Rain Forest    Click on the images below to see an enlargement

To prove we were in the rainforest, we had one day of steady rain (which quickly showed up on the Napo with a rise of at least 1 metre). The weather didn't help our excursion to the clay licks, as none of the parakeets considered the day good enough to go to the clay banks, even if we did (in forlorn hope).

We visited the house of a local elder with a long association with La Selva. A blow-pipe competition killed a melon with several accurate shots (er, blows?).

Fishing off the lodge wharf resulted in several piranhas and a catfish spending a little time in the rain, before returning to the lake's dark water. The weird meowing noise coming from the catfish suggested this was part of the reason for its name.

The large "woolly" tarantula greeted us coming up a bar stool. It was the size of a large spread hand, though no one wanted to provide a hand in the picture to offer some scale. It seemed rather like a child's toy or pet. The other tarantula, found on the trunk of a kapok tree, was clearly quite dangerous, with its large fangs.

Some 20 minutes away from the lodge is a wooden viewing platform built around a huge kapok tree. Some 41 metres high (156 challenging steps up), it provides a great viewing point over the top of the jungle canopy. In the late afternoon to twilight periods that we were there it was difficult to get good photographs of the many birds.

Rainforest weather!	Blow-pipe firing competition	Local elder's youngest	Piranha fishing	Red meat is the bait (they love blood)
They do have those teeth	A very noisy catfish	Tarantula in the bar	Boardwalk	Dangerous tarantula
Viewing platform
Sunset at the platform