Lost!

Today we ventured out in the canoe to explore the waters of the Amazon at night. The critters of the night can be found by casting a flashlight around and watching for the blood-red reflection in their eyes. It took several hours but our guide eventually found us several snakes, a frog, and even caught a caiman:


Unfortunately, when it was time to go back to the lodge our guide realized he had lost his bearings along the way and couldn't find the way back to the lodge. (The landscape is nothing but water and the canopy of trees so the lake we were on had no actual edge – you could row for hours in any random direction. Also, did I mention the generator was not working at the lodge so there were no lights on and we could be 20 feet from it and not know it.) It's a strange situation to find oneself in: out on the floodplains of the Amazon in pitch darkness except for the faint outline of the trees on the horizon and random flashes of lightning in the distance, the only residents of the canoe being two Canucks, two Swiss, two very embarrassed Brazilians who didn't know where the f*ck we were, and several dozen unnervingly large spiders. Having to spend the entire night out there waiting for daylight became a real possibility, and everyone was just thankful that it wasn't raining (though nobody voiced this at the time lest they be the one to jinx it). I was absolutely killing myself for leaving my iPhone back at the lodge; even though we were 200km from the nearest cell phone tower, the GPS and compass would have still worked! (NOTE TO SELF: Never go anywhere without your iPhone.) Thankfully, our guide eventually managed to find an area he recognized by flashlight and got us back to the lodge at almost 1AM after five hours on the boat.

At last count, our guide has apologized to us about this eight or nine times; he was pretty embarrassed about it.