We arrived in Manaus on 22 November and signed straight up for an Amazon tour. We nearly made our first significant travelers error by going for a tour run by a guy we met on the bus from the airport. A guy called Antonio Batista (aka Thomas, Tom), he helped us out a lot and was genuinely nice to us, but we googled him and found a history of being a general conman, and using people's credit cards whilst they were on the trip. Anyway, we stuck with a recommended by LP operator (Iguana Tours, see review) and opted for the long version to Lake Juma, a beautiful and relatively remote part of the Jungle near Manaus, a 5 day - 4 night tour. We were lucky with our group, and shared the trip with two other couples, Asif and Amy from San Francisco and Simon and Madeleine from Switzerland.

The days broke down as follows:

Day 1: Travel to the site, including; taxi, boat to meeting of the waters of the Rio Negro and Rio Amazonas, a bus, and another boat, this time smaller. Also a bird watching trip which included dolphin spotting and fishing for piranhas in the river; and at night searching for caiman on the shores of the river and then bed in the jungle lodge.

Day 2: Watching the sunrise over Lake Juma; a 3 hour hike in the jungle; eating piranha soup; boating to and setting up camp in the jungle; and finally panicking that we were going to get eaten alive whilst asleep (see below).

Day 3: Waking up (thanking our luck); another jungle hike; boating to a local family house and being shown around the garden of trees and plants used for medicinal purposes and staying under the stars near a local family.

Day 4: Battle of the warriors with blowpipe and bow and arrow; boat to lodge again; swimming; canoeing through Lake Juma and another walk; spear fishing for monkey fish; sleep in the lodge.

Day 5: More fishing; visit to a rubber processing company; travel back to Manaus.

It was an incredible experience. It is by far the biggest and wildest place either of us have ever been, and the memories of the noise of troupes of howler monkeys, sheer numbers of birds and caiman and the faces of vanquished piranha will stay with us for ever. Hopefully, the pictures will paint most of the story (there is also a list of some of what we saw in the review section), but some highlights were as follows...

On day 2 our guide saw a Jaguar, unfortunately we did not as it grunted and ran off when it saw the group. The sheer noise it made though, its bark like grunt and heavy feet, were awesome. Our guide Alan hadn't seen one before, and he said it stared right at him. Alan coolly admitted to being slightly spooked for about half an hour. This encounter helped fuel our evenings imaginings…

For Rich, as well as all the guys on the trip, the hour between 4 and 5am whilst sleeping in the jungle felt like the longest in his life. We had heard a troupe of howler monkeys far off in the early evening, and they got closer and closer until around 3.30 they were not too far away. Then twice they howled their ghostly hollar, followed immediately by a bark that sounded a lot like the jaguar bark we had heard during the day. Our fear found logic where it went looking for it and when, at about 4am (the darkest hour, just before the dawn…), the monkeys passed straight over head making their noise and dropping food on us, it seemed rational to conclude that the monkeys were being trailed by the jaguar - who was waiting for one to come out of the tree - and that on its route it would stumble on our camp and therefore eat us alive in our hammocks. Rich had volunteered to sleep outside the shelter and under the stars, so it was also perfectly rational that he would be the first to be eaten (so he wouldn't get the benefit of the screams and general hubbub of people waking up to the jaguar's first course, which might scare it away). Asif was also convinced it was going to attack his head during his sleep, and Simon was prepared with his feet ready to kick the beast as it attacked.

Alan the guide found this all very amusing, especially as he had snored through the whole thing, and he nonchalantly told us that it was probably nothing… but we will never really know. What is interesting is that all the boys were alert, listening and wanted to confront their expected doom, or at least tried to think about how they might face up to it (Rich was going to shout and shine a torch in its eyes!) All three girls heard it the same but simply rolled over, Michelle with ipod, and hoped it would go away…

On day 3 we demanded Alan showed us some monkeys, and he nailed it. We saw 2 saki monkeys, aka old monkeys cos they look like old men, in the high trees. They looked down to see what we were up to and then made there way off through the trees, totally wild and incredible.

There were loads of wild grey dolphins, and also some pink ones, we were occasionally swimming and they would go by, although we can hardly say we swam with them. On the last night the six of us in our group set about a bottle of vodka and a bottle of Cachaca (local sugar cane rum) and decided to paddle one of the boats out down the river after a skinful. It was awesome, we sat under the stars and drank our booze, and sat in silence and listened to the noises of the Amazon. Most incredibly, we were there for about 30 minutes and after 20 or so we were surrounded by wild dolphins - as in they set up a perimeter around us - and they started surfacing more and more often to see what we were doing, then making louder and more threatening noises. We were admittedly hammered, but like to think that they had identified our behaviour as unusual for humans at night, and we were on their territory, so they came in numbers to check out if we were a threat… it was incredible and possibly not unlike what we people might do if faced with a similar situation, except with more sonar and less guns of course…

That's it for this week, if anyone reads this far please feel free to post a comment on our page if you feel like it… we certainly appreciate hearing from our friends at home!