Living in Peru's Amazon Rainforest

It's always been my dream to visit the Amazon rainforest - so I loved (almost) every minute of our visit!  It was like God was having fun showing off his creation just for us!  If this is a taste of what we'll see in the New Earth someday, I can only imagine.....





We stayed at one of those wonderful lodges where you room is open on one side to the jungle.  The plus of this was that you heard all those wonderful jungle noises, and got to see cute littel animals scurrying all around.  The downside is you had to sleep under a net.  When you open your eyes, this is NOT what you want to see!

And when you go to the bathroom, this is NOT what you want to find!  This little friend was caught in our neighbor's bathroom, as he was trying to climb the wall into our room...


But aside from that, it was WONDERFUL!  Here are a few pictures of things we enjoyed seeing:

A whole flock of Macaw's - we watched them come into the trees a couple at a time, then after something started them, ~25 took off together.  Beautiful!

We also saw toucans and parakeets in the wild (but couldn't work fast enough to get pics).

This is a HUGE tree that is totally hollow inside - you can walk into it.   What happens is this tree (Tree A) grows next to another tree (Tree B) - it starts engulfing Tree B and eventually totally covers it up. tree B then dies, leaving a big hollow inside tree A.  Pics are outside and inside Tree A.  Apologies for the duplicate pics - Blogger and my iPhone are not cooperating - so now you get to see us twice :-)

 

Monkeys - lots to see, but hard to get pics!  

The things hanging from the palm tree are the nests of the Weaver bird....

Lots of Brazil nuts everywhere!!!  We had Brazil nuts for snacks, Brazil nut crusted chicken Brazil nut crusted everything!  They grow in these coconut looking things.  The one on the left was opened by an animal.  The one on the right was opened by machete....

Well......I had never seen one of these things growing up from the forest floor before.  They are air holes for cicadas buried under the ground.  So when it rains in the rainforest, even if it pours, the cicadas are able to get air.  Hooray for the cicadas......

So they can live to get into your room at night and clatter around the light fixtures and everything else.  In the rainforest there are no seasons oryears when you get a lot of cicadas.  There are just a lot of cicadas.....all. the. time.  LOTS.

I could have gone the rest of my life withiut seeing a tarantula nest, but since we found one, I thought I'd share it with you.  Our fearless guide thought it would be a fun idea to poke it with a stick to see if he could coax the tarantula into coming out.  YIKES.  Fortunately, the tarantula must have been sleeping off a big meal - she was not interested in coming out.  Whew!  FYI - the tarantula is above the stick at the top of the area covered by white.  Just look for the dark shadowing.....

For those who have seen fabrics made from Kapok, this is a Kapok tree.  It is HUGE.

And this is the opened pod of the Kapok tree, where they get the Kapok from....

 

Termites in a tree - yum...  If you look at the dark area going up the tree to the big termite nest....that area is a big tunnel the termites have built onto the tree and leading into the nest.

 

Well, I bet you typhought bats slept in the dark.  Not these bats!  The bumps on the tree below are cute little bats - they are sleeping on a tree at the edge of the lake, where they are positioned to snag the bugs that fly around the lake.

Oh, and did I mention the paranas?  Yep, the lake was FULL of them.  You could throw a little piece of bread in the lake, and all of a sudden the water erupted in paranas tearing into the bread.  Great incentive to stay in the boat!

This little guy is a Carybara, the largest rodent in the world.  He looked to be a couple feet long - and generally always has a bird perched on him to eat the bugs on him.

Well, so much for the brief overview of the Amazon.  You could stay there for a long time and still just scratch the surface of all there is to see and hear.  There's plenty more of God's creation waiting to be explored!