Adventures in the Amazon: Part 1

I woke up bright and early at 4 a.m. on Friday morning so that we could be down at the UP by 4:30. The bus took us to the airport, where we got some breakfast and then got in line to go through security. After we got all the way through the huge line, they scanned our tickets. Unfortunately mine, and about 6 other people´s, wouldn´t scan. They told us we had to go back downstairs to the LAN desk and get new ones printed out. Which would have been fine, except that we only had about half an hour until our plane took off. 
So we ran downstairs with Jose Luis, cut in front of all the people that were waiting in line at the check-in counter, and got new boarding passes. From there we ran back upstairs and tried to explain to the security guard that it was very important for us to cut in line. He was kind of a jerk and wouldn´t let us, but luckily there were some nice Peruvians that let us go in front of them. We ended up making it and had a nice short flight to Iquitos. 
As soon as we stepped off the plane we felt a heat wave, and my hair immediately doubled in volume. We were in the jungle!!
Outside the airport, we met our tour guides for the weekend, Rudy and Ray, and they took us in buses to  the city of Nauta. 
From there, we got on some boats on the Marañon River and headed to where the Marañon merges with the Ucayali. That was a cool moment for me, simply for the fact that I actually knew those rivers. I´d been looking at maps of the Amazon this whole semester and now I was actually there!
Then they took us to the Pacaya Samiria Lodge where we would be staying, which was about an hour and a half boat ride. I think anyways. I was asleep during most of it. 
When we got to the lodge, we sat in the lobby while they assigned us rooms and explained how the weekend was going to go down. Then they had an older member of the nearby village, San Jorge, give us a welcome in Kokama, and then the translation in Spanish. That was cool, too, because I remembered discussing Kokama in my linguistics class.
The lodge where we stayed was gorgeous. It was all wooden bungalows with palm roofs. The bungalows slept 5 people and had a porch out back with a hammock and some lawn chairs. The beds were all covered with mosquito nets and there were huge screen windows that let the air in and kept the bugs out. They only had electricity from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.

our back porch

We got all of our meals served buffet style in the dining room. Bananas or plantains, and rice were a part of every meal, and they usually had some kind of yummy tropical fruit juice for us for breakfast.
On Friday afternoon, we went on a hike through the jungle behind the lodge. Ray was my group´s tour guide. 
He showed us all kinds of plants and wildlife. We saw some ´´pocket monkeys´´and some frogs. He found a snake, too, but it got away. He showed us 2 different types of magic mushrooms, and the ayahuasca plant, which is used by shamans here, and also by a lot of tourists who want to experience it.
He also showed us a termite nest and let people taste the termites. I did not take part in that in Costa Rica, nor do I ever plan too unless I am dying in the jungle. He also showed us how to cut a root with a machete so that we can get water out of it. The water from the roots actually tastes really good, too. 
We found some Tarzan vines, and got to swing on those, and then it began to rain. My handy poncho that I had bought in Cusco, was sitting in the lodge so I got soaked as we made our way back, but it was a good way to cool off, and was way better than the sweat that I had been drenched in before. 

The Tarzan vines

A couple of the girls in our cabin went to the lodge after our tour to get a pre-dinner cocktail. I tried the Caipirinha (a Brazilian drink made from Brazilian sugar cane licor, sugar, lemons, limes, and carbonated water). It became the weekend favorite of me and my friend Mary and the bartender, Julio always knew what we wanted before we even had to ask :)
After dinner, we showered and it was lights out.