After breakfast we disembarked to explore a riverside visitor site known as Amazon Natural Park. We started our exploration into the rainforest, encountering a few species of insects: colonies of leafcutter ants marching along the trail, as well as a few colonies of bullet ants.
The rainforest of the Amazon basin is home to more than 80,000 species of plants, some of them crucial for the development of microhabitats for insects and many species of birds. Today as we explored the forest we found a rubber tree; we learned about the harvesting of latex from these trees, and the big industry this became during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
After the hike, a local shaman named Carola came aboard to talk about her use of medicinal plants to treat common local illnesses. Carola is a shaman in charge of several communities, and our guests had the opportunity to ask her questions and learn about her work.
