Kaj made it to South America with all his luggage and flights intact. How do I get all the bad luck? We met on a plane in Cusco on our way to the jungle from Puerto Maldonado which is almost on the Bolivian border of Peru. Kaj didn´t recognise me at first, his excuse was that he was watching all the people get on the plane. I was however the 3rd person on the plane, so it was a crap excuse. He was instead taking delight watching a little bitty airline hostess struggling to put a large suitcase in the overhead lockers. No, he didn´t get up and offer to help.

On arrival in Puerto Maldonado we were taken to the office of our lodge company, and asked to remove anything from our luggage that we wouldn´t need. So, out came all our cold weather gear, since it was about 30C and extremely humid.

I was glad to be at sea level and breathing in a good amount of oxygen and my Cuscian altitude headache was slowly fading. Kaj however was really under the weather after being in the air for 27h, and hadn´t slept a wink. He was dreading the 45min bus trip to the river, and the successive 4h boat ride to the lodge.

The bus trip was an interesting experience. The road can´t really be called a road by our standards. It was a dirt track, barely wide enough for our bus with dodgy bridges and potholes big enough to swallow Mum´s new Hyundai Getz. It was muddy as it´s wet season here too, and I was worried at any moment the bus would get bogged and all the American tourists in their clean adventure gear were going to get real muddy while we all pushed the bus out of a former pothole - now a small lake.

But no, we make it intact to the boat departure, and it was a pleasant journey along the river. Kaj was even able to keep all his lunch intact, and the further upstream we went, the more bird life we saw.

Our lodge, Refugio Amazonas was a 16 room log cabin structure with a thatched roof. Our room had two beds (note to self: when in South America, don´t ask for a double room if you want to sleep with your partner. You require a matrimonial room) and one wall was completely open to the jungle. We were warned to keep our important documentation and any lollies in the safety deposit box as creatures sometimes enter the rooms while we sleep.

The only creatures we could tell that came in were the mosquitos. Not nearly as many as in Iquitos, but it did require us to sleep under mosquito nets. They´re not nearly as romantic as they look!

First night in both Kaj and I came down with gastro problems, and that had me totally out of action for the first day. The second day wasn´t much better. Kaj´s condition improved enough for him to take a jungle walk to a canopy tower 36m high where he sat watching macaws fly past.

3rd night we were transferred to the second lodge, the Tambopata Research Centre, which is a further 5h upstream. Although the boat ride was gruelling, upon arrival a family of 6 red howler monkeys greeted us as we hopped off the boat.

We observed the monkeys for about 2 minutes, when the big one came down from higher in the tree and stood above us and started to pee. He didn´t get me, but an American researcher was more lucky! Then, all the monkeys started to pee. It was raining monkey pee! We assumed they didn´t want us at the base of their tree, so we carried on to the lodge.

Every time we entered the jungle at this lodge we saw something spectacular. We saw so many monkey species, but the real highlight was visiting the macaw clay lick.

We needed to rise at 3:30am to get to the location before the birds did, and suddenly about 300 parrots and macaws descended on the location. They was so noisy, but their colours were amazing.

Not many ate clay that morning, most of them just sat in the trees like a bunch of women gossiping.

We´re now in Ollantaytambo again on our gourmet food tour, and will write more when we have a moment.

Thanks for all the comments - so nice to be loved!