Yeah I have totally fallen behind on my journal writing. I was in the jungle for a month without internet and now that i am in Iquitos City, the internet is super slow and its loud and distracting here beside the road.

I promise I will update soon and add photos...

I had a cold for a few weeks, finally got over it a few days ago and now its comming back. Must have gotten reinfected somehow. I will have to stop kissing all the boys. Har har!

Today was the best day of all on my whole jungle trip, well aside from the part about leaving for Lima today... Eww Lima (shiver).

We went to an island that is a refuge for orphaned monkeys.
Kitty, Carl, Jan, Debbie and Marlene were also along.
Species included tamarin, spider, woolly, howler, saki, uakari and titi monkeys.
As soon as I got off the boat a baby howler monkey leapt into my arms and stayed there during our whole time on the island! Sooo cute!

At one point I had baby howler on one arm, one on the other arm, another monkey on my HEAD and another hanging off my camera strap!! Very funny. I was the only one who would let them climb on me though... I thought it was the coolest thing ever ever ever! Then one started chewing on my ear. Hmm that was kinda weird and I was afraid it would bite me hard but it didnt. Hooray for monkeys!!

Later after leaving Ceiba Tops and Iquitos, I found myself in Lima. That place is scary at night time so I got a more expensive hotel (Hotel El Ducado) for the night instead of messing around trying to find a cheap place since I was flying to Cusco the next day. The hotel was OK.

My taxi driver was nice but spoke no english. I would estimate like 3% of the population here speaks any english. When I was in Thailand I only learned one word of thai. I think it was hello. Everyone there spoke enlgish. Its very hard for a tourist in Peru with no spanish. I have met lots of travelling people here who also dont know any spanish and they say the same thing. It is good though too because it forces you to learn something new.

I must say though, that some of the best conversations I have had have been with dudes working outside of the airport and them drawing me little pictures to try to explain what they are talking about!!

Floating down a stream created by rainwater in a dugout canoe in the rain is a pretty cool thing to do. Especially when you are not the one doing the paddling. Har Har!

Today the group was Kitty who is American but works for the Peace Corp in Lima, and an Argentinean Family - Octavio and his daughter who are living in Germany, and his parents who are living in Lima. We went to Explorama Lodge for breakfast.

We hiked the Bushmaster trail to a Yamoga villiage and got to try our skills at using a blowgun. I got 2 out of 3 on the narrow plank we were shooting at. Looks like playing all those first-person shooter video games is good for something! Yeaahhh! (Thinking of all the chaos I could create with a blowgun and a strategicly placed perch back in canada... mwuh haahaaa!

Bought some crafts from those guys and I gave them all packs of cookies I bought at the bar... heh. If you want to make people like you in Peru, just give them cookies... its an easy way to buy friends!

Explorama lodge has tons of wild macaws flying around! Actually seeing them flying is cool! Then they land in the trees and laugh at you. There were 3 macaws aroudn when I was there and 4 other green parrots. One was sitting in a tree and was trilingual!! He would say "I wont eat, I wont eat!" in spanish and "Hello" in english. I cant remember the other language he was talking in. Funny what parrots pickup from people. I showed them all I had crackers and they were running after me on the ground! Having macaws run after you is quite funny as you can imagine...

Later we boated over to a local rum distillery where this dude makes 4 different flavours of rum from sugar cane: 100 proof, molassas rum, rum flavoured with roots and herbs, and my favorite ginger spice rum! Yummm! They were all good but I bought a bottle of Ginger rum for some night when i feel like getting sloppy silly drunk.

Americans Carl, Jan, Debbie and Marlene were now at Ceiba Tops from ExploreNapo lodge so we hung out by the pool. They had already been to the distillery and were pounding back their bottle... no i am kidding but i think they were drinking some of the ginger concoction as well. Good stuff I tell you!

Louis took Octavio, Kitty and I out for a night walk to see if we could see any creatures that only come out at night time. Like snakes and huge toads. We only saw a turantulla and I am happy to say I have NOT had any nightmares about that beastie... ewww!

This was my last night at Ceiba Tops :´-(  SAD SAD SAD

Never imagined I would be fishing for Pirannahs on the Amazon River but that is what I did this morning. I didnt actually catch a pirannah though... I caught a catfish! I set him free though.

Go free little catfish and make more catfish kittens for other people to catch!!

I saw two pink fresh water dolphins which was pretty neat and then visited a little village and watched the kids going home from school. There were dugout canoes on the river banks.

In the afternoon, Louis and I went for a walk around the forest close to Ceiba Tops. It was crazy HOT like the kind you get before a big rain except worse cause its in the jungle. Must have been over 40 degrees and I was dying and dripping but it was a cool hike. There is this wicked cool Ceiba tree that the lodge was named after. The hugest tallest tree I have ever seen in my life!! The braches stretched out to the sides and the middle was bare, you could biuld a big house right on top of that tree. Louis said that a paper mill was going to buy the land and cut the tree down but Peter, the owner of Ceiba Tops, managed to buy the land instead and saved the tree and all the forest on it. Its supposed to be like 300 years old.

There were lots of frogs, mushrooms, termites, weird trees and other crawling things.

After dinner, a group of students from the nearby village Indiana came and performed some traditional dances. It was cool, they were pretty bouncy and stuff... yeah bouncy.

OK first off i have to say there is a man beside me listening to headphones and singing along to Brian Adams Cant Stop Loving You, and I dont understand anything he is saying. But, he does make the song sound better I must say....

In the morning we travelled by boat down the amazon river to the ExploreNapo Lodge for breakfast. Once I saw ExploreNapo I was glad I picked Ceiba Tops. No air conditioning because the rooms are all open. You have to sleep under a mosquito net and there is one communal shower. While these things may appeal to some - it doesnt appeal to me and I will keep my nice cool bug free room. Hehe. After breakfast we hiked to the Canopy Walkway. It is hanging bridges 120 feet off the ground and a third of a mile long. It was really neat to have a birds eye view of the trees. I could hear toucans but couldnt see them ALAS!

Explorama Company was founded and is owned by an ex-american (Peter Jansen) who started his first lodge in the amazon jungle in the early 60s. He now owns 6 different lodges and every year buys up more land to protect the trees and animals within. Really cool considering how much of the rainforest gets cut down every year. Peter lives at Ceiba tops and considers it his retirement home. Nice!

While at ExploreNapo, I saw the cutest little green parrot drinking the dirty soapy water out of the hand washing basin and had to take some shots of him.

We then took a short hike to Renu Peru Ethnobotanical Garden and met a Shaman who explained the uses of different plants and did demonstrations. I was the lucky recipient of a funny head dress made of medicinal leaves and smelly garlic alcohol since I had a headache... I always have been at the height of fashion. yeah... but the coolest part was when someone brought in a baby ant eater they had found. It was the cutest cuddly creature and walked like it was drunk!

There were these funny birds called Pale Wing Trumpeter`s following and leading us around everywhere. Saw 3 turtles being lazy on a log with yellow butterflies fluttering all around them and landing on their shells! Very cool!

After leaving ExploreNapo, we made a special trip to see the fresh water dolphins and the giant water lilies since the Norwegians were leaving in the morning. The lilypads were so huge! like a meter across and more. On our way back to the boat, I saw a Sloth which is my new favorite animal cause it is just too weird looking!! Its face it like a smiling buddah statue it has this grin on its face all the time. Poor thing has no way of defending its self, I bet it smiles even when something kills it for food. Sighh... people in the jungle eat them and keep them as pets but the sloth really enjoys being alone and lives in the very tops of the trees eating leaves in the peace and quiet.

When I got back to the lodge, someone had tied bunches of bananas up in a tree and the tamarins were going crazy! they are so small, they almost look like kittens but they are monkeys!

I wish I could post my photos to these blogs but I had them burned onto a DVD and the typical computers around here dont have DVD readers. I will have to add them later...