A guide can really make or break an excursion or tour and I don’t think I’ve ever had a guide as interesting and crazy as Marcus. He made what could have been a fairly disappointing trip into the Amazon rainforest a really crazy and memorable time.

After a day and night based at the river lodge the second and third days and nights of our tour where spent exploring the deeper jungle and sleeping in hammocks in a ramshackle camp.

After building a kitchen and a cooking a pretty decent meal of incredibly salty BBQ’d chicken, rice and lots of cachaca we bedded down in our hammocks. We were woken throughout the night by our overly excited guide Marcus who kept finding interesting bugs to show us, the highlight being the tree frog.

The following day we where up early for a long trek through the rainforest guided by Marcus’s Machete that doubled up as a magical compass! It worked, I have no idea how he knew where were going as we cut new paths through virgin forest. Unfortunately the long trek didn’t result in much animal sites save a Tarantula, some very distant Gibbons and birds.

The vines made great swings. After our adventure in the thick jungle we stayed with Marcus’s one handed friend (he’d lost his arm dynamite fishing) on his floating house, enjoying a night in the local floating pub.

The next day we went canoeing through the mangroves in search of more wildlife, this time finding a unfortunate sloth who we had suspicions as to whether we found him or he actually was always there. Anyway Marcus presided to climb 30 ft up the tree to bring the sloth down to us for a better view, as we where watching Marcus with breaths held a sudden splash besides the canoe took us all by surprise.

The Sloth, in an attempt to escape had let go of its upside down position in the tree and plummeted in to the river. Marcus quickly brought him aboard the boat for us all to have a hold of the drenched but content looking animal.

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We then finished our trip with a slightly touristy visit to an Amazon tribal village, wandering around the village we realised that this small indigenous village was saddy surrounded by a modern brazilian town.