Amazonian Adventura Part 1: Trekking the World's Longest River and Largest Jungle - Family Style!

When we first knew we were moving to Colombia I must confess I knew little about the place beyond cocaine, cartels, coffee, and Cartagena. The latter I knew only as a port you could sack in the Amiga 500 classic Pirates! It remains one of the places I would most like to see in Colombia. The Amazon frankly did not factor on our places to visit list while in Colombia, assuming we would one day get there instead while visiting Brazil. The Amazon is a big place though, the largest tropical rainforest in the world, and in fact exists in Colombia in the southernmost department: Amazonas. Once learning this it immediately became travel destination numero uno.

The broad picture of where we were

As close as Google could get us, as you see, there are no roads to speak of.

Brittney holding the baby Caimain our nature guide "Pancho" found near where we were staying.

So with one month off from school for Christmas break no time was like the present. Little did we know that this put us smack in the middle of Amazon rainy season, little else did we know that the rainy season was delayed this year (score!). With all of our work colleagues returned to Canada and the US for Christmas, we took our only other remaining friend Brittney with us for the adventure. We booked our trip with Amazon Experience, and because we had kids, opted for their less strenuous three day two night river trip and tacked on a one day hiking trip to an indigenous village. he tour started in Leticia, the southernmost point in Colombia, where if you look across the Rio Amazonas in one direction you can see Peru, and in another, Brazil. The massive scale of this river was something I was not fully prepared for, it is easily 500m across in most of the places we saw, and surprisingly clean. We had a lovely guide/boat pilot named Ruben and an amazing interpreter/guide named Claudio, who was full of information about all things “wild and Amazonas” relating to culture, flora and fauna.It seemed every hour or two we would stumble across some rare plant, monkey, bird or frog and Claudio’s enthusiasm for what he was seeing was matched only by his knowledge on the subject.

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Claudio, Amzonian expert and guide extraordinaire!

Claudio shared an admirable loathing for Brazilian and Peruvian conservation methods when compared to Colombia’s efforts in the same region, and he gained further points in my books when he venomously described Brazil’s deal with the US that gave them debt relief, while at the same time granting license to eco-monsters like Monsanto moving into the Amazon and fucking the place up good and proper. And he yet gained my further admiration for his wealth of knowledge on the evils of the World Bank and the IMF when it came to third world development, and environmentalism. Claudio will remain to me an Amazonian conservation warrior, and the world certainly needs more like him. He maintains a small traditional home not far from Leticia on indigenous land, which he lovingly refers to as his his sanctuary. During our trip he was harvesting all manner of seeds to plant and grow further crazy fruits and plants to attract more wildlife to his “sanctuary”. Our trip would not have been the same without him, muchas gracias Claudio.
The first night in Leticia I was really wanting to get a glimpse of the Rio Amazonas, knowing that our tour would actually be taking us up one of its tributaries the Zacambu river into Peru, so Brittney and I took an fruitless journey to the small “fantasy” island which lay adjacent to Leticia and had been formed only in the last 90 years by river sediment build up from changing river currents. It being the rainy season, the precarious planks that lead across the offshoot of the river gave way to a soppy muddy mess that we were not equipped to deal with for the sake of a picture of the mighty Amazon, and I left a bit disappointed to come so close to the mighty Amazon, but actually get to see it.
The next day I was; however, delighted to discover that our trip first went up the Amazon for a distance snaking through both Brazil and Peru before branching off into the Zacambo river and lake waterways. The river tripping here was not unlike our trip up the Mekong River in Vietnam and Cambodia, and the boat too was similar. We were not really sure what out accommodation would be like, but I had envisioned camping of some sort. We actually stayed in a hostel on stilts (we were in a floodplain in rainy season next to the largest river system in the world) in the middle of the jungle, it was one of three, more or less adjacent to each other, and was in a beautiful setting. The jungle we experienced here though was nothing like what I had envisioned the world’s largest jungle to be. It was dense-ish, but not what I had pictured. From here on various journeys we encountered caimans, pink river- dolphins(freshwater dolphins, who knew such a thing existed), scorpions, tarantulas, monkeys, all manner of birds and frogs, an anaconda and piranha, which we caught and then ate for lunch (nine year old Aurora caught her very first fish unassisted, as did her 38 year old father!). A pretty fulfilling wildlife experience. Given that it was the rainy season, we actually lucked out with the rain getting caught in a downpour only once. More on the indigenous experience in Amazonas Part 2.

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