Welcome to the Jungle

DAY ONE
     Our boat ride to Amazon King Lodge started with Sergio our tour guide informing us about the Amazon River and the Indians that live there. We spent the next two hours traveling to the lodge marveling at the fact that we has made it to the amazon. 
     Once we got to the lodge, we had lunch, were sized for our rubber boots for trekking, and were showed to our room. The food was delicious; every meal was. Rice and a salad of beets, carrots, avocado, and cucumber were accompanied with Yucca for every meal which usually had a delicious protein. Needless to say we were stoked on the food. Our room was pretty sweet too. We had a private triple and they had folded our towels into little animals. Just the first bit of wonderful hospitality we received during our stay. We were roughing it a bit with no electricity, "everything traditional" as Sergio would say. 
     We then went around the grounds learning a bit about the different plants and trees. It seemed uninteresting but Chels and I quite enjoyed playing with the natural finger paints and such. Thus began our jungle creature ways. 
    After our tour we had a little down time before walking to the reserve with monkeys we could play with, which was awesome. We also got to hold a parrot, snapping turtle, and an anaconda. Little creepy but I did it ha.
     Then we walked further along the river bank to a lookout so that we could watch our first Amazonian sunset. The view was gorgeous buy we had to walk back fairly quickly since we had an hour to walk and had to beat the darkness.
     After dinner, Chels, the Germans and I opted to join the night trek into the primary jungle in search of tarantulas and wild anaconda. Lizzy was tired from a long day so she decided to stay in and sleep. The walk was pretty cool. The stars were phenomenal, we could see the milky way and I was in awe. We found a couple tarantulas which was actually kind of exciting, plus it was our first time in primary jungle and in the darkness Chels and I were super stoked and totally nerding out that we were there.
     On the walk back we talked Ortlieb and cars with the Germans and after our three hour trek Sergio told us we were good walkers. This proved to be quite helpful since we did a lot of that in the next few days. All in all, it was the perfect first day. We went to bed exhausted but ready for our 5am wake up call the next morning to see dolphins and birds.