Today we started our day exploring on foot a very interesting environment that we had only seen from the skiffs before—the flooded forest. Due to the very nature of the region and the incredibly abundant rainfall along the eastern slope of the Andes, every year the whole Amazon basin receives fresh water faster than it can drain it into the ocean and huge areas get flooded. Every day of the trip we cruised along it, but never landed. The hikes that we did before were in those areas of forest, slightly more elevated, which never get covered during the annual floods, and the vegetation and animal life is different there. So, in order to get a better understanding of this dynamic environment we visited it while the rising water level still allowed us to do it without the need of a boat. We learned about the marvelous adaptations that trees and shrubs have in order to survive having their roots submerged several months of every year. Animals too need to adapt to the challenging conditions and most of them became proficient swimmers. Even the slow-moving sloth is a good swimmer, just like the tapir, the jaguar, and the anaconda. It is a magical place where sometimes jaguars stalk their prey on exactly the same areas where later pink river dolphins chase fish!
Once back on board the Delfín II we enjoyed a couple of talks from our naturalist, including one about the incredible diversity of medicinal plants from the area. Most of them are still used on a daily basis by people living in small, isolated communities along the Ucayali and Marañon Rivers. It is well known that a great number of pharmaceutical products were discovered in plants from the rainforests of the world, and the Amazon is possibly the main provider. It is likely that hundreds, if not thousands, of new medicines and other products await being discovered.
In the afternoon we explored the Supay Lake area looking for more wildlife, finding once again abundant examples of the tremendous diversity of life that characterizes the Amazon, making for an excellent finale of a wonderful day.
