Live From the River: Amusing Stories from Our Amazon Guides
Aqua Expeditions has an eight-year history river cruising Peru’s section the Amazon River escorting hundreds of guests on wildlife and birding excursions, swimming trips, kayaking excursions and visits to local Peruvian villages. Our experienced naturalist guides have had the pleasure of creating and sharing stories with the guests joining us for this completely unique travel experience in the remote Peruvian Amazon. Here are some of their more memorable ones…
From Amazon Guide George Dávila
“Tourism is great to see in the Amazon, but living in the moment and being a part of an authentic Amazonia experience is more important to me and that is what I aim to provide our guests. Once upon a time, we were returning from a night excursion with the guests and were keeping an eye out for caimans all the way back. Suddenly, I spotted red eyes above the water line and pointed this out to our guests. We were slowly moving closer and closer when, to my great surprise, the eyes flew up into the air, away from the water and up into a cecropia tree. One of the guests exclaimed “George, caimans can fly?!” Naturally, we all burst into laughter. It turned out it was actually a night hawk and not a caiman of course. Finally we did find a real caiman, but in my attempt to catch it, the big black caiman dragged me into the water! Nevertheless, (now drenched) I showed it to our guests with everyone clapping.”
From Amazon Guide Alex Enriquez
“We always have guests at Aqua that really want to catch (or at least see) a piranha. The bad reputation of piranha for being furious and attacking any animal in the water intrigues all visitors to the Amazon. One particular week we went along to Charo Lake to hunt for piranha and something curious happened… Suddenly a school of fish started jumping alongside us and one fish ended up hopping inside the boat! It was very funny to see the reaction of the guests who all started screaming thinking a piranha was attacking them. It was actually only a group of fresh water sardines and as soon as they realised they had panicked for nothing, we all started laughing. I guess these guests had just watched too many scary movies about the mighty Amazon Basin! I explained all about Piranhas, and the reason why they have very sharp teeth. It was very funny to see the whole group of guests screaming like that… as always, each of our Amazon cruises really IS unpredictable!”
From Amazon Guide Roger Tejada
“A few weeks ago we had a charter on one of our vessels, the Aqua Amazon, with a friendly family from the United States. During one of the afternoon excursions we were looking for wildlife along the Ucayali River, on one of the Amazon River’s tributaries called Sapote. One of the passengers saw a black caiman on the riverbank and pointed it out to me so I said let’s go closer to see it better. The skiff driver took us closer, finally we caught a good glimpse of it. Everyone thought the alligator was dead. It was muddy and wasn’t moving at all, and we all felt a little sombre. I decided to get out of the boat just to check whether it was actually alive and to everyone’s surprise, all of a sudden the three-foot long caiman started paddling away and charged into the river. We didn’t stop laughing until we had returned to the Aqua Amazon!”
