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We're going to the jungle baby! After a wicked time in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I was excited to see how Peru measured up. We took a half hour flight from Cusco to Puerto Maldonado - the city in the middle of the jungle. The first thing we noticed as we got off the plane was the intense heat - 37 degrees and almost 100% humidity. A huge change from cold Cusco. Peru is so cool like that, you can take a half hour We had a bit of time to kill so we wandered around the town looking at the markets and smelling all the funky smells. They have chickens and other animals just sitting in the sun with flies covering them, and they stink so bad i can't believe people don't get sick from them! This one stall had loads of chickens hanging up, and this young kid just playing with them, they must have a stomach of iron, because I'm pretty sure I got salmonella just from looking at it! Just kidding, but it was pretty gross.
I practiced my bargaining skills some more with a shirt and once again came out with the crappy bargain. Definitely need to get more of a backbone with these people! It was then time to meet up with the others and get on a motorised canoe to head to our accommodation - EcoAmazonia lodge, the last site for accommodation before you hit the thickest part of the Peruvian amazon. So you can imagine all the different creepy crawlies that were about, I developed a nervous slapping twitch every time I felt something on me. And the lovely manager informed us that there were over 20 tarantulas placed in and around our huts to kill the Mosquitos. He didn't find it funny that I'd rather have malaria than sleep with an effing tarantula. Thankfully I didn't see one.
Once we had unpacked our gear, we jumped back into the canoe and headed over to Monkey Island - a rehabilitation island for monkeys that had been injured or sold on the black market. We were told that they were extremely tame, although wild, and we made sure to hide all our drink bottles because they loved to steal them. Within 2 minutes of being on the island we saw our first monkey - who leapt onto this girl and held onto her head! He soon found a water bottle in the pocket of this guy, and proceeded to unscrew the lid and skull it back before the other monkeys could get their hands on it! We walked a bit longer with dozens of monkeys following us, and climbing from one person to the other. Shirley managed to get wee'd on which I loved. The tour guide cut up a bunch of bananas and spread them out on the table and then called the rest of the monkeys. Soon there were dozens more all climbing on the table and screaming at each other trying to get at the bananas. There were a couple of smart ones who grabbed a few pieces and scampered off so the bigger monkeys wouldn't beat them up.
Once we got back to the huts it was time for dinner, and a swim before hitting the sack, sleeping with one eye open of course (for fear of those bloody spiders)
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