After just a few hours of sleep we headed to the airport for a full day of travel. Everything went well to Denver and then Houston. In Houston, we boarded the biggest and oldest plane I have ever been on and started to taxi. We had to stop for about 20 minutes for a small problem, and then started to taxi again. We stopped again and they announced …

This morning we got up and enjoyed the hotel breakfast (which was great!) before heading back to the airport to check in for our flight to Cusco. The area where we had to wait was the waiting area for about 10 different flights, all heading to Cusco. It was crowded and confusing, but we eventually figured it out. As we were waiting, some Peruvian …

We woke up early today and used the shower that was located right in the bedroom literally next to the bed (very odd...), enjoyed another great buffet breakfast and then packed up to meet Cesar for our trip to Manu. We joined 9 others on the small bus and then stopped at the airport to pick up 2 more people on the way out of town. We started the …

We woke up at 4:40 AM today and met the group at 5:10 for a walk to spot wildlife. Most of the time we were spotting small birds in trees quite a ways away. I've mentioned how much Kepler and I love birds, so you can image how excited we were to be up this early for these types of sightings. We went to another area where you can usually spot …

We had breakfast before dawn today (my stomach was having trouble with that concept) and then set off for a long ride on the river to the Manu Wildlife Tent Camp. It was a little less than an hour to the Manu National Park checkpoint. There, we had to get out and sign in to the National Park as visitors.

From there is was another 5+ hours to get …

Today was the first day we didn't have to move to a new location- one full day and night in the same camp! We set out this morning by canoe for Cocha Otorongo, an oxbow lake near camp. We docked on the sandy shore and set off on a hike through the rainforest to the oxbow lake. Along the way, we saw some Brown Capuchin monkeys playing in the …

Ted really wanted to see jaguars, and was very upset that we had not. To give us the best chance of spotting them, we agreed to leave before dawn. We got up around 4 AM for breakfast (though I still felt too sick to eat), and were in the boat and heading back down the river by 5 AM. Sadly, we saw no jaguars.

We spent 7 hours on the river- 5 back …

Our alarm went off at 3:50 this morning and we put our bags outside our cabana and headed to breakfast. My stomach was still not back to normal, so I wasn’t able to eat much. We all headed down to the dock and piled into canoes where our luggage was waiting for us – there were about 30 of us leaving the lodge today. We made our way …

This morning we enjoyed a nice breakfast next to the fireplace at our hotel and then checked out and met Ayul in the lobby to head off to the Sacred Valley. He had already picked up Sandy and Rich and we joined them in the mini bus for our journey. On our way out of Cusco, we stopped at some nice viewpoints so we could get a great view over the …