After a great half day spent in Lima, we flew to the Upper Amazon region to board our ship, the Delfin II, and to begin the exploration of this marvelous location.
The ship is beautiful and comfortable, but the main highlight will be to explore the deep Varzea or flooded forest of the Pacaya and Samiria National Reserve.
And so our real adventure began today, by taking an early morning option to explore via skiffs the intricate ecosystem of the Marañon River. For the first morning, we chose to drive our skiff into a nearby tributary (known locally as caños), and it was here where we had our first wildlife encounters. As you can probably guess, birds are abundant in the Amazon, making it a great percentage of the wildlife to see every day. However, we were lucky enough to have the encounter of our first three-toed sloth perched high up on a tree already searching for its daily meal. It took a little while for us all to identify the sloth, as they are master of camouflaging.
Another great encounter was to find a baby squirrel monkey that, we guessed, was accidentally dropped by its mother while jumping from tree to tree. Unfortunately the baby was dropped in the river and was drowning and struggling to get to a dry area. It was our luck (and his) that we were there at the right place at the right time to save him. Once in the skiff, the baby became everyone’s favorite choice for a picture, but the real question for the staff was to figure out what to do with it. As you can imagine, we didn’t have the heart to leave that baby abandoned in the jungle but instead we made the executive decision to bring him back to the ship and to feed him and care for him for a couple of days until he fully recovered from his unfortunate accident. He will end up in a nearby rescue center for wildlife, and hopefully, he will be reintroduced to the wild where he belongs. It has been only a few hours and I, together with the rest of our guests, would love to adopt this little guy as his precious eyes tells you more about the Amazon, than a thousand words would!
