Over the next few hours we saw many caiman, birds of all sorts and lots of turtles from ones the size of a child’s palm to serving platter size (and I’m sure in the past they have been serving platters!). Quite often we saw them swimming along, their little heads poking up above the river, but more often we saw groups of them clustered on tree branches in the sun. It is hilarious to see them piled up, they can’t climb very far up the branch but there are obviously popular branches as turtle pile-ups occur.There were also lots of pink river dolphins, but swimming was to be later on in the day, we were searching for monkeys! Not too long after we set out we found our first family of yellow squirrel monkeys. When I was a child, my family sponsored these at the Taronga Zoo, so it was a huge thrill to see them in the wild. They were incredibly cute, moving through the trees and even coming right down to the water to drink.
We continued on, still on the monkey hunt, and eventually stopped right in at the river bank so that we could have a loo break. However, there was also another family of squirrel monkeys in the trees at the same spot. They were very curious about us coming so very close to the bank – one even came on the boat! He ran right along the side inspecting us to see if we had any food on offer (which of course we didn’t, but apparently unscrupulous guides do feed them which is really bad for them).
As we headed back down river Anna managed to spot a solitary black howler monkey. Our guide was a bit disappointed not to have been able to show us more but such is life.
We arrived back at the swimming hole and there were a group of dolphins there, so I headed into the water. The water is a muddy brown colour so you can’t see very far into it and there were caiman all around the banks and piranha in the river, but I didn’t care, when else am I going to get the chance to swim with pink river dolphins in South America. I will admit to not feeling entirely comfortable however as I headed over the side!
Amy and Anna decided to bravely take photos of me from the boat!
The water was really nice and the dolphins came within a about 1.5 meters of me, although the water is so muddy I could only see them when they broke the surface, but it was a bit boring swimming about on my own and the girls were keen to get back for lunch so I only stayed in for about 5 minutes. The girls should have come in though because about 10 minutes later the heavens opened and the rain poured down so they were as wet as me. It got pretty cold as we headed back, but lunch was waiting so we were soon dry and warm again.
After a mid-afternoon snooze (for me and Amy, Anna read and wrote in her diary) we headed back out on the river to catch our dinner – piranha! Ivan took us to a couple of fishing spots before we started to catch fish. Amy caught the first and biggest piranha and in the end the tally was:Amy – 2 piranha, 1 sardine (which was thrown back)
Anna – 2 piranha, 1 sardine and 1 tiger fish (both thrown back)
Lisa – 1 piranha, 1 sardine (thrown back)
I seemed to be much better at letting the fish eat all of the meat off the hook, rather than actually catching them which didn’t bother me at all – especially as they aren’t into the quick kill here, once Ivan took them off the hook (we weren’t allowed to touch them as they have such sharp teeth) they were just chucked in the bottom of the boat.
Dinner was spaghetti (really good) but we also got to each eat one of the piranha, crispy fried. They tasted really great but Amy couldn’t eat hers after catching it herself.
After dinner we headed back out on the river and went torchlight spotting of the caiman. It was fun spotting their red eyes glinting in the torchlight and we even managed to see some green spider eyes and a few fireflies.
Today has been just brilliant and so relaxing, I simultaneously can’t believe we have only been here for a day and a half and that tomorrow is the last day.
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