In our last post, we told you the first two things about our ‘never-forget’ moments. If we’re really honest, I guess we cheated a bit because we snuck in a few runners-up because it was so hard to choose! For part 2 of this post, we’ll try to limit ourselves to 3 specific moments.
3. Fishing with bamboo canes!
By Brae:
In the Amazon, it’s not really surprising that people do a lot of fishing. During our stay there, we ate a lot of different kinds of fish, including pirarucu. Pirarucu is a the world’s largest freshwater fish and it can reach 9m long! It’s also carnivorous and eats other fish and birds. We didn’t try to catch a pirarucu but during our time in the Amazon we did go fishing three times.
One day when we were in Peru, we all went fishing on the canoe, but instead of rods we had bamboo canes and pieces of string. It was very relaxing but nobody caught a single fish. Perhaps you can tell from this picture, we weren’t exactly trying our hardest!
One of the things we were fishing for was piranha. I bet we wouldn’t have looked this relaxed if we’d actually caught a piranha!
Later the same day, we went out again but this time we were looking for baby caymans. We weren’t going to eat them…just catch them and then set them free again. We waited until it got completely dark and headed out in the canoes. The sounds on the water were so crazy. It was hard to know what was making the noises…insects, frogs, birds, monkeys or bats! Whatever made the sounds, they were completely magical.
Yet again, we didn’t actually end up catching anything, but after seeing a gigantic cayman in the lake earlier that day I wasn’t completely sure that catching babies was a good idea anyway. I didn’t want to make the parents angry! I definitely didn’t need to catch anything to make our night time fishing expedition worthwhile. I’ll never forget the sounds of the Amazon at night.
Even though the first 2 fishing trips were really good, we still hadn’t caught a fish so the next day all the kids wanted to try again. This time, we decided to fish from the dock just outside where we were staying and at last we had some success (apart from Oren). I’ll try to show you how the fishing trip worked out.
Oren 😞
Hector this long
Petra this loooong
Brae this loooooooooooong (not actual size)
I’m not sure if Oren would have chosen the fishing trip as one of his top five Amazon moments but for me it was pretty awesome! After our failure the day before out on the lake I wasn’t expecting much but suddenly my fishing rod jerked and even though I didn’t really know what I was doing I managed to keep hold of it and bring it to shore!
Number 4: Swampball
By Brae:
When we were in Puerto Nariño, me, Oren and Hector joined in a football game with the local kids. We saw them playing on a football pitch right on the banks of the Amazon river and we asked if we could join in. I called it swampball because it had rained earlier that day which caused the river to rise and the whole pitch had flooded. I don’t mean that it was a bit wet and muddy – I mean that in some places on the pitch you ended up ankle deep in water. And no matter where you went on the entire pitch, a load of Amazon river water came splashing up on you whenever you took a step! We were also playing in bare feet so as not to demolish our shoes.
We started to play (me and Hector on one team and Oren on the other) along with a load more kids. It was very hard to shoot because of how much water there was and you ended up just missing the ball and covering everyone near you in muddy water. The more we played though the easier it got because we were starting to get used to it.
We played for about 20 minutes and still nobody had scored so we stopped the game and started a penalty shoot out. By this time it was starting to get dark and the jungle was coming alive around us with the screaming of cicadas. We had the penalty shootout and after the first five (with me scoring mine) it was 3-3 so it went to sudden death. Both teams scored their first ones so it went on. Somebody on Oren’s team missed and then I scored my second one so we won which I was quite pleased about. We then went back to the place where we were staying to wash off all the mud.
Everyone who knows me knows I’m football crazy, but when I think back to that game it makes me love football even more. Both times we went to Colombia, football helped us to have new experiences, meet people and make friends. Joining in with the local kids in Puerto Narino, and getting to feel like we were really part of things, might not have happened without that game. The swampball was one of my favourite parts of our whole trip.
5. Swimming in the Amazon river!
By Brae:
Ever since I knew I was going to Amazonas I wanted to swim in the Amazon river but I knew it was really dangerous and I probably wouldn’t get to do it. Then, you might remember that I told you that we swam in a small tributary of the Amazon when we went to Alfonso’s Annaneko (that’s where we had to heave a wooden canoe up from the bottom of the river). After that I felt like I could ‘almost’ tell people that I swam in the Amazon, but not quite. Then, almost at the end of our trip, our guide told us that he was going to let us swim in the Amazon for real, and so when I found out I would be doing it I was really happy.
On the day when we finally got to swim in the Amazon river I was a little bit nervous because our guide said that the 9 metre caimans and 9 metre anacondas usually only hunt at night. The other thing he told us was that if the water was a tiny bit lower then he might have decided it was too dangerous for us to swim as all the deadly creatures would be crowded together in a smaller space competing for food. He said that because the water wasn’t as low as usual for this time of year, he didn’t need to drive the motor boat around us in circles at top speed to keep the caiman away from us! I guess that was meant to be reassuring but my Mum tells me that she wasn’t completely comforted by this!
Because of all this, as I stood on the side of our boat and looked down into the dark waters, I felt a bit nervous but of course I couldn’t let this opportunity disappear so I jumped! Once we were in the water we relaxed and it was actually really refreshing. We swam under the boat and came up the other side and that was really fun. And I just kept thinking to myself ‘I’m swimming in the Amazon river!!’.
So, that’s it – our top 5 never-forget moments. And that is the end of our blogs about our Amazon adventure, and the end of our blogs about our second family trip to Colombia! It already feels like a long time since we were there, and of course we are often talking about when we will go back.
It’s funny that the older we get, the more Brae and I realise how special these adventures have been. I think the first time we were in Colombia we didn’t really know how crazy and exciting it was. Now when I think back to all the things I did when I was 10 years old, and Brae was only 8, I can’t quite believe it. Thank you for reading our blog. We absolutely love coming back and re-reading our posts and all your comments. We hope that it’s not too long before we’re writing about our third trip to this amazing country that we love.
From Oren and Brae.
We walked along a little jetty and onto Peruvian soil. The people just said ‘hola’ but they didn’t ask to see our passports. You can just see the Peruvian flag at the top of the slope. I found it quite weird seeing so many countries so close together because the UK is an island so it’s not like that. One of the other surprising things was when I realised that we were in the southern hemisphere. We weren’t far south of the equator – only just – but it was my first time and I hadn’t realised that we’d be going there so it felt like a unique experience. One of so many unique experiences that I was lucky enough to be having! 
From the very first step, we were surprised about how much night time activity there was, but apparently 70% of animals in the rainforest are nocturnal. Our guide set out in the front and as we walked behind him, adrenaline was rushing through us, our hearts beating at what felt like 1000 beats per minute. 
Soon, he pointed out several stunning frogs and giant stick insects (like the ones our friend Harvey has as pets). It was a great start to our walk, but it was only going to get better. Later on, we saw lots of small spiders and one thing called the scorpion-spider. With a name like that you would never want to meet it in a dark jungle, but it turned out that it was harmless! Suddenly the guide stopped and pointed to a spider a lot bigger than my hand. It looked like something out of a horror film, and to make things worse it was poisonous! It was pretty scary watching my Mum lean in so close to take photos of deadly creatures. We steered clear of that one! 
Literally everything is dangerous here! The scariest part of the snake encounter was that the guide had walked past it. We all had torches and as Brae scanned the undergrowth, his torchlight fell on the snake, so he pointed it out to the guide. He told us that it was in attack position and advised us to walk right off the path in order to go round it. Basically, if Brae hadn’t spotted it I bet that one of us would have walked into the leaf it was sitting on (which was right by the path) and it would have bitten us! 
On the way back we split into two groups and our group spotted tarantulas -and not one, but five! They were lurking behind a rotting log, in the nooks and crannies. They were really impressive and I was thrilled to have seen them. I have seen so many pictures of tarantulas that it was insane seeing them for myself. 
So after all that, was dinner worth it? Well, I certainly enjoyed my half a piranha! All in all the night walk was an incredibly unique and wonderful experience and it was one of my Dad’s top 3 moments of our whole trip. 
During our Amazon trip, we had the opportunity to journey through the jungle canopy. Before deciding to take on this challenge, we had thought it over quite a bit, because my Dad is scared of heights, so it was definitely out of his comfort zone. To get this completely different perspective on the jungle, we first had to haul ourselves 38m up a rope to the top of a tree. 
We had harnesses and braces that held us in place and stopped us sliding back down when we were climbing, but it was incredibly hard work on your arms. We were absolutely exhausted when we reached the top so we were pleased to rest and admire the view from a platform before starting our journey from treetop to treetop, by zip wire! 
At first I wasn’t sure about sleeping in the hammock because I didn’t know if I was going to be able to get to sleep, but actually I had a wonderful night’s sleep. The hammocks were hung in the middle of the room and to get inside you had to undo the zip at the bottom and climb inside the net, and then get round into the hammock before reaching down to do up the zip at the bottom. 
It was a very nice place to stay as you could look out of the window and see the jungle below you! The balcony was home to a small colony of bats who slept in the roof. As I got in bed to go to sleep that night I said to my dad “I have Oren on my right and bats on my left!”. You may think that the bats were about 10 metres away but they were actually under a foot from my face. I could hear them squeaking to each other as I went to sleep. 
On our second day in the Amazon we went on a long walk through the jungle and stopped for a rest when we reached an indigenous house. We were going to have lunch there and we were about to walk in when we were told we had to go round the other side and enter through another door. It was explained to us that these indigenous people believe that the house is like a body and so you must enter through the mouth and then go out through the rear! 
To escape this cooking we quickly got into our swimming costumes and headed down to a small tributary of the Amazon river. Because it is so humid in the Amazon, going in the water felt like being brought back to life because of how refreshing it was. However, it was a bit worrying because even though caiman, anaconda and piranha usually don’t go in that area there was nothing to stop them doing so! After we had had a swim, the chief asked us to help move a canoe, and we were quite surprised when we found the boat about four foot under water! 
In the end, one person stood in shallow water so they could be really stable and then we joined hands to make a chain, with each person getting deeper and deeper and nearer the canoe, and then we all heaved, pulling against each other so that we didn’t fall over. We nearly gave up a few times but finally we succeeded in getting it near the surface and then we bailed all the water out. Then me, Oren and our friends Hector, Petra and Tom all got in the boat and went across the river to test it. It was extremely wobbly and kept letting water in the sides so in the end we all jumped out into the deep river. 
When we got back to the hut we had lunch and we were served catfish and piranha, not sloth. This tasted fantastic, and instead of a table cloth and plates we had a colossal banana leaf covering the table to eat our food off. 
I know that the coca leaf is used to make something that Colombia is very famous for but this is not the same. The indigenous people use coca to keep them alert and active, a bit like coffee. Coca leaves are also used across the country and in other countries like Peru to make tea to help with altitude sickness and for general health, and the indigenous people used it like this for a long time before the other way of using it was invented. 
One of the things the people told us was that their ultimate goal is to have no monkeys at the reserve! It seemed a bit confusing until they explained it. The monkeys that they take care of have either been injured or have been kept as pets by humans after being taken from their families in the jungle when they were babies. Also, if the police find a monkey being kept as a pet then they take it to the sanctuary to be looked after. It was really upsetting to think that only a few years ago they had 65 monkeys there because so many were kept as pets.😡 Now there are only 7, so it is so great to think that so many monkeys have been released back into the wild. 
While they are first in the sanctuary, they are still allowed human contact and one of the things I found most amazing is that the monkeys came and hugged you and used you as a climbing frame. As well as the woolly monkey, there was a noctural monkey, some squirrel monkeys and a capuchin monkey. It was an amazing experience for everyone, but especially for me to get so close to these magical creatures. One of the monkeys even went inside my t-shirt; then it wriggled around, trying to find an exit. I loved every second of it! I learned so much that afternoon, talking to the people who worked there, and I didn’t want to leave. I found out that they sometimes let volunteers work there for a few months so you can guess what I am planning now! 
It was such an incredible and hilarious moment. We waited a few more moments and then up popped two beautiful, little, grey river dolphins. We watched them for a few moments before the boat set off and the dolphins swam alongside. 
Suddenly, I saw a pink dolphin break the surface of the water about 20 meters to the left of the boat. It was then that I really noticed the difference between the two species. For example, the pink dolphin is much bigger but its dorsal fin is a lot shorter. They grey dolphin comes much higher out of the water than the pink ones, who just swim level with the surface for a while so we could see them clearly but the photos didn’t really come out. Also, the pink dolphin can move its head very flexibly so that means they can go in and out of tree roots to hunt fish that are hiding in there. 
The dolphins are hunted by jaguars, caiman and anacondas but luckily they are not hunted by humans. This is because the indigenous people believe that dolphins are mythical creatures that swim in the water during the day and at night they can turn into humans, come out of the water, party all night and then take beautiful women back into the water to live with them as dolphins! I’m not sure I believe in this myth but if it helps the dolphins to be protected from human hunters then I think it’s a good thing. 
At the edge of the water there was a platform with a sign telling you to wash your boots (people always wear wellies when walking in the jungle as it is very muddy and also the wellies protect you from the snakes). Below the sign for ‘boot wash’ there was another sign saying ‘beware caiman’! I didn’t really feel like washing my boots when I saw that and I definitely didn’t plan to go swimming. 
That afternoon, we were going for a swim when our guide shouted to us come and look at something. We ran over and there it was: gliding through the water with no effort at all. And it was coming towards us! We were led to a platform where we could watch safely and our guide explained that the caiman had been coming out in the day for a few weeks now (caiman usually hunt at night) and that they had been feeding it
. It showed signs that it had been injured in a fight and it had a bend at the top of its tail, but it still swam effortlessly. The caiman swam round towards the live fish that our guide was dangling from a rod just a few feet away from me. As we saw it cut through the water towards us I was filled with awe of how graceful it was, and how enormous! As it reached us, it lunged at the fish and seeing a 4 metre caiman leaping out of the water is an amazing sight. 
There are strict rules about how many people can enter the park each day and it’s really well organised. Each group is given a different route and a different start time. We did a 14km walk with 4 awesome swimming spots, lots of wildlife and the prettiest views you can imagine! We were chosen to do the longest walk in the park because before you go to Caño Cristales you have to fill in a form about how healthy you are, and then they will chose a walk appropriate for your group’s average health and fitness. We had to say that both me and Oren are very active 7 days a week and that brought our average fitness level up loads! 
For this reason, my Mum didn’t mind about her lipsyl and so we boarded our jeep to start a 40-minute journey to the start of our hike. After the first few minutes bumping over roads eroded by water, we noticed that the dog was running along behind. We tried to ask our driver to stop and give him a lift, but they said the dog did the run every day too and would be fine. And sure enough it ran after the jeep for the whole way! 
First we saw white flowers everywhere. It was another special plant that could survive the fires that happen there. You can see the burnt stems in the photo but it just starts growing again. At one point an insect landed on us and Jose was really amazed as it was something he had never seen before. It was like a cross between a bee and a butterfly. He took photos to show some university students who are studying the nature in the park. When you remember that this place was completely unexplored for a long time, we really thought that maybe we discovered a new species!!
We also saw some grasses that we thought Nonna and Jesse would like. 
To get to all the places that we wanted to go, we had to jump over rocks and wade through the water. We also passed giant waterfalls and holes in the rock that had been made by the water. Some of them were like perfectly round, super deep swimming pools, and we even climbed through a hole to see another waterfall. 
Over a wide area it was at least 3 metres deep so it got quite tiring because we were swimming there for about an hour, but luckily there were lots of stones to stand up on. 
It’s basically a lot of rice with vegetables, sea food and meat. In fact, food is always a big part of the time we spend together and the whole family makes sure we get to try the best Colombian food. On our way back from Diana’s mums house we had lunch at a ribs place that Diana’s other brother Ivan wanted us to try and he was right because it was the best ribs I’ve ever had!!! 
We took our bags to be weighed but it wasn’t only the bags that ended up on the scales. We had to be weighed too! I don’t know what they would have done if a really heavy person came! We had to wait quite a long time because our airplane was so small that it couldn’t fly in the rain and it was raining in La Macarena. When we finally got on the plane, it was teeny tiny; it only had about 15 seats! 
Part of the meal was meat from the cows on the farm and it was nice but it was so incredibly tough and chewy that it made my teeth hurt for the next few days! I still ate it though because I didn’t want to faint again, did I?😉 
The roots are all above the earth and as it grows new roots the whole tree can slowly, slowly move across the ground! Just then Jefferson looked up and we followed his eyes. My breath was taken away yet again as, yes it was, it was monkeys! They were just hanging around and jumping around the treetops. I was so astonished to see them just a few footsteps away from the cow’s field; it was amazing! Even though I have now been lucky enough to see monkeys in the wild quite a few times, I will still treasure this memory forever. 
We rode our horses up a hill and just took it all in before returning to the stables. On the way back, you could tell that the horses were eager, as it was hard to control them as they galloped along the home stretch. I say all of our horses were eager, but my Mum’s horse had ground to a halt early in the walk so our guide just tied her horse to his one! 
The same happened to my Dad’s horse later on and it was funny to watch them getting pulled along, while Brae and I galloped ahead! We charged rapidly through a lake, getting ourself soaked all up our legs. I could tell that my horse was happy to be at the stable again – maybe he wanted to get the heavy load off his back! 
It then flew over to us and started investigating our watches with its tiny beak, as if it was trying to steal them! One of the best things it did was a backflip off Brae’s watch! After it had got bored it discovered the fun of licking condensation off bottles and was amused by that through our whole lunch. When we returned from our horse riding it flew over to us and landed on my head. I was so happy and everyone took photos but then I felt something warm and slimy sliding down my back. I wasn’t happy then, as you can see by these photos. 
red, orange, yellow, green and purple. Our guide said that inside these pods were the cacao beans that made chocolate, and the colour of the pod depended on how ripe it was and the type of tree. She said that there were 2 types of tree: original and mixed. There were two types of original trees; one with yellow pods for when it was ripe and green when it wasn’t. The other original tree had orange and red for ripe pods and purple for unripe ones. The mixed trees included both types, so they had all five colours on the tree, but they were cultivated differently and made more pods. These trees looked like a rainbow and it was amazing to see that the pods grew straight out of the tree trunk. I really don’t think there is any other crop that looks anything like cacao, and we were already fascinated. 
Our guide chopped one of the pods off and cut it open with her machete. Inside we were extremely surprised to see white seeds instead of brown. She said that we couldn’t eat the seeds but we could eat the soft coating around the outside. We all took a bit and it was so sweet. It tasted like a tropical fruit that had been grown only to eat on its own, not to make chocolate. It was so delicious that we had to have more until we’d eaten nearly half the pod. Beneath the white coating there was a pale brown seed that looked a bit like an almond and that was the bit that was made into chocolate. When the seeds had been removed from the pod, they were put in a bag to ferment and then put out in the sun to dry. 
Finally, they were spread out on a platform to dry. The platform had a sliding roof over it so the people on the farm could shut the roof when it rained. It was really important that the seeds didn’t get wet at any point in the process. 
The next step was breaking off the skin around the bean and we were put to work doing that. You were allowed to try the inner part but it was very bitter. When all the skins had been thrown into the compost we put the remaining part of the seed into a mill or grinder where you had to turn a handle to make a kind of chocolate paste. This is when it turns from cacao to chocolate. Finally, you added sugar and they also added cinnamon which was a family secret, shhh 🤫 ! At this point, we were given some of the chocolate and we were told to make a shape out of it. I made an empanada, Brae made a smily face, Dad made a snowman and Mum made a seal. We were then allowed to eat them, which I was very happy about.
Just when we thought it couldn’t get any more interesting, our guide put some of the paste aside and mixed it with hot water to create a smooth paste which she put on our faces – a chocolate face mask! While we were letting the mask have its effect we had some delicious hot chocolate and got some homemade chocolate and orange brownie. I think you will realise by now that this was my kind of tour, and it was another day in Colombia that I will never forget!