WOW! What an experience! we travelled to the jungle by plane on Wednesday morning and when we arrived we had to take a 2 hour boat ride into the jungle where we were met by our native guide in a canoe who paddled us to our jungle lodge. They were small huts made of bambo and outside the front door on the porch we had a hammock. From our porch we could look right down onto the lake. We went for our first walk through the jungle that afternoon and we saw frogs, an owl, a monkey and loads of bugs - can't believe how many ants there were (anna it was spitchwick all over again!) After a lovely dinner prepared by the chef we took a ride on the lake in the dark. It was pitch black and our guide took a big torch with her and sat at the front so she could spot things for us. There were loads of bats flying over our heads and we also saw a kinkacou.

Our first night under our mosquito net wasn't to bad, we had a wake up call at 6:00 on Thursday and we were in the jungle by 7:15am we walked for a while before getting in the canoe and going around a different lake, we heard howler monkeys - the biggest monkeys in the jungle and we got to see one up really close. We also saw a sloth and of course loads more insects! In the afternoon we went aroundthe lake in front of our lodge and saw lots more monkeys, a toucan and loads of stinky turkeys!... it's a bird that is known as the cow of the jungle! In the evening we stayed in around the bar before heading back to our (not-so-good) second night! Late in the night we were rudly awaken by an intruder, we listened to it for a while trying to work out what it was and when we put the torch on we couldn't see our visitor any where so we were reluctant to get out of bed in case "it" jumped out on us somewhere. Anyway, we finally managed to located the furocious creature that ran along the top of Tom's bed and saw that it was a terrifying....

Mouse!!!!

We both laughed feeling like right fools being scared of a mouse, but the cheeky b***** had sniffed out Kim's dried soya beans and thought he'd found himself a free dinner! He left us in peace for the rest of the night (as the beans were in the bin!)

Friday was much more of the same in the morning, again we saw lots of animals and insects including a small black snake and a taransula - which our guide proceeded to antagonise with a stick, Kim was not impressed! In the afternoon we went piranah fishing in the lake girls verus boys and the women really out did the men, women catching 3 and men catching 0 Only Audrey's catch was a piranah, so he was given to the chef to cook which we al tried at dinner time.

The last nights sleep was the worse as we had a hideous flying cockroach in our room which both of us refused to try and catch so we ended up spending most of the night with the bloody thing flapping in our mosquito net with us two huddled together sat up in the middle of the bed! hahaha - yes funny now but at the time we can asure you it definatly wasn't!

This morning we got up at 5:00am and left at 6:00 to go back to quito It was a great experience and we were really lucky with the amount of wildlife that we saw. Kim didn't want to leave, but Tom had had enough of the heat.

Hope you enjoy the pictures, although it's no where near the same as being there!

We'll be in touch soon. Keep the messages coming guys we love reading them

Lots of love, us two x x x