The Missing Adventures Part 1: An Amazonian Adventure

The Amazon Basin is one of the richest, and most diverse, sources of biodiversity on the planet. it's lush green tributaries and head waters feed the one river system over the breadth of the continent and support life relatively untouched since the dawn of time.

Here is the domain of the anaconda, the jaguar and the cayman. More concerning, here is the domain of the mosquito, the centipede and the countless other insects that threaten at any moment to crawl inside your eardrum and drive you insane with the eternal buzzing, Khan style.

The air is perpetually humid and hangs, heavy amid the chirping, forever around you. There is little escape. With no electricity in the camp, save the 90 minutes of generator time a night to recharge essential batteries (cameras, iPads and phones), with which to power a fan.

But despite this, the camp is a luxury amid the mud and fetid air. Built on short stilts to protect the virgin ground, the main pagoda sets the scene - lofty ceilings and hand-woven thatched roofs, green insect screens and stained dark timber. The eternal law is "keep the door closed" and woe-betide the unfortunate who forgets this and lets in the dollar-coin sized mosquitoes. Boardwalks connect the pagoda to the individual villas - built of the same style - and the bar runs clear with the local cerveza. 

The Amazon basin itself - we are not on the Amazon, but one of its multitude of tributaries - is biodiversity incarnate, with the caveat that the vast majority of this biodiversity is invisible to the human eye as it wanders through the dank rainforest. The cayman, the capybara and the parrots are all clear for our inferior eyes, but the real diversity, the multitudal insect and microscopic life, are best left to the modern day Livingstones, pouring over microscopes in climate controlled laboratories.

Twice we ventured into the depths of the jungle, prevailing over mud, insect and, once, boar, to find, well not much really. 

Don't misunderstand me, the forest is immense and impressive. The ancient fig trees and their strangler-vine counterparts cannot but impress. In hindsight, I suppose the failings of the Amazon basin are owed to the hype that has been built upon them and the reality that, for us at least, fell short of the lofty expectations.