Iquitos - Peru

We took what can only be described as a random trip from Mendoza to Iquitos. In order to save a couple of hundred quid we took a bus back over to Santiago, flew back to BA, then flew to Lima and then flew to Iquitos in the jungle. This all took about 32 hours and was a real pain in the arse but money is tight these days.

We visited a butterfly farm near the city called Pilpintuwasi here where Gudrun and Robler do an excellent job of looking after butterflys and also many other jungle creatures including a jaguar. they can be found at www.amazonanimalorphanage.org for those of you in the area who want to pay a visit.

The main reason to come here however was to revisit the jungle and seek out the mighty anaconda in its true environment as this was one of the only things we failed to see in Bolivian jungle. This should have been relativly easy to arrange and the guides we ended up going with assured us this was no problem. However, when we had paid and were well on the way he brought up the standard itinery we were going to follow, I again asked about hunting out the giant snake and it was at this stage he said there was very little chance of finding one and we would not actually be just searching!!!

Pissed off to say the least as we have obviously done a good bit of animal sight seeing in Bolivia.

Anyway we carry onto the village and then deep into the rain forest reserve of Pacaya Samiria, Perus largest national park to camp a few nights. Being the wet season the mosquitos were unbelievable, I have never seen anything like it, also the waters are high so not many animals to spot. In the end we wnet back to the village a night early and stayed there as the biting was getting seriously bad.

Did a bit of spear fishing there though which was good fun, caught a couple of tifddlers too.

Back in Iquitos the Sunday was the first night of carnival, our jungle guide invited us to see Iquitos´s biggest band, Explosion, they were excellent and the tradition of carnival is to throw as much water, ink, dye, flour and anything else messy over as many people as possible. This was great fun and would have made great pictures but I wasn´t going to risk another camera for that!!

Next we are off along the mighty Amazon the opposite way to enter Columbia, hoping to have no interactions with FARC.