The Explorer's Inn is quite a nice place out in the jungle. It is completely off the grid; they have a generator to supply power to the main dining room during the evening (mainly for compact fluorescent lighting and to recharge camera batteries). In each of the individual cabins (which have paper thin walls, thus all three rooms of us had conversations together), and it was lit by candlelight, which was pretty cool. Although tough to blow out the candle when you’re under your mosquito net. And there was only cold water.
On Saturday our wake up call was for 4:30am, so we could have breakfast at 5:00am, and depart through the jungle by 5:30am. The rainy season starts in the jungle on October 1, so it was wet on the trail. Thankfully they lent us rubber boots to use.
We started so early so we’d have a better chance of seeing animals, and weren’t disappointed seeing some monkeys right off the bat.
It was a 5km hike to the oxbow lake we were going to, and on the way we saw more monkeys, leaf cutter ants, a rubbler tree, brazil nut tree; just incredible to see such diversity. The greatest was the huge ironwood trees that are cut down for hardwood elsewhere, but are thankfully protected in the reserve.
After a couple hours of hiking we finally made it to the lake, and got to the blind to look at the giant river otters. They were a little anti-climactic since we’ve all seen otters at home, and they were a long ways away. After about 20 minutes, we got into canoes that were bolted together to become catamarans for a quiet cruise around the lake to see some more animals close up.
We saw a rufescent tiger-heron,
neotropic cormorant,
some other birds,
and many noisy blue-and-yellow-macaws that were flying over.
After about an hour on the water, we started our way back towards the lodge, and saw a huge strangling ficus, on which I spotted a chameleon.
Nathan decided to go Tarzan on one of the vines hanging down.
We saw an owl butterfly off the side of the trail, it is more impressive to think that the wing measures about 6 inches top to bottom.
We made it back to the lodge, had a delicious passion fruit juice, and took a bit of break/nap. There were so many hummingbirds outside of our cabin.
In the late afternoon we walked 1.5km out to the new canopy tower that they had built out in the jungle. It was mainly used for research purposes, especially for carbon-dioxide concentrations and global warming potential work.
With all the equipment on the top, we could only go to the top of the stairs, but it was still a good view from 42m up. Unfortunately it was cloudy and there wasn’t too much of a sunset to see.
From there it was the start of our night walk for 1.5km back to the lodge. We saw some tree frogs, stick bugs, a preying mantis, some spiders, grasshoppers, and many fireflies.
Once we got back to the lodge we went on the tarantula search, and Rox even came along. There were a couple along a tree just outside the lodge.
We had another great supper with some delicious soup (they have amazing soups everywhere in Peru) before having some rum and playing some crib. Quite an odd occurrence happened as Nathan was dealing. As he was dealing a card, a dead cockroach fell from the ceiling and landed on the table and the card hit him. It was such an odd thing and quite funny all the same. After playing some cards we headed off to our last night in the jungle, which is incredibly loud with all the insects, frogs, etc.
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