Tarantulas are scary in the dark....

So its been a while since the last blog and there´s a lot of catching up to do. Its been action packed since my last entry; prepare for numerous blogs in one day!

After the excitement of the Inca trail we headed to Puerto Maldonado for a few days in the jungle. The boat had only gone a short distance up river when we spotted something in the water..... a sloth trying to swim from one riverbank to the other. Tough going when you´re a sloth (they really do move slowly), especially when you have boatloads of tourists watching you, hampering your progress. Our jungle tour guide Carlos decided he would give the sloth a lift and before we knew it, the sloth was in the boat. Comparisons to ET were rife!

The jungle lodge was very basic, but very relaxing. On our first night we went for a spotlight walk to check out the locals. We mostly saw insects in various forms and in various poses including a pair of amorous stick insects! Our guide enticed a tarantula out of its burrow, its babies following like ducklings behind, and the nickname "Jungle Boy" was coined!

It rained most of the second morning which put a dampener on our early bird watching start. Birds don´t like rain so we didn´t see much except for an anteater far off in one of the distant trees (stupid humans should follow the birds´example!). The rain meant that our trip to an oxbow lake was put off till the afternoon, so we spent a relaxing morning reading books in the hammocks and playing cards instead.

The sky cleared in the afternoon and we floated on Tres Chimbadas lake in search of giant otters and piranha. One of the team caught a yellow piranha and our guide showed off its teeth by inserting the edge of a leaf into its mouth. The piranha instinctively bit down and the leaf came clean away, leaving a perfect piranha teeth circle. After putting the little fella back in the lake and floating to the other side we spotted a pod of giant otters. Our Intrepid guide (Holger) had been to the jungle a number of times and this is only the second time that he´d seen giant otter so we were very lucky. Even luckier to spot seven, happily swimming and ducking below the surface of the lake. We could hear them calling to each other with little pips... very sweet indeed.

We weren´t so lucky on our cayman spotting trip that night with only one pair of beady eyes in the water as bounty. The river was swollen from the rain and was too high for the cayman to rest on the banks. Regardless, it was nice to be out on the river under the stars. It was even nicer on the following day to spot one happily resting in the sunshine on the bank as we made our way back to Puerto Maldonado!