Oh man, you have got to go to the Amazon one day! Whether it's the Deepest Jungle with untouched riverbanks and tribes no one has heard of; or the outer areas in Colombia, Peru or Brazil, it's an incredible place that is just brilliant.

We arrived into Leticia from Bogota with only one slight drama- as the plane was coming in to land, it had to rev up and lift off again, circling round for a few minutes before landing. Coming in to the airport (about the size of a double garage, including the luggage belt) we each paid a few dollars 'arrival fee' and stood with the other sweating people waiting for the bags to arrive. Our plan was to go to a place called 'Omshanty' which is about 12km from the town, owned by a Spanish guy. It had had good reviews though when we'd tried calling no one had answered so the plan was to just turn up and hope. Funnily enough, there was a taxi driver with an 'Omshanty' sign waiting, with 'Kristine' on it... While Nick watched the luggage belt I rocked up to the dude and asked if he knew if there was space at the place. He said yup and that he'd wait for us...nice bloke.

Our bags arrived and we wandered out of the airport and over to our new buddy, who took us to his taxi and chucked our bags in the boot. We asked him if he needed to wait for the person on the paper and he got confused- turns out he thought I was said 'Kristine', oops. So he ran back to the arrival door, returning shortly with 3 people- way too many to share a taxi with. He called over one of his fellow drivers and me and Nick jumped in that car to toddle off to Omshanty.

Arriving at the hostel (which is on a couple of acres of jungle/rainforest) we were met by two giant dogs and **** the owner. After he'd settled the other three guys in he came over for a chat, saying there was a 6 person dorm there but we were the only ones in it—it was cheap and in a very cool jungle house thing with its own kitchen, so we took it for 3 nights and popped into town to grab some food.

Our first night I was upstairs in our bedroom part when I heard a "Arrgggghhhhh-oh-god-get-down-here-now-aahhhhhh" from Nick in the kitchen. Getting down the ladder as quickly as possible I went into the kitchen where my darling was staring at this HUGE spider of doom—it looked like a mixture between a crab, scorpion and the monster from the movie 'Alien', and was terrifying. And huge- including the legs it would easily have been bigger than a side plate. And it moved quickly. We saw a second one right by the kitchen sink (good excuse to not do dishes) but as they seemed not interested in us, we left them too it. I saw a third one while in the bathroom which was not fun. Later that evening there was another, equally scary spider, this one in a frog/snake, army camouflage pattern. It wasn't a good sleep that night.

The days passed in hot sunny happiness with us wandering around between Omshanty and Leticia township. On the second night we went on a night time jungle walk with the other three guys (Kristine, Gary and Craig) taken by a local guy Cristobal. At the beginning we went to the local indigenous village meeting house where Cristobal told us about different traditions, and offered us some Mambe, which is a powder of coca leaves, tree bark and other herbal things. It's meant to work the same as coca in Peru, slowing down your heartbeat, giving extra stamina etc but has the added value of protection against bad spirits. You chuck a spoon of the powder in your cheek and leave it there, same as the coca leaves. We set off into the jungle after that and walked around an hour seeing tarantulas, spiders and various other creepy crawlies. Cris was talking with us soon after going into the trees and we were asking about various dangerous things to watch out for. He said to keep an ear out and let him know if we heard something sounding like a chicken clucking- turns out there's a nocturnal snake that sounds like a hen... it's quite dangerous and is attracted to light, We all had torches. While not generally found that close to people he did tell us about one time he and a local family had been walking back to the village at dusk and one of these snakes had been slithering across the path. The family had a small dog with them which the snake attacked but they all got away and gapped it for the safety of the village. Cris went back later that evening but couldn't find the snake again....b*****??!

On our last day in Omshanty we were talking with **** regarding boats, as we planned to take that afternoons' fast boat a couple hours upriver to Puerto Narino, stay there a few days then carry on on a fast boat further up the Amazon to Iquitos which was back in Peru. There was a mad rush to get into town as the taxi arrived late- we needed to get to the airport and stamp out of Colombia, then get across the river and stamp in to Peru, as well as buying tickets to P.Narino, as well as the P.Narino- Tarapoto boat. It's an interesting area where we were- the tri border of Peru, Colombia and Brazil meets there and they have an open border policy where you could freely go between the three towns in the area (one for each country) but if you wanted to go into that country to the larger towns and cities you'd have to get stamped in. So we had been in Colombia so had the entry stamps and we could have travelled just within the tri borders with no hassles, but as we were going to be going into Peru ending in Lima, we needed to get stamped into Peru while in that Amazon area. Easy enough and it took hardly any time, but we still cut it fine getting the boat up to Puerto Narino as it left at 2pm.

When we arrived into Puerto Narino there was a skinny guy from Alto de Aguila ('Eagle's Heights', the hostel we were staying at) who gave us the choice of walking 10-15 mins or taking the hostels dingy for free, 5 mins upriver. No contest. Alto de Aguila had seemed gorgeous on the internet, owned and ran by an ex priest who now worked at the local school. The hostel was set on a large property which was also home to a million ducks, a dozen cats, 4 macaw parrots, a toucan, a dog and five wee monkeys. When we got there we had to walk a couple minutes uphill and upon arrival were swarmed with cats and monkeys. It was brilliant, the room was lovely, there were hammocks for guests, a lookout tower thing, a fabulous view and the animals were fantastic!

The dude from Alto, Felix, offered to take us out on a boat one afternoon to see the local sights- we went to the Walking Tree which has its branches growing side and out, as normal, but the roots of the trees grow down from the branches, eventually becoming strong enough to support the branch so it grows out further, sending down more roots. We went into this grove which was circled by what looked like a dozen trees but was truthfully only one, incredible! After this we changed the pace by going fishing for piranhas (I asked, but turns out no one's been eaten by piranhas there yet. Happy days). The fishing rod was unique- a stick with some nylon tied on the end, and a hook on the end of that. Very basic but seemed to work as we all managed to catch at least one fish each. Both me and Felix gave Nick a wide berth as he was very enthusiastic with the fishing and had a tendency to biff the line everywhere. He still doesn't believe he done that but you'll notice from the photos that there aren't any of the usual close ups of him while he's got the line in his hand! After the fishing he took us to the mouth of where that river linked into the Amazon. Where the waters mix is very rich in nutrients and small fish life and it's there that you will find the Amazon's oddest looking water mammal, the pink dolphin. They are quite ugly to be fair, not really looking anything like their salt water cousins the bottle nosed dolphin. They're also shy, not coming up and playing or showing off or anything, stink. We sat on the boat for a while without seeing much but Felix was incredibly patient and we were eventually rewarded with glimpses of them. The calves are born grey but as they get older the pigment in their skin changes and becomes pink. Weird, but kind of cool. The shape is also different, with a more rounded dorsal fin. Not sure about the rest of the body as the fin and back are pretty much all we saw!

On our third night in Puerto Narino we decided to have dinner up in the tower watching the sun go down. It was sort of my idea and to be honest not the best one I'd had. One of the blue macaws climbed (don't entirely know why it didn't just fly) the steps after Nick and bit his ankle (could be for that) and three of the monkeys bounced up the top with us. In the end there were the two of us, four macaws (the other three had flown) and three monkeys all trying to eat off the two plates. We ended up going back down and eating inside!

The village of Puerto Narino is lovely. Very very isolated with only the boats as transport, but the people are so friendly. Walking back to the Alto one afternoon we passed a school class on what might be a horticulture outing—kids of maybe 10-12 years all wandering round with machetes bigger than they were, it was hilarious- and slightly unnerving! Good times though.

It was a sad day when we left. One of the monkeys had completely attached itself to me (literally. We couldn't get the thing to let go!) and I would have loved to have stayed longer, but we needed to leave. We were catching a boat to a place called Caballo Cacho, needing to stay the night there to pick up the fast boat down to Iquitos (fast boat= 8 hours.). We were staying in Iquitos for a few nights then were going on the Last Adventure- taking a slow boat 4 days up the Amazon River to Tarapoto. It was going to be great, yet bittersweet as our days were running out very quickly and the flights back to London were looming.

The boat sort of went to Caballo Cacho. Turns out in the rainy season there are no worries, but as it was dry the water was low and the fast boat too big to get as far as Caballo. This meant we docked briefly at a tiny wee shack and transferred to some small pangas (small dingies which could hold 6ish people) before going an hour further up a creek to Caballo itself. In the morning we would have to leave there early, around 4.30 to come back down the creek to where the fast boat would hopefully be waiting... Caballo Cacho doesn't really have much going for it but that was ok as we were only there a night. We turned up bright and early—or at least, early- to the river the next morning to catch a panga down stream but lo! Things weren't that easy. Because it was still quite dark it was hard to see where we were going and our driver beached the panga several times, once for almost 15 minutes. It was the same for the other pangas and as the dawn broke we could see ahead more sand bars. In the end the panga pulled up to the river back, everyone jumped off and we walked a couple hundred metres past the worst of the sandbanks to were more pangas were waiting to take up to the boat. In the end we made it on time and were pleasantly surprised with the boat, comfy seats, food provided and in all, better than several of the buses we'd taken along the way! We settled down into our seats as we started cruising for Iquitos, and got to sleep.