Results tagged “Canopy”

The rain forest was AMAZING!! We saw sooooo many different types of animals and bugs!!!! I would love to talk about it all, but I am going to focus this blog entry on our journey to the canopy tower at the Posada Amazonas lodge. After an early wake-up to go to the parrot clay lick (unfortunately we didn't see any parrots due to the weather) we decided to go to the canopy tower to view the rain forest in a new perspective.

We had a 15-20 minute walk down the muddy trails of the rain forest until we finally made it to the tower. It was a 120-foot metal tower. I looked up and couldn't even see the top (that's how tall it was). We went up single file on the narrow steps to the top. It was very neat to see the trees in different ways every step we took. Once arriving to the second to last step we got to crawl through a little trap door onto the platform on the top of this structure.

Hey! This is Laura Beth again! I just wanted to write about what we did the last few days of the expedition, since we didn't have Internet access where we are staying and couldn't blog every day.

On Saturday we flew out to a tiny airport at Puerto Maldonado, which is in the rain forest area. I wish all airports were like that! Everything there was so calm and there was no possible way to get lost. There was one thing I was not prepared for, however, once I stepped out of the plane: the humidity. The air was so thick that at first it was kind of hard to breathe! I soon got used to it though, and started to appreciate the beauty of the area.

We drove for about an hour in a bus down a muddy road, and then took a boat for an hour and a half down one of the Amazon river tributaries. Once we got to our new home for the next few days, a few of us were very surprised. I guess the lodge can kind of be described as sleeping on a porch in a bed covered in mosquito netting. We didn't have electricity or hot water, and there were no doors or locks to separate the rooms--just curtains! I don't know about anyone else, but I loved it! We could all hear monkeys and birds at night, and the rain falling, and the first night I found a three-inch-long grasshopper (well, at least it looked like a grasshopper) in my bed! Everything was beautiful, even the cockroaches! My mom and I took pictures of the roaches we found in our bags because they were the prettiest roaches we'd ever seen--with red and brown bodies.

Staying in the jungle for three days was like going to the best summer camp in the world. One side of our room was open to the trees, and it had a hammock in it! My favorite thing at the lodge in Puerto Maldonado, however, was the canopy tower. Standing 120 feet tall, it towered above the trees.

The whole Amazon forest has been the most amazing thing I have ever experienced in my life. One thing that really thrilled me though was the canopy tower. After a muddy hike through the jungle, we reached a rickety (well, it looked rickety) metal tower that seemed to stretch on forever and ever up into the sky.

Around and around we went up the winding metal stairs. Only after I was convinced the metal structure never ended, we were at the top. For a moment, I didn't dare breathe. Stretching out below me was an endless expanse of wonderful trees.