Jungle Tour

After being unsure of whether I would actually do a jungle tour or not, I finally decided to take the plunge and paid for a 4 night 5 day jungle tour. There would be two of us plus a guide. Raul, a Chilean, was to be my travel companion for the next several days as we traveled 250 km into the jungle. Our base camp was called Delfín Camp and consisted of a thatch roofed structure that included a common eating room, several screened in rooms and hammocks.


We stayed at the camp for two nights and camped in the jungle for two nights. I am not quite sure how to describe my experience. We would spend our mornings either going out in the canoe looking for wildlife or hiking through the jungle looking for wildlife. We would return to camp for the hot part of the afternoon and then head out again at night either in a canoe or on foot. As far as wildlife is concerned, we saw many monkeys, many birds, many freshwater dolphins, iguanas, a cayman, a turtle and an electric eel. The most abundant creature we saw was also the most unwelcome. Millions of mosquitoes managed to find us over the course of the five days. These also weren't like the mosquitoes I am used to back home. These were mosquitoes on steroids. Despite wearing plenty of insect repellent and two shirts (one long sleeve, one short sleeve) I still had bites all over. And when I say all over, I literally mean all over. Even when I was able to forget about the bites, there was still a constant buzzing in the ears as the flew around my head. It was the buzzing that nearly drove me over the edge to insanity. I had to keep reminding myself that I made the choice to pay money to experience the mosquitoes. Ooof.


Halcón, our guide, was very good at locating things in the trees and was also very good at making bird/animals calls. He always amazed me in that he knew the names of every animal, bird, insect, plant and tree that we would see and also knew the medicinal uses of the things we would find.


Our first day was spent mostly in canoe. We paddled to a small village called Libertad, arriving just before sunset, and wandered around for a bit. The village kids were all playing soccer and volleyball and it was fun to just sit and people watch for a while. As darkness fell, Raul and I entered a makeshift store (I think it was really just someones house) to get a cold drink. Since this village didn't have electricity, the cold part became problematic. The kind store owner offered to turn on his personal generator for a few minutes so that the fridge would cool down so our drink would be cold. After about a minute we were served our still warm drink. As you can imagine turning on a refrigerator for a minute isn't going to cool down anything, but I still really appreciated the effort though. After it was completely dark, we went out to look for caymans (a type of alligator). We were told to keep our headlamps off while our guide scanned the water for the reflection of eyes. After not finding anything for a very long time, Halcón suddenly drove his hand into the water and pulled out a cayman. It was about a year old and didn't really do much. I guess it was playing dead hoping we would leave it alone, which we eventually did.


After finally finding our cayman, we started paddling back to the camp. The paddling started to get very difficult as we were going through a very shallow area with lots of vegetation. Eventually Halcón just jumped out of the front of the canoe and started walking. Not a good sign. The river had evidently dropped several feet since he had come through last and we would not be able to paddle any further. We started dragging the canoe (keep in mind this is a 12-foot dugout canoe made of a single piece of wood and very very heavy) through mud that was up to the knees. I am not sure how far we dragged the canoe or how long it took us, but it seemed like hours (I think it was really less than 30 minutes) but tempers started to flare and some not nice language was used in the heat of the moment. Once again, I paid money to be able to do this. I should be happy. We made it back to camp around 10pm, ate dinner and immediately went to sleep. Long day.


I won't bore you with the details of every minute of the jungle tour (we saw a tree and then another tree and then a pretty bird...), it was something that is best experienced and not explained. The canoe trips were relaxing, the jungle hikes involved lots of mosquitoes and the camping in the jungle was an experience. While camping we slept in hammocks inside mosquito nets with a tarp on top to protect against the rain. One night as we were trying to fall asleep something that sounded like rocks started to hit the ground around us and the tarps with very loud thuds. Turned out to be a monkey eating a pine cone like fruit and as he was discarding the remains they would fall and make a loud noise as they hit the tarp and the ground. While I was glad the monkey found some food, I started to get very irritated at the constant barrage of fruit that kept me awake. As if there wasn't enough other noise and irritants to keep me awake in the jungle.

All in all my 5 days in the jungle were very good. I am very glad that I went on the trip and that I had the opportunity to delve deep into the jungle. While there were certain aspects of the trip that i wish had gone differently, I am still rather pleased.



More photos from my trip into the jungle at: http://picasaweb.google.com/jmellgren