After a rest day in Cuzco (we got back to Cuzco at 2am after a 23-hour day in and around Machu Picchu), Jack, Jen, Stef, and I all flew to Puerto Maldonado to spend a few days in the jungle. We reserved a few rooms at Inkaterra Lodge – a semi-luxury resort on the banks of the madre de dios river. After our month in the Galapagos cloudforest, Stef and I had decided that we would only go to the jungle if we were staying at a high-end place – otherwise it is just not fun, comfortable, or worthwhile for us.
Our two days were fun. We visited a “native family” (yes, liberties were taken with the definition of “native”, but I got some good photos so I was ok with that):
We cruised the river at night looking for crocodiles (we only saw one, for a second).
We walked through the 100-foot-tall, 800-foot-long jungle canopy walkway:
We saw a lot of different spiders in the jungle at night:
And we visited their butterfly house:
All in all, the jungle was hot and humid, but our accomodations were really comfortable, and the food was great. Unfortunately, Stef got a 24-hour virus that the hotels nurse mistook for a reaction to our malaria meds, despite the fact that we had been taking them for 6 months prior. So I was pretty disappointed in the way they handled that.
We saw some more stuff, too – here’s everything else we saw:
But that’s the jungle! Then we went back up to altitude in Puno to visit Lake Titcaca….
