pretty much straight away as we'd failed for the first time to bring our heavy duty ponchos, bought for this very reason. We were all feeling pretty miserable when suddenly Noe whispered everybody get down, we all crouched as we heard a grunting noise, there was a herd of wild pigs close, Noe tried to flush them out by creeping slowly toward them, suddenly there was a panick and around 6 or 7 of them when hurtling through the forrest, we caught a glimpse but it was very funny, we werent expecting to see anything because of the rain. We came to a clearing and saw a river with our mode of crossing it....a fallen tree, it was still very wet and therefore slippery, Oliver skipped along it barefoot and cut us some steps and he and Noe helped us across, bloody hairraising. We cut our walk short and headed straight to the madre de dios to try and flag our boat down early, unfortunately we werent expected so we had to wait for a couple of hours, Oliver and Noe werre trying to show us hoe to build shelters with palm leaves. Oliver has a house he built near Erika which took 60,000 leaves to build the roof, he walked for 5 hours to fetch it too. Ian had spotted a tarantula nest earlier en route so us two decided to go off spider hunting....despite Ians phobia, as the threat of spiders in the tent seemd silly he really got into it. We finally found a tarantula sitting in the entrance to his tunnel, very cool to see, beautiful jet black creature. Finally the boat arrived, we climbed on in the rain, bloody misearble, us two and Noe in the front trying to keep dry under a huge blue tarpaulin, after an hour or so, the rain turned to drizzle and we were rewarded by a nice cup of tea, as it was brewing and we were all chatting away, the driver shouted out Jaguar, we all went silent when we looked to the river bank. There he was (we named him Jim) sitting right in front of us, pretty uninterested at the gauping boat full of people snapping away with our cameras. He stood up and started to saunter along the bank, trying to wark out how to get back up to the junglw, lucky for us it took him 1/2hr, it was spectacular, there is one jaguar in 25km square, so this was a very lucky sight. We finally dragged ourselves away and set off again, in high spirits, we saw many more black and white caiman, a few more capibara and spider and brown cappuchin monkeys swinging from tree to tree. We had nice tea and food on the boat and finally arrived at Blanco Private Reserve. This place was very plush, great showers, private rooms, loo papaer and towels....a real treat, our stuff was now all dirty wet and stinking of muldew unless we were wearing it. That night we went over to Boca Manu where they were having a festival and had a few Cervesas and watched the lantern procession while sitting on the porch of our little shop, a little girl took a shine to us so we fed her crisps and tried to talk to her, luckily Natalie was there to speak spanish but the girl was a bit shy of talking. A little boy suddenly appeared at immediately started to climb up ian like a tree, it was really funny he really took to him although I think Ian wanted to sit and drink his beers. We got up to leave and guess what, with my shoes full of mud I fell on the steps down and landed on my back, I was in agony for a while but luckily only bruised it, and with Pedro the surgeon and Solidat also a consultant I was in good hands, me and Ian were laughing people wondered why.....it's so bloody typical for me to do that. We went back to the lodge and had our last evening meal as a group (half were flying back the next day) it was rice and beans, apparently vegetarian (apart from the ham). The guides cracked open three bottles of really nice chillean wine, which went down a treat, we all went off to bed very tired but happy to be in nice beds, all clean etc.