Life is a jungle

Hola,

We are back from the jungle. We had a great time. We got to see
pretty much all the wildlife that we were expecting to see. We even
got to see the elusive tapir. The tapir is the funniest looking
animal I've seen. It looks like a mix between an anteater, a hippo, a
wild pig, and a cow. The viewing blind was all set up with individual
mattresses for each of us, each with it's own mosquito netting. We
slept/watched for about 4 or 5 hours before the tapir came. We also
saw about 4 types of monkeys, 150 species of birds (our birding
friends were keeping count), and of course lots of bugs and spiders.
Oh, and otters too. We even got to check out a tail less scorpion
with no stinger. It didn't look like a scorpion at all. We each
about doubled the amount of mosquito/sand fly bites, even though we
stayed covered from wrist to ankle. My hands look like I've got a
case of chicken pox. Oh, and it was about 150% humid the entire time
with no electricity. We were so glad to get back to the freezing cold
Cusco today.

The funniest story from the jungle was probably when we found the
guard pig. Mark and I were going for a walk on our own. We didn't
know where the trails were yet, so we were wandering. Well, we
wandered over to the hut where the staff lived and there was a huge
pig blocking our path. We slowly approached, and the pig circled and
grunted and charged us. Then one of the staff came out and told us
how this pig played soccer with them. I think the pig got fed up with
us standing there because he finally ran over and crashed into my
legs, nearly knocking me over. We decided it was a good time to turn
around and head out.

We've got two days in Cusco before our 4 day Inca Trail hike starts.
We are checking out some more ruins, doing laundry, shopping, and
relaxing.

Until next time . . .