You either love it. Or you hate it. To many, the Amazon and all it holds, is called the Emerald Forest. A treasure trove of wonders untold; of lost cities (think of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) of lost civilisations (who constructed the pyramids of Madre Dios?); undiscovered fauna and flora with applications for miracle drugs and cures for all and for others it represents wealth and riches untold. Isn't the Emerald Forest such a charming expression full of happy and positive connotations? Almost like some sort of fairy tale!

But one man's fairy tale is another man's nightmare. To some, especially the early Spanish explorers, the jungle was known as "the Green Hell". But like anything, the more you know about an environment, the better you are able to handle yourself in it. In the early stages of the Spanish, and later other European, explorations there was not a lot of knowledge. Bar that the jungle was the place where you were eaten alive by all manner of biting things, big and small, and could die of "the fever"(the general expression given to anything contracted in "the Green Hell") or suffer at the hands of aggressive indigenous tribes that called the jungle home.

Fortunately, we had Ivan to give us a little insight into the Emerald Forest and all that it contained! We had been looking forward to getting into the Emerald Forest ever since we had made it to South America! Even so, I had to think back to my university days and remember long forgotten details of the "....ology" courses (zoo, bio, parasite, ento, botany, etc) we learnt in classrooms and labs! Here was a university waiting to divest its knowledge!

Besides riding the river and experiencing its many moods, it was also a chance to observe life at the edge of the river. If you keep your eyes open, you will see birds galore! Red and blue squawking mackaws, green parrots, toucans, eagles, vultures, terns and gulls and not to mention the shy giant rodents called capybaras and their offspring leaping into the jungle at our passing! But to experience the jungle, you need to get into it! And that's what we did! Once you get away from the river, the jungle just closes around you. Light from the canopy diminishes slightly and becomes diffused. Any sounds are muted except for the shrill calls and screams of birds high above our heads in a canopy out of sight. The jungle becomes a green thick wall around you and you can never see more than 5m or so in any direction.

2 long day walks and one at night! Brilliant! This was a chance to see all the little things that you don't notice otherwise (unless it bites you and you happen to notice it doing that!). The plants and the insects that come in so many different shapes, sizes, colours and biting ability! Weird and wonderful all at once. Although we went piranha fishing, nothing was biting (except the mossies that feasted on us all!).

Here were trails, that criss-crossed the jungle floor, of leaf cutter ants with what looked like sails of cut leaf in their jaws for the nest that holds up to 8 million single individuals. The ants don't eat the leaves (or anything else they can get their pincer sharp mandibles around), but store them in their nests. In time a fungus grows on the leaves and that's what they eat! Don't touch that tree because the fire ants will come out and bite you. One bite is extremely painful, hence the name fire ant, and 50 bites will kill you! There is also the inch long black bullet ant. He acts alone during the day scoping out possible prey sites and at night, he and a dozen friends go raiding! Fortunately we did not see the army ants. They move from place to place in a phalanx and devour anything and everything that gets in their way! And those are just some of the ants here!

All round you are flying insects of the most awesome variety of colour and size and configuration! The butterflies and moths were stunning. Brilliant reds and yellows against jet black wings; or white and orange, or heart shaped flecks on chocolate backgrounds; or the brilliant electric blue of the morph butterfly! Here you cannot help but marvel at the colours that just the butterflies bring to the jungle! And at night you can hear the heavy beats of giant moths as they fly close by avoiding the bats that hunt them.

No jungle trip is complete without a night walk looking for the giant tarantulas that make the night their own. Besides the baby ones that we saw, no adults graced us with their presence! Something the ladies in the group were quite happy about! What didn't help was being stung by a wasp from a disturbed nest that the Canadians blundered into as they passed on by! Getting stung hurt a lot! Turning around and seeing what it was that caused the pain, I was ready to hotfoot it past the whole group when I saw a nest swinging in the torchlight and it crawling with some seriously upset wasps! (Ed: what Sands forgot to add here is that 5 minutes later, the group heard expletives of the highest order and I was asked to hold a torch to a certain person´s private parts! Yep, an ant, the size of which we still can´t agree on (but actually not that big) had given Sands a little nip on the end of his you know what! Poor guy, quite a shock, but we did fall asleep in our tent that night with tears in our eyes from all the laughing - one of those things that was funnier after the event, especially for Sands!!).

Ivan showed us strange roots of a type of palm tree. It is reputed to move at above 20cm a year as it grows higher into the canopy! Impressive. But it is also the place that hunters will place themselves to provide some protection against the jaguars or wild boar that roam and forage on the forest floor. We were told that groups of wild boar can number up to 200 individuals whenmoving through the jungle, and contrary to what you might think, they eat anything they can get hold of. Including careless hunters that don't take adequate precautions! Climbing a tree does not save you from either a jaguar or marauding wild boar.

Having spent only a few hours in the pitch black night jungle, even though there was a full moon, it was not hard to believe Ivan's tale of people becoming lost in the jungle and then having to spend a night or two out there. Apparently in the town nearby, two people had totally lost their wits after a protracted time in the jungle and having to spend a night or two out there! Some locals believe that goblins come out at night and cause the lost to lose their minds by tying them to a tree and dancing around them in the light of a fire! The reason why they get lost in the first place is that the goblins lure them away from familiar trails and areas with something akin to a dogwhistle. You don't know why you do something, you just do it!

You can't leave the jungle without a swing on a liana vine like Tarzan! Ivan was obliging and found a muddy, swampy stream bed that had a few of the vines hanging down! No matter who you are, where you come from and your upbringing, swinging on a liana vine has to be done! Each and every one grabbed the vine and leaped out over the mud and arrived on the other side in a form or state of elegance or another! The secret to not landing in the mud is grabbing as high as you can, and then leaping as far out as you can! Some of the party did this far better than others in our group!

But like the soldiers of any army know, the jungle is neutral. It bestows no favour on one over another. No matter what you think of the jungle, you are left with an overwhelming feeling that the jungle pushes in from all sides and that it wil eventually win. Manmade structures will eventually succumb and revert to jungle in time. The jungle will always win, no matter what!