So we had a nice trip up the Amazon that day. How often does one eat breakfast in Brazil, lunch in Peru, and dinner in Colombia? When we arrived at the park that evening, we learned that you can’t poke around the park without a park guide (who wouldn’t want to start before dawn) and that we wouldn’t be allowed in with our recording equipment anyway without a research permit from Leticia (too late for that). But there’s plenty of forest just outside the park, so we’d work there.

However, even to get there you need to paddle nearly an hour (no motorboats allowed) through flooded forest in the park to get to the terra firme. So we’d have to make a real early start to get to terra firme by dawn.

And we did. At sunrise, though, it started to rain and kept it up for about 2 hours. We’d actually been extraordinarily lucky before that, with no rain at all. In fact, it turned out to be the driest April (normally the wettest month of the year) on record, in contrast to a horrendously wet March. But that rain killed our last morning—a shame because both the terra firme and igapo there looked real nice. Oh well.