The Jungle Book - Day 2 - Rebecca Takes it on the Chin

Morning – The Jungle Walk

The morning activity for Day Two was a walk through two of the four different types of rainforest topography – lowland and highland. We would visit the other two topographies – swamp and lagoon – on Day Three.

Rebecca and I suspected that the hiking parts of the trip would not be greeted with exuberance by Maya and Jonah, but we expected them to last more than the fifteen minutes that it took for us to stomp through the lowland mud.

I was prepared to turn back with them, but Rebecca graciously offered to take them back to the lodge and let me continue on. I accepted the challenge.

At 21 years old, our guide Romulo, is in his fourth year of guiding tours. He is native to the area and had a new Che Guevara shirt for each day we were at the lodge. He has a saying that roughly translates to “the jungle is for those who love it, not for everyone”. He clearly loves it.

On our walk, Romulo identified different trees, leaves, nuts, plants and vines and described how the native tribes use the wood for spears or arrowheads, the leaves for paper, the nuts for buttons and jewelry, and the plants and vines to weave baskets and jewelry or to use as cables and ropes. He spotted and identified different frogs, spiders and mushrooms and showed how the poisons from each could be used on arrowheads for hunting or drawn by insects for hunting or for protection (and, in some cases, prepared and eaten by humans to no ill effect). I ate these mushrooms after Romulo burned the poison hairs off.

Romulo also pointed out at least a half-dozen different types of ant nests, including leaf-cutter ants, hunting ants, army ants, and the evil-looking conga ant. You can kind of make it out in this picture. It's the red thing.

The conga ant is about a half inch long and has mandibles that, Romulo said, can sink deep into your skin and bite you five times before you know what the hell happened. He said that the bite of twenty ants could kill you. The thing was nasty-looking, so even I refrained from volunteering to be bit.

Romulo also identified a type of tree to which lemon ants are partial. Lemon ants get their name from their lemony taste. Romulo cut some twigs in which the ants build their nests (and kill the tree in the process) so we could all have a taste. Lemony!

I took a twig back to the lodge so Rebecca could have a taste, but Maya enjoyed them too.

Here is a bunch of other funky stuff we saw. A big fat toad that Romulo just pulled from under a bush as we walked along.

A bug Romulo had never seen before. He let me name it. I called it the volcano bug.

This nest. But I can't remember if it was an ant's nest, a termite nest, or a wasp nest. One of the nests that Romulo showed us is used as a skin protectant. You take bits of the nest, mix with water to make a paste, and smear it on yourself. Let's pretend this is the nest. It could be. They all looked pretty much the same - large and brown.

And this funky tree with the red roots.

The two disappointments of the walk were that Rebecca wasn’t there, and that we didn’t see any wildlife.

Both of these were remedied at lunch. Just as I sat down next to my lovely wife to dine on something from a can, Romulo spotted two yellow-handed titi monkeys snacking on some fruits in the nearby trees (don’t laugh at the name. Titis does not mean the same thing in Spanish as it does in English. There is a different Spanish word for “titties” that is not nearly as much fun to say).

Afternoon – Fishing for Piranha

After an afternoon siesta, which Jonah and I spent swimming in the river from the steps of the lodge and Rebecca and Maya spent prone on the bed, we piled into the canoe to head upstream for some piranha fishing.

Piranha fishing is done with wooden sticks, fishing line, a hook and chunks of raw, red meat. After you bait your hook and drop it into the river, you dip the tip of your fishing stick into the water and splash it around to imitate the sound of a struggling fish. The noise attracts the piranha close enough to smell the raw meat, and then it attacks. As soon as you feel a tug on the line, you jerk your fishing stick violently upwards to hook the fish.

In our case, however, the violent upwards yank on the stick by the surprised fisherman results in the hook flying out of the water, devoid of meat, and into the air above the boat. If one is lucky, the hook and line tangles in the overhead branches. If one is unlucky, the hook lodges in someone’s arm. If one is really unlucky, the arm belongs to the same someone.

Jonah was really looking forward to going fishing. And it was really cute to see him standing in the boat making a racket with his fishing stick. But alas, he’s not much for feeling tugs or for pulling the stick out of the water fast enough when he felt a tug. So he didn’t catch any fish.

Initially, Maya was timid about being in the boat after the caterpillar of pain dropped in on us the day before. But, when she saw how much fun it was to splash the fishing stick around in the water, she got excited to try. She proved expert at making a racket, but not so expert at hooking the fish.

A few people in our group of ten did catch fish, but none were big enough to keep. The following day, on our trip to the Grand Lagoon, Romulo hooked several big red piranhas and yellow piranhas (he threw the red ones back because he said they are not good to eat). He put a stick in the mouth of this yellow piranha and the piranha bit the thing right in half with one chomp.

We took the fish back to the lodge and the cook broiled them and served them for dinner. They were very tasty – not fishy-tasting at all.

Rebecca asked for the teeth for Maya and Jonah to bring to show-and-tell and so we could make them into a Christmas tree ornament – but we ended up forgetting them at the lodge.