More Amazon (above ground)

We've been in Lima for the past couple of days. It's a nice enough city, but lacking in the charm and friendliness of Bogota. We've spent the bulk of our time doing "travel maintenance": booking onward tickets, getting haircuts, monitoring our cuts and bites from the Amazon.

I'm assuming you don't want pictures of Leah booking online bus tickets, so I'll finish up with just a fraction of the photos from the Amazon. We flew into Tarapoto, one of the bigger cities in the Peruvian Amazon. From there, we took a minibus for three and a half hours to the smaller town of Juanjui. Then, when the road ended, we boarded a boat that took us about two hours upstream to the edge of Abiseo National Park, which has been closed to tourists for 30 years. To give you a sense of scale, the park is almost exactly the size of Rhode Island.

We stayed at a tiny lodge run by Kevin and Maria, retired World Bank officials who formed an NGO to help conserve the park. From the lodge (where we spent a fair bit of time lounging in hammocks), we hiked, scrambled over rocks to giant waterfalls, and swam in the Abiseo River (a tributary of the Amazon). Fortunately, the piranhas are only indigenous downriver.

It's hard to convey the density of the jungle. You don't go looking for wildlife; it envelopes you.

Thanks to Kevin and Maria for inviting us to this extraordinary place!