The next day we had to get up at 3.45am as Daniel was picking us up at 4am. He drove with us for 1.5h to Nauta by car and from there another 3.5h by boat into a reserve in the Amazon jungle. Even tough we hadn’t booked a private tour, the group consisted only of us, Daniel and the captain.
It felt great to drive deeper and deeper into the jungle while only from time to time other boats were crossing us. And when we were completely alone, our pink friends showed up again. While they were relatively far away the day before they were pretty close that day and two of them even took pirouettes.
To reach the next highlight on our trip we had to put on rubber boots, long pants, long sleeved shirts and lots of Mosquito repellent as we were leaving the boat and exploring the jungle by foot. But we weren’t there for the Mosquitoes but for the birds. And about 1000 Mosquitoes later we finally saw two majestic Macaws sitting in a tree and later taking off informing everyone with their characteristic sound.
Afterwards we tried to fish our lunch but as the fishes didn’t like the banana pieces we put on our hooks we arrived at our captain’s village empty handed. And he wasn’t joking when he said that we would only receive rice if we didn’t catch anything. But the food wouldn’t have been the center of our attention during lunch anyway as there was a baby sloth climbing on the veranda.
In the afternoon we went for another exploration into the jungle and this time we spotted Squirrel Monkeys and some birds we had never seen before. And when returning to the boat we put little pieces of fish on our hooks to fish for Piranhas. But the thrilling part wasn’t the fact that we were successful and pulled two Piranhas out of the water but the fact that we went swimming afterwards in the same water.
We knew that reality wasn’t as in the comics when Piranhas eat you down to the bones in seconds and we had read that Piranhas rarely attack humans but the thrill stayed. We also knew that in the same waters Anacondas could be around but well – you only live once. And so we jumped in and enjoyed the warm and cold water of the Amazon river until we couldn’t resist the urge anymore to return to the save boat.
And when we returned at 8pm and went for dinner we couldn’t stop talking about all the awesome experiences we had made in the Amazon jungle.
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