OK this is the first report from the Amazon. This trip is certainly not for the faint of heart but we are surviving. The lodge, four hours up river, exceeded expectations and was comfortable. I was going to provide links to all the critters and weird stuff that we saw but the internet is so slow here that I soon gave up. In fact, our little group was not the quietest and so we probably saw far less than the serious naturalists.
On the way up we saw a big family of capybaras (huge rodents) and several cayman (crocodiles). One really weird bird was the stinky-bird (hoatsin) that has a stomach similar to a cow and was thought to be a prehistoric remnant but DNA proved it to be related to the cuckoo!!!!!!.
Other odd things were the famous leaf cutter ants that consume 10% of the forests foliage, the walking palms that move 80 cm per year (maybe related to Tolkein´s Ents?) and the strangling fig trees that eat other trees.
After the Amazon trip we flew to Cusco in the High Andes where we are now. Hotel is marginal ..... we should have sprung for a more up-market one but the travel agent really does not know who you are and what you want. Sharon suffered badly from altitude sickness (circa 12000 feet, straight from sea level) but seems OK now. We plan to hang out here for a couple of days before we leave to go mountain biking in the Sacred Valley.
OK ... this keyboard is driving me nuts so that´s all for now.
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