When you book these things, you get a bit of a blurb, this one mentioned a flight to the middle nm of nowhere, a boat ride up a river and only being allowed 5kg of luggage, limited electricity and wifi.

That translated into my head as an off grid camping experience!

I was wrong. Quite the glamping experience is more like it.

Am early flight to Porto Maldonado, a township on the banks of the Madre de Dios river. Very close to the Brazilian and Bolivian borders and more importantly the Peruvian Tambopata national reserve .

So a quick repack at the Intrepid offices and onto our transport up the river. The forecast had been for rain, but it was thankfully fine and a super relaxing trip up the river. Warm breeze , although those boats sit very low in the water and while I’m sure they are fine. They felt like they could easily unbalance.

About 45minutes to an hour later we arrived and a 5 minute walk into the jungle revealed our lodge.

This was no camp site!

Lunch was served and then we had a briefing of what was to take place, to be honest I missed half of it , lots of walks and that’s about it… that’s the beauty of these things. You just need to turn up at the prescribed time and things happen. No checking itineraries or tickets , location maps etc it’s all done for you . Love it.

The first “excursion “ around the lodge introduced us to our environment. A blog can’t capture the sensations of sound and smell. Suddenly you’ve been dropped into a David Attenborough special. What this ecosystem is capable of, the adaptations it’s made are incredible!

Seems like humans will be humans , if the stories that are being told are true, the lengths men will go to give their sons big penises!🙄.

While we were walking, listening to the birds, monkeys and goodness knows what else.. the rumble of Thunder could be heard getting closer and closer .. by the time we got back to camp it was pouring down. This postponed the “nighttime” walk – so it was dinner and up for a wait for it – 5am start.

It rained pretty heavily all night , and I thought things would be canceled, but thankfully after an awful sleep I dragged myself out of bed and away we went… should have been paying attention because we ended up in a canopy walk.

It was a schelp getting up that high, and by the time we got to the top there were 19 of us on the top and this thing swayed and wobbled. I really didn’t like it, but the views were great of the canopy, not as many bird sightings as we had hoped for – but still. Pretty cool.

The Madre Dios eventually flows into the Amazon. Its biggest tributary accounting for 15% of the total Amazon volume. It’s huge! I’d heard that Peru was ecologically diverse, Lima is so dry and arid and then over the Andes you get dense rain forest. It’s wild to me that the geography of this area means that despite our proximity to the Pacific Ocean this water will flow thousands of kilometres across a continent to the Atlantic Ocean.

Anyway, off the platforms and we had to do a series of rope bridges. No time to think about them- just go them. They wobbled like hell. And it was head down and just get on with it.

It was then back to the lodge and a few hours off before we headed off to the next excursion! Back up the river, bit of a walk to an inland island for a bit of a canoe.

Then it was the long walk back to the boat, a tarantula or two on the way and the last glimpse of the sunset. Long, long day

Tomorrow we head to Cusco , first time at altitude so will be interesting to see how we cope. Another early start but we will be thete by 11am… looking forward to another change in scenery…