Our Amazon Jungle Trek: Part 2

After fishing for piranha, making shelter out of palm leaves, having a run-in with a tarantula during Part 1 of our five-day Amazon trek and journey up the Urubu river (read that one first), our adventure through the jungle continues…

Day 3 – Make blow dart gun, learn to use blow dart gun, swim with piranhas

As we walked through the jungle our guide told us lots of stories from his tribe and the things his father taught him, one of which was hunting with blow dart guns. One thing lead to another, and as the shavings might tell, we proceeded to make a pair of blow dart guns using nothing but our machetes and materials from the forest. Full blog to come on how to make a blow dart gun.

So we arrive at camp on day one, catch a dozen piranhas. Day two we hear about the 12-meter long anaconda that was caught downriver, which had an entire wild boar in its belly. Day 3, well, it’s time to shower and there is no running water. Enough said.

Day 4 – Paddle leaky canoe, weather rainstorm, fresh grill amazing piranha

Having spent a night in the jungle (and survived), the next step to complete the daily-double was to travel up river by canoe, fish for our dinner, then create a campsite directly alongside the river and spend a night with the water wildlife serenading us (OK sometimes serenade meant scaring the be-Jesus out of us). As you can tell in the photo we ran into a bit of a storm (thankfully, rain is hard and fast in the jungle).

If someone asked me what are the bodies of water you would never want to drink from, then Ganges would probably be tops on the list, and the Amazon wouldn’t be too far behind. Between all the flesh eating critters and the extremely acidic water (see photo), it could use a little purification. Thankfully, we had a SteriPEN (disclosure: SteriPEN sent us this unit to test around the world as we travel) as we actually had less water than we thought for our two-day overnighter up river, so it was a total lifesaver. Here is a video of me making (and drinking) potable water straight out of the Amazon.

Cristavo was a machine at making things with his machete. This was the grill he created from sticks that magically never caught on fire while we grilled the day’s catch.

Piranha skeleton by candle –when you spend the day making weapons, trekking, canoeing for miles, and setting up palm shelters in the rain…yeah…you clean your dinner to the bone. Yummy.

Day 5 – Shed tear for last day on the amazon, and share one last amazing meal

Anne’s homemade backpack (see video here of our guide making by weaving two palm branches!) which we used to carry our hammocks for our overnights.

The family we stayed with never held back when serving meals. There were mountains of food at every sitting, from noodles to beef stew to various manioc dishes, to piranha stew. Here is our going-away meal.

This was our family for the five days on the Amazon, and the kids…so cute! Most kids are scared of the dark, these kids fear nothing and seem to find fun in everything.

If you have any questions or thoughts at all, please do leave them in the comments section below on this blog post, and we will answer each and everyone! We love to hear from you guys.