My wife Ellen and I returned recently from a four night-five day trip to the Peruvian Amazon.
We flew from Lima to Iquitos where we were met by a guide from Aqua Expeditions. We then drove to board their 12-cabin, 24 passenger boat where we had wonderful food, air conditioning, hot showers, and stayed in a cabin with windows that allowed us to look out on the rain forest as the boat traversed the river for a total of 450 miles (round trip).
During the day we would venture out on small skiffs with one of three wonderful guides, sometimes walking in the rain forest for two or three hours, other times just exploring small tributaries and observing both wild life and human life along the way.
Most of our fellow travelers were ‘bird folks,’ and they were delighted with every flapping and every sighting. We mostly just enjoyed being in a very different environment and learning about a world we did not know.
Here are 16 of Ellen’s pictures:
And now the link to more of Ellen’s pictures (be sure to click on “Full Screen” in the top right hand corner of Shutterfly).
W. David Stephenson said:
Wow! How exotic!
Carrie said:
Wonderful pictures.
janet miller brown/SISTER! said:
The settings are exquisite but the photographer seems to capture the beauty!
awesome
Roger Nelson said:
The pictures were fanastic. The natural beauty of a place unseen to me was awsome. Thanks for sharring.
Eric said:
Lovely. Keep ’em coming.
Land Wayland said:
I just finished re-reading 1491 which is an excellent account of the enormous changes that have come to the field of pre-Columbian studies regarding the size of the population of the Americas in 1491. A major section deals with the millions of people who lived in the Amazon/Orinoco basin and the ways they dramatically altered their environment to create the most fertile soil in the world that allowed them to live and farm in thousands of villages lining, cheek-by-jowl, the entire length of both rivers. Early Spanish and Portuguese explorers reported seeing hundreds of thousands of people living in this area before European diseases killed 90% of them
The pictures are so very well done. Having lived in the American Southwest all of my life, I am amazed that vegetation could be so green and thick. I tend to think of plants as being solitary and emotionally pinched and fairly small and surrounded by dirt. I particularly enjoyed looking at the pictures that focused on individual items that are so big and deeply colored and alive.
Thank you Ellen and crew.
Land Wayland