The start of our Peru vacation began after an overnight flight to Lima. Unfortunately, we only had about a half day and one night to see the city. We checked into our hotel in the Miraflores neighborhood. Miraflores is right on the water and filled with lots of shopping, restaurants, and nightlife. Ceviche is THE cuisine of Peru, and particularly Lima, so we went right to the highly recommended cevicheria. Afer lunch we enjoyed a few pisco sours, and walked around the neighborhood. I wish we had more time to see the city, but we had to catch an early morning flight off to the amazon!
We started our amazon adventure flying into the small airport of Puerto Maldonado. From there we checked in with our lodge at their local office and took a one hour bus ride to the local dock. The drive went through some of the rural and very poor farming villages in Puerto Maldonado. From there we took a 2 hour boat ride down the tambopata river to our lodge. This is when we realized how off the grid we were traveling. For the next 3 days we were far removed from civilization, without power, and living in a room with no walls. It was definitely a shock, especially when that bat got in our mosquito net.. I've never screamed louder ah! Other than that hiccup we saw the local fruit farms, woke up at the crack of dawn to see the macaws (beautiful and colorful birds), ate termites, did a nocturnal night walk (so many spiders, and extra large tarantulas!), went piranha fishing, and saw huge cayman at night. I definitely didn't know what to expect of our trip to Inotawa but it was absolutely incredible. The stars at night were so clear and we were surrounded by hundreds of miles of rainforest. My absolute favorite part was during the night walk when we all took 10 minutes of silence to listen to the jungle. SO amazing!
Stay: Hilton (Lima) // Inotawa Lodge (Tambopata, Puerto Maldonado) Eat: Punto Azul Cevicheria (Lima)
ReplyDeleteI was here 5 months ago and today I was feeling kinda down, I needed something that would cheer me up so I just googled Puerto Maldonado Inotawa and voila! I came across your blog, it was interesting and sort of reliving the moment coz my husband and I took the exact same package and same itinerary as yours when we went to Peru especially Peurto Maldonado. We had Paul as our tour guide and I recall the nocturnal walk on our first night seeing different insects, frogs, spiders and then waking up to the Macau's followed by hiking around the lodge trying the various vegetation plantations, piranha fishing, caimans, taking a dip in the Amazon basin and last but not the least, silently sailing under the bright starry night in the Amazon of course! Thank you for sharing your pics and blog, I re-lived those precious days !!