My Favourite Animals I Came Across In The Amazon Rainforest

I think one of the things I would definitely do again is visit the rainforest because there are so many animals there that I hadn’t seen before and every day we saw new ones to add to our list. It was a very long journey deep into the Amazon to the Yasuni National Park. Plane, fast boat for 2.5 hours, then another half an hour in a canoe.

The canoe ride to our lodge was exciting, brushing past vegetation laden with creepy crawlies. The first big spider that we saw was a Rafting Spider and it was a very close encounter!

It was much easier to see animals by boat or insects at night because when we walked in the forest there were surprisingly few animals to be seen. This was because they were high up in the canopy where there was food and light.

One of the most exciting animals that we saw were the monkeys. In just three days we saw 6 of the 7 species of monkey found in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Howler Monkey, Squirrel Monkey, Night Monkey, Capuchin Monkey, Pygmy Marmoset and Red Kiki Monkey. We didn’t see the very shy Spider monkey sadly. The cutest monkey was the Pygmy Marmoset because it was the smallest monkey in the Amazon Rainforest and it could fit in your pocket.

We were treated to an overhead circus act show one evening from the boat.

We went on a night walk which was a little scary as this is when all the exciting (dangerous) animals come out to hunt! We saw (and heard) some pretty weird things. Listen to the night chorus!

We also went fishing for Pirañas. Our guide was really good at it as he caught two of them in the first few minutes. We didn’t have so much luck and we tried for half an hour. Our mum turned up and had a go and caught one within a couple of minutes which was really annoying. Our guide said we had just five minutes left before we went on our next wildlife exploration but luckily both Phoenix and I managed to catch one! They have really sharp teeth!!!

That evening we went out on the boat and heard bass singing through the echoes on the boat and we saw lots of sets of Black Caiman’s glowing yellow eyes looking at us, reflected in the torchlight. Only their head shows because the water was really murky. Thankfully we decided not to go swimming in the lake! You can just make out the eyes… they are near the centre by some branches …good luck with finding them!