The following morning Gerson came at 5 to pick us up. After one hour drive we reached Nauta, the last civilization before entering the Amazon. Again we jumped into a canoe full with foodstuff, petrol and unidentified gears. After a while, there was only trees and water in the landscape. We took a seasonal shortcut and two hours later we reached a nice wooden two stories house that seemed to be floating on the side of a river. It was our shelter. A nice large room with thin white nets over the beds against mosquitoes, a rudimentary cold water shower and no light. That was it. Gerson introduced us our guide, Bala (The Bullet), a short native dark skin hunter in his forties that Gerson reconverted to jungle guide. We talked briefly about our program for the following days and the thrilling possibility of sleeping in the middle of the jungle. Of course less comfortable than staying on the house but so exciting. Elsa and I looked each other deep in the eyes and answered in unison. ‘Sure!! Shall we go now?’. He laught. Next morning when we got up the canoe was full with water, some bananas, oil, some colored blanquets and a gun. With no time to digest the breakfast we jumped into the canoe. In front of us, four hours navigation. Final destination: a place where we could find emerged land in order to hunt. Four long hours of water and trees. Two of them under violent showers dampening all our clothes. The river tend to narrow as we continue going further and further. We finally stopped in an old hunter’s shelter, too old to be reused. Two vertical poles with a temporary palm leaves roof completely destroyed that could not protect anything. We started to build two shelters from scratch. Once it was finished we went again to the canoe and we went upriver for an hour. Bala spotted a place suitable for fishing and so we did. He took a hook big enough to catch a whale, cut out some big pieces from a red piece of meat that looked like a nice sirloin piece. ‘Are you sure they will eat that kind of bait?’ He took the fishing line and threw it to the water. He gave Elsa the line and told her ‘wait’. Before finishing the second line, Elsa was screaming ‘oh putain!!!’ and started to pull out something that seemed to be big. And it actually was. A 6,2 pounds cat fish that tasted delicious some hours later. We continued fishing and catching some different fishes, among them a couple piranhas. The dark invaded the scene. We took our hooks out of the water and prepared to go down the river with the sole strength of the river current. We put on our frontal torches and we started to slip slowly over the calm waters. No one talked. The jungle seemed to deeply sleep, but it wasn’t. After a ten minutes where we could hear each other’s breath in that canoe our rays pointed two red lights on the shore. There were two red leds coming from a tree. Bala directed the canoe that way and after stopping under the tree where the lights came from, with a fast movement he took a little white boa by its tail and its head. We continued going down the river and suddenly he waived his arms in order not to make any noise. He stand on the canoe at the same time that he took his gun, he pointed in a fraction of a second and pulled the trigger. I never heard a sound like that. For a while I kept deaf. I saw Bala rushing to get the paddle and rowing to the shore. He jumped in the middle of the night into that deep and thick jungle. We stayed on the boat. After 10 minutes waiting a little blaze teared the black night. Bala appeared with a 20 pounds rodent on his right shoulder. He threw it inside the canoe. The tongue of the unlucky animal hanged laterally dripping some warm blood inside the canoe. Bala came inside the boat and we continued going down. Twelve minutes later we spotted a crocodile and he also captured it… We were astonished how skilled that guy was. We could never have survived that jungle on our own but with that guy we felt that jungle was a safe place. We finally reached the camp. Bala prepared the meal for us and we went to bed. We were so tired we could have slept anywhere. I had no time to hear the forest noises. However I’m sure the forest heard my noise though. The following morning we got up early and we had some fish and bananas for breakfast. Then we went for a walk with Bala to a place he used to go with his father when he was a kid. It was a place where Tapirs use to go to eat mud. A special mud that help them on their digestion. We walked for 30 minutes on the mud. Thanks god we had raining boots. One of the times the earth swallowed half of my leg… thanks god I had a branch that I could grab and by pulling, I released my leg. The excursion ended without any tapir but Bala took the time to explain medicinal plants and he showed us the one that heals malaria. A 2 meters diameter tree with red trunk and small leaves. He scraped the trunk surface and he squizzed the sawdust. There is a bitter red juice that came from it. We tried it. He avouched to heal his malaria when he was a boy with that juice. He was saying malaria could be heal with that juice. It is assumed that malaria is one of the most devastating illness around the world nowadays, killing more than 2 million people around the world, 75% are children.
With this in mind we scavenged the camp and we headed our wooden palace. The following days we did some interesting excursions near the hotel. We saw all kind of monkeys, giant water plants, an amazon leopard, and we swam in the water close to the famous pink dolphins. However, the memory of this incredible adventure into the heart of the jungle lasted for a long time in our heads.