When I woke up this morning I was feeling much better, still not 100% but good enough. So I packed up my bags again and deposited them in the hotel storage before heading off to Max Adventure offices. On the way I bought some croissants from the French bakery for everyone. I had one with a cup of coffee when I got to the offices.

We were introduced to our guide Juan Carlos, and we had a new girl, Katrin from Germany, join the group in place of Madlene.

We walked down to the River Beni and got on a motorboat to go to Madidi national park, i.e. the jungle.

Once at the park we were welcomed by one of the park rangers who explained all about the park. There are 6 entrances to the park and only 26 rangers working across it. There are also 34 indigenous communities still living within the park. Only some of the park is open to tourists, much of it is unavailable and protected.

Whilst at the park entrance we met a coati who was very friendly and wanted to play with us, he was like a little puppy.

This is Katrin playing with him but we all had a turn.

We also saw a red macaw wandering around.

We hopped back on the boat and drove for around another hour to camp, which is another beautiful ecolodge.

We had some lunch before heading off on a short hike into the forest. It was amazing to just be wandering through the jungle listening to all the sounds – sometimes it sounded like it was raining but it was actually the monkeys moving around in the trees. We saw and heard some wild pigs too – they were really noisy grunting and clicking their teeth to warn each other we were there.

One of the birds we saw was a black tailed tragoon.

We also saw some playful brown capuchin monkeys.

We saw loads of spiders too, some of which were poisonous. There were also lots of poisonous caterpillars along the walkway to see the macaws.

At the macaw look out we were facing a wall with holes which are where the nests are. Using binoculars you could see the young macaws inside and then the parents would come and feed them. I tried to get photos but they were quite far away.

We saw loads of other animals and birds too including Amazon Squirrel, golden silk spider, huge mosquitos (the size of your fist), wood creeper, black-fronted nimba, bullet ants, squirrel monkeys and blue throat pippin chicken.

We also saw lots of different trees, one of the biggest ones we saw was an elephant leg tree. We also saw fig trees, some of which are being strangled by parasite trees. One of the interesting trees was a walking palm tree which can walk across the forest. Basically it regrows it’s roots and the old ones decompose so it moves along the forest floor.

We came back to the lodge and had some dinner before setting off again on a night walk. We saw a water spider, a tree frog, a smokey jungle frog, an illea frog ( or something that sounded like that). Right towards the end we saw an Amazonian tree boa.

After all the walking we were very hot and sweaty so we went to have a shower. As we got to the shower there was a small boa snake, around 2m long but very thin, on the outside of the shower wall. Alongside it was a banana spider which apparently is very poisonous, it certainly didn’t look very friendly!

The cabins are lovely and the beds are very comfy.