The Amazon conjures up many images.  Jungles, water, copious mosquitoes, water, creatures best left to the imagination, water.  As I discovered, those images bear a striking resemblance to the reality of the Amazon.  My adventure was not in the rainy season, rather in the flooding season when villages normally in the jungle are now surrounded by water and boats are the only way in and out.  Still, walks in the jungle are possible but more time is spent on boats than on foot.  The advantage to the jungle walks is the proximity to those creatures.

Our local guide was determined to give us the jungle experience so would periodically disappear in search of something we had never seen before.  First, it was the very colorful, very small, very poisonous frog.  About the size of a thumbnail, the little critter was brought to us on a leaf for viewing.  It is a truly amazing color, unlike anything I had ever seen.

Moving on, our trip leader hoped that the guide would find a good snake for us, preferably an anaconda.  The guide disappears into the jungle then comes running back, soaked up to his armpits, shouting “snake!”  An anaconda is wrapped around his arm as he holds it just under its gaping jaws.  What luck!  Back into the jungle to, presumably, toss the snake back into the water.

“Maybe he will find a tarantula.”  Lo, the guide returns with, yes, a tarantula–big, brown and hairy.  This is beginning to sound like a jungle script.

Another colorful frog, but a different color, a bullet ant and our fauna tour of the jungle is over.

Did the guide really happen on these specimens we were hoping to see?   Or, does he have a mini creature circus hiding amongst the trees?  In the Amazon, we are all rubes and I loved every minute of it, real or “really.”