Making new friends

With Joo Yeon feeling strong and super-adapted to travelling, we made a final trip up the Amazon before leaving Iquitos...

Honestly, I was the only one who really wanted to go, but in Korean culture, it´s normally understood that everything is done with the entire group, even if people dont want to (as opposed to US culture where we might split up, do our own thing, and then meet back up). So anyway, I drug three halfhearted but unwilling to split up Koreans up the river to a little village where a German woman was rumored to have started a butterfly farm.

When our boat arrived at the village, we had a short hike which should have only been 15 minutes, but I led us astray and so we got a more full jungle tour, which, along with the humidly scorching sun didn´t help the group morale so much. But eventually, we arrived and saw the butterflies...


Which were pretty neat I suppose. But much better were the animals we began to interact with, including a tapir, an anteater, sloths (well, they were in a cage), birds (are they parrots?)...

But by far the greatest part of the experience (and the one which changed everyone´s mentality about the trip...thankfully... I would have felt really guilty if they didn´t like the trip after I had pushed the Korean limits of group travelling) were the monkeys. They were swinging all around us, dropping in, grabbing our stuff, hanging off our body, riding on our head, biting anyone who screamed, and even holding our legs at the end to stop us from leaving!

And as we left the monkeys (who were sleeping after having played with us so much), we took a boat back, grabbed showers (monkeys stink... bad), and said our goodbyes to the Amazon...