Explorer´s Inn and the Amazon Jungle

We´ve spent the past two weeks in the Tambopata Nature Reserve having an amazing amazing time... We were picked up from the Peurto Maldonado airport and a boat took us along the Tambopata River into the jungle for 1 and a half hours to get to the Explorer´s Inn where we´d arranged to volunteer for 2 weeks. The lodge has lovely simple bungalows (with no hot water or electricity) and a central dining room/ chilling area with a ´discovery centre´that has displays and a library of jungle related info books, it is surrounded by primary rain forest, 2 ox-bowlakes and a river, and 34kms of trails. The lodge is very involved in rain forest research and has a cool program where students with ecology/biology degrees can live there as resident naturalists and help with research, trail maintenance, guide education etc, and there were 4 of them while we were there, and another 2 volunteers.

How to explain the time we had there? The jungle was so impressive; exotic animals (4 cool species of monkeys, capybara´s, coati´s, paca´s, peccary´s), 600 species of birds, cool butterflies and bugs (the mosquito´s that follow you around the trails in clouds of at least 200, sandflies that also carry weird diseases, botflies that lay eggs in your skin, and the tick that took a ride on me all the way to Cusco, are NOT included in that, and the spiders were a leeeeetle frightening) and beautiful jungle sounds all day long. The food was deliscious and we met really cool people there...

The volunteering work was fantastic, we basically were there to help the resident naturalists with some of their usual jobs, and walked trails (and through a LOT of mud, now I know what gum boots were made for...), machetying bush that had grown or fallen in the path (Steven loved that part and was very sad to part with the machete at the end of our stay), fixing steps and handrails on trails, helped the bird researchers with mist-netting to catch, measure and release colourful amazon birds, monitoring parrots at the clay lick, and we slept overnight in hammocks in a bird hide (hmmmm very interesting experience! Getting into a hammock, in a sleeping bag, under a mosquito net... and then trying to sleep in a banana shape with weird and scary jungle sounds all night long) to do a 1 and a half hour caiman search at night by rowing around the beautiful ox bow lake under stars and moon 5kms from the lodge.

Absolutely loved it!! It felt like a case of ´dr livingstone i presume?´when we returned to cell phone reception and internet access yesterday! Sorry everyone! We weren´t expecting to be so completely cut off either! Love to you all!