It was a dark and stormy night…
As scheduled, the skiffs were launched at 6.30am and headed up the Zapote River searching for primates and birds. We scored on both counts. There were squirrel monkeys and saddleback tamarins along with bright yellow oriole blackbirds, black-collared hawks, ringed kingfishers aplenty and a lone mealy parrot. A squadron of great egrets did an impressive flyby.
We also saw an inquisitive yellow-crowned brush-tailed rat, also known as a bar-tender rat. So it was appropriate that our next activity was Juanito’s bar-side lesson: How to make a Pisco sour. Even though Chile claims to have first concocted Peru’s national drink, it was apparently invented in the 1920s by an American expat homesick for a whisky sour. The lesson ended with hands-on practice by a few guests, who had to shake their drinks to the beat of Rudy’s Peruvian dance music.
After lunch, spirits undampened by the rain, we had an afternoon skiff ride and saw birds that most of us had never heard of, let alone seen this week, some with names as colourful as their feathers including the speckled chachalaca, the social flycatcher, the chestnut-bellied seedeater, the undulated tinamou, and the cream-coloured woodpecker, finishing with the panda-like white-headed marsh tyrant on the way back to the ship.
Tonight we looked back on the highlights of the expedition by sharing our favourite images on the big screen in the lounge before a lively barbecue dinner, with entertainment by “The Teenagers”, led by “Delfin II’s Santana” our talented guitar player, head waiter Pedro Ruiz.
Rain pelted the side of the ship as we turned in for the night, and all was as it should be on the Ucayali River in the Peruvian Amazon.
