Leticia and the Mighty Rio Amazonas

It's one of those things you dream of as a child, sailing up the Amazon. Well we did our research, and sailing up the Amazon ain't half as romantic as you would think. Firstly its very slow, very boring, smelly and quite dangerous. So we opted to fly in, took us a while as LAN cancelled our flight out of Manizales and it instead of 6 hours, it took us 2 days.
But as we flew into Leticia, skimming over the treetops, childhood took over again. We were staying in a jungle lodge, Omshanty, and it was exactly what it promised. Kike, our Spanish born host, was brilliant: "What do you want to to while you're here?", "A jungle trek at night". And by nightfall we were dressed like bumpkins in gumboots, pants tucked in and smeared in layer upon layer of insect repellent.  Torches in hand we were bundled over to Eduardo, an indigenous man from the tribe next door. By moonlight we marched through the jungle for hours, and although we didn't see anything apart from insects, it was so much fun. Eduardo spoke muffled Spanish nonstop, his cheek constantly filled with coca powder. He occasionally paused long enough for us to say 'No entiendo' at which point he would giggle excitedly and continue on with his monologue. Surprisingly we understood quite a bit, although possibly we just made up our own version of his tribes history and the plants and insects he was showing us. And just as a side note, the insects here are on speed, we met a moth the size of my head, a 'baby' tarantula that was palm size and there was a cockroach sitting on our bed that looked like it might have eaten the pillow for lunch.

Baby tarantula

Hummingbird in flight - look closely

The following day we told Kike we'd like to meet some dolphins, and off we went, sailing up the Mighty Amazon. Dodging huge tree trunks and other hull busting flotsam, we made our way 2hrs upstream to Puerto Nerino, the only eco friendly town in the Amazon, everything recycled, no cars or motorbikes. Peaceful. From there we took a tiny boat out into the lakes that lie between the Amazon and other rivers. Almost immediately we spotted the greyish pink dorsal fins of the endangered pink river dolphins. Oddly easy to spot but horrendously hard to photograph. We spent hours just drifting, watching them rise around us, but just the fins was as much as we saw. Our guide, Nicholas, jumped in for a swim, and told us you could hear them underwater, but neither of us were brave enough to join him.
We  tried our hand at fishing, surprisingly easy to catch a piranha, though they were so tiny they all went straight back in. And although Nicholas told us they were completely harmless, we couldn't help but notice they he jumped just as far away as we did when one was dropped.

On the hunt for pink dolphins

Pirahna fishing

Sunset on the Amazon