Manuel met us with the car about an hour later then scooted us off to Pilcopata. Along the way we passed some small villages and observed this:
Quite a few tarps laid out with drying coca leaves...before another stop to buy bread in a tucked away little room with a huge wood fired oven, the bread neatly stacked in a 4'x3' wooden flat.
In Pilcopata the nine of us loaded onto a raft and our guide, Edwin, navigated and coached us down the river. Abby rode at the tip of the bow and didn't seem to mind being barraged with water. There were two points where 6 of us jumped in the water and floated along. Even though we really needed someone to step up as coxswain, we managed to successfully reach our next destination, where we we now loaded, dripping and giggly, onto another boat in order to reach the lodge, which is only accessible by water.
This sums up the fun we are having:
Ah, but the day was not over! We dropped our gear at the lodge, had another fabulous lunch, a break and then a soccer match on a small island across the river. There were goals already set up made from sticks tied together. Jose, Ernesto and Willie along with CJ and Caroline, took on Abby, Claire, Lee, Chris, Jackie, Annie and Karen. You can probably figure out the victors.
At dusk, Jose took us on a night hike which, I'm sure you can imagine was as wild as ever. We were hit in the head with low hanging coffee beans, tasted a termite (Jose claims they taste like mint), almost ran into a very creepy group of spiders who had linked their webs together to create a spider city, were introduced to a plant called a walking something or other, with long, exposed roots that resemble a lean-to or tepee, bullett ants and some other huge, creepy spider that doesn't need a web because it's a hunter. Nice. And just outside the lodge is a colony of leaf-cutter ants going about their work.
