Journey to Napo

Our journey to the Amazon started at heading to the airport at 6am. There we flew to a town/city called Coca where we met with the team from Napo Wildlife Centre. The first stop, which is their headquarters, we signed our wavers and got everything arranged. This is where the rain also started, and not just a little bit, it bucketed down. They have been waiting for this rain for weeks, and it finally arrived ... Yay.

It's where Alex and I feared that our luck with weather had run out. Of all the places we have been, this was not where we wanted it to rain. Muddy, wouldn't be able to take photos properly, animals would be hiding.

After waiting a while for the rain to slow, we got into a long motorised canoe and began the next part of our journey. Heading upstream along the river. With the sides down and unable to see much, I think most of the trip we were asleep, it was about 2 hours to get to our next stop.

Next we left the motorised boat for a short walk to get to the entrance of the National Park, there we got on a paddle canoe. But this stage the rain had eased significantly and it was a beautiful temperature. The water level at this time of year is very low, so there was a lot of scratching and scraping along the bottom of the boat from the exposed branches and logs.

A magical journey. Here we were being paddled down a river in the Amazon. Along the way we saw a lot of different types of birds, I'm not a bird person so I can't remember what they are all called. We even saw some squirrel monkeys in the trees. Then after another 2 and a half hours of paddling, we got to the mouth of the lake. There we gasped at the impressiveness of the wildlife centre, but our attention was quickly moved over to a large caiman that was infront of our boat to greet us.

After arriving we went up to get a briefing on the cabins and hotel facilities. But half way through we were interrupted by some big howler monkeys just outside the window. We were definitely in the wild now, and our fears about the weather were unjustified it only made it better. Welcome to the next 3 days.Read more