Tuesday, 8/14

Plan--7:30am breakfast followed by 9:30 jungle walk w/Awan. Finished breakfast & decided to walk to local swimming area (close to resort). Absolutely no one was on this trail. We heard lots of animal sounds (birds, rustling leaves, insects) but never saw anything long enough to recognize it.
The weather is very similar to Houston (humid), possibly a degree or two cooler. We dressed for exercise; Frank in his short-sleeved running top and me in my tank top.
Our jungle hike w/Awan was to be about 3 hrs. We hiked to the 1st view (canopy area) and then the 2nd view (still higher). This hike was definitely taxing. The hike was quite steep and the footing was difficult. It is hard to imagine that anyone could do this hike. I would definitely put it in the “challenging” category. Even our guide paused mid-way up to catch his breath. On our descent, the footing was still a little treacherous. We made our way to the canopy walkway. It is touted as the longest canopy bridge walkway in the world (they also say that this rainforest is the oldest in the world—I can’t argue with that because I truly don’t know).
The canopy walkway is 6 suspended bridges connected together. It is 300 meters long and 40 meters off the ground. The views were fabulous but you couldn’t stop because you would then hold up the line waiting to get to the other side.
During our 3 hr hike, we saw a dusky leaf money, who tried to pee on us. We heard gibbons calling the entire time but never saw them. We saw several giant squirrels; these guys are huge! They’re a caramel color and bigger than your average cat. Their tails are long & fluffy (longer than their body). Awan picked up a piece of wood & started cutting. I had learned that we were about to smell something because he had already shown us the lemon grass tree (smells oh so good). He was carving sarsaparilla wood!!! It smells delicious. He carved it for me to take home and then gave me a recipe so I can use it medicinally. Hopefully that is allowed to come w/me through immigration. He carved it up so that there is no way a bug can still be there.
Those are the highlights of our trek. He left us at 12:30 and we were meeting him again at 2:30 to go to a popular local swimming hole.
We took a 20-minute boat ride to the swimming hole. This boat was similar to our ‘3 hour tour’ boat but was smaller.
On the way to the ‘hole’ we saw a python curled up in a tree. Definitely got a picture of that.
The swimming hole was great. The water was a little too cold for me so I just put my feet in. Frank had a blast. He found a current and continued to use it as a slide.
On the way back we saw a colorful kingfisher (large & very, very colorful) and a hornbill.

Later in the day we looked for an internet cafe & were prepared to download pictures and update the blog. Unfortunately the connection was too slow for us. After wasting almost an hour we learned that it wasn’t possible to do the blog and the pictures hadn’t downloaded. Oh well.

After dinner we attended the video at the interpretive center. It was a wonderful 25-min video that reviewed everything at the park. If it were a CD I could have purchased, I would have. It really captured the park experience.