Rainforest - Day 3

Tuesday 8th April

Yeah - sleep in this morning! After brekkie we headed out on a walk along one of the trails around the lodge to see a clay lick (where birds and animals come to eat the mineral rich clay) and to see a giant Capoc tree.



The track was quite muddy and even swampy in places - the lodge provides gumboots for everyone to wear - so we eventually got to the hide across from the clay lick and, yep - nothing was happening! Not a bird or animal in sight. So after we waited for a while to see if anything would show up, Rodolfo (our guide), just showed us the types of animals and birds that go there on a chart. Then is was off to find the giant Capoc tree. After walking for about 30mins and through yet more swamp, we got to a part of the track where the swamp was too deep, so we had to head back to the ldge - so all in all a pretty unseccessful morning (all we managed to see was some monkeys, a toucan, and some coati (which are a funny looking mammal that looks like a cross between a monkey and an anteater). One bit of good luck we had, was that we arrived back at the lodge just before a short, but really heavy downpour of rain - at least we didn´t get stuck out in that!


At the lodge we rested a bit more, before and after lunch. It has actually been really nice having a few relaxing days of enforced rest after the exertion of the Inca Trail, it means we have built up our energy reserves for the next leg of the trip.


at 1600, we headed across the river to visit a local farm/orchard - this was very different to anything we would call a farm/orchard in NZ. Bascially the Infierno community have one 10,000 hectare land title from the government, and they have put all the land on one side of the river aside as a reserve (where the lodge is located), and the land on the other side is for subsistence farming. The community get no aid from the govt whatsoever, and the money they get from Eco-tourism has allowed them to build schools, water storage and roads to transport their produce. Each family is allocated a block of land and they can grow whatever they want. THe most common crops are rice and maize, but the farm we visited grew bananas (several types including some pink ones), avocados, pineapples, oranges, mandarins, yucca, rice, papaya, mango etc. There appeared to be very little organisation in the block with jungle constantly encroaching from all sides and fruit trees just planted anywhere, there were no specific blocks or rows of each species of tree, they were just anywhere and everywhere. But it was very interesting to learn about how they live and how their community has developed.