“But it’s a pink-toed tarantula – they’re the friendliest species,” he says. “Locals keep them as pets because they’re so friendly.”
The exposed nature of this remote eco-lodge might come as a shock, but that’s its appeal. At night, guests drift off to sleep to the sounds of the rainforest: screeching cicadas, the deep, low roar of howler monkeys and occasional crashes as primates lurch through the trees.
In the morning, I sit on my patio and watch the rainforest come alive, before checking to see which weird and wonderful insects have attached themselves to the mosquito net surrounding my bed.
‘It became a holistic experience’: millennials and the modern pilgrimage
Getting to the lodge was no mean feat. After flying into Puerto Maldonado, a town founded on rubber (logging, gold and Brazil nuts are now the main sources of income), it was an hour’s drive to a tiny dock – little more than a pier – from where I began a three-hour boat journey upriver.
The wildlife sightings began straight away. Paul pointed out a family of capybaras – guinea pig-like creatures that are the world’s largest rodents – lounging on the riverbank, and brightly coloured macaws screeching almost constantly across the sky.
By the time we arrived at the lodge, our sightings also included bright green kingfishers and the nest of an oropendola. This rust-brown bird builds teardrop-shaped nests suspended from tree branches.
The Tambopata Research Centre, one of three lodges belonging to Peruvian-owned Rainforest Expeditions, isn’t a lodge for tourists who simply want to tweet photos of their foray to the Peruvian Amazon before retreating to the nearest luxury hotel (not that there are any in this part of Peru).
This 24-bed lodge provides the only accommodation inside the Tambopata National Reserve, a wild 274,690-hectare (1,060 square mile) chunk of preserved land in southeast Peru, and started life as a research base for scientists studying the area’s flora and fauna.
Founded in 1989, the centre’s evolution into eco-tourism occurred a few years after it opened, the progression of a system that allowed relatives and partners to join the researchers based here for a small fee.
In a clearing set back from the Tambopata River (a tributary of the Amazon), the lodge has an open-air design and some of the bedrooms come with stand-alone bathtubs on outside decking. Raised boardwalks connect the bedrooms to the public areas.
In the morning and evening, the surrounding rainforest explodes with sound, as if every one of its species is competing to offer up the loudest reminder of its presence.
It’s easy to be unnerved by the cacophony and I am especially concerned by the sound of what I assume to be a chainsaw, until Paul points out that it’s a very vocal species of cicada.
But by day two, when I’m dive-bombed by a huge green insect that emits a catlike screech as it torpedoes into my arm during dinner, I’ve become accustomed to the sounds.
Other insects are stealthier. One day, a huge, bright green katydid – a species of grasshopper that looks exactly like a leaf – sidles along the arm of my chair. And I develop a soft spot for the semi-resident, rainbow-hued macaw that appears after dinner and gazes imploringly at leftovers.
Activities generally start early, at around 5am, and days are filled with guided hikes and jaguar-spotting meanders along the river.
We rise especially early one day to visit a clay lick. Like much of the world, this part of Peru was once underwater, and when the oceans retreated, vast quantities of salt remained.
Macaws and parrots, whose diet consists largely of unripe and poisonous fruit and nuts, flock to the riverbank to gorge on these reserves of sodium, which neutralises toxins.
For hours, we watch hundreds of macaws and parrots nibble at the clay, creating explosions of colour as they take off en masse only to settle elsewhere seconds later. At times, it appears as if the creatures know they are being watched.
Capybaras seem to wear a bird proudly on their head – one even crosses a river with his feathered friend clinging to his fur.
Storks pose with their wings spread wide – Paul tells us they are drying their feathers, but I prefer the posing theory – and beautiful roseate spoonbills stand stock still on an island in the river as we snap pictures from a safe distance.
Look but don’t touch is the mantra here. Paul constantly reminds us to avoid steadying ourselves by grabbing trunks or branches, many of which are covered with snaking lines of bullet ants – so-called because their sting is often compared to being shot.
On a hike near the riverbank, Paul points to mushrooms that cause week-long hallucinations if consumed, and a wild papaya tree, its trunk covered with tiny green spikes designed to prevent it from being eaten.
It is impossible not to be wowed by the ingenuity of the rainforest. Take the cashapona, or walking palm, with its leg-like additional trunks, which allow the tree to move (up to 20 metres a year) to more fertile patches of soil, or the ficus tree, revered by both humans and wild pigs because of its glossy leaves – eating them can calm upset stomachs.
Paul tells me that certain trees communicate through their roots. If one is being attacked by aggressors such as caterpillars, its trunk and roots will secrete a chemical SOS, and nearby trees will produce a toxin to ensure the caterpillars stay clear.
A highlight are the night walks, when we don head torches and make our way along the tangle of footpaths surrounding the lodge. The eyes of insects – and other creatures – reflect the beams from our torches, and in the pitch black, hundreds of pairs of all shapes and sizes light up.
Paul spots several huge spiders dangling at head height across the path, and at one point signals for us to stop, before using his laser pen to point out a sloth, clinging to the uppermost branches of a tree.
Later, he notices a hollowed-out patch of earth. Seconds after wiggling a twig across the entrance, an angry-looking tarantula scurries out, followed by 20 tiny babies.
He pulls out a black light to search for scorpions, which use their exoskeletons to detect UV light, turning them a bright blue. Moments later, I’m staring at a fearsome looking specimen.
In the evenings, the lodge hosts talks by the biologists stationed at the reserve, who provide insights not only into their work – one explains how some moths mimic the ultrasonic clicks (echolocation) produced by other, poisonous moths to defend themselves against predators such as bats – but also the ways in which visitors can assist.
Wired Amazon, the lodge’s citizen-science project, encourages visitors to contribute to crucial research.
A recent example is a project that focuses on the aforementioned moths – more specifically an attempt to discover and log new species (several have already been discovered here). Guests can join entomologists on moth-hunting night walks, or help analyse the species that are drawn to the lodge’s light trap.
Other projects have focused on jaguars and Brazil nuts, and guests are asked to log any discoveries with the same apps used by researchers.
On our final night, we gather in the lounge to watch a documentary about an expedition that took place in 1984, when scientists from the lodge headed upriver to study macaws in the remotest reaches of the Peruvian Amazon.
The Tambopata Research Centre was – and still is – the last permanent human encampment on the Tambopata River, so the team were heading into the unknown.
A flash flood capsized their tiny boat and a member of the team had to fashion a propeller from a tree trunk to replace the one damaged in the incident.
The next day, one of the scientists scaled a skyscraper-tall tree to observe a macaw’s nest, but the presence of a wasps’ nest meant he had to do so clad entirely in cumbersome protective gear. The humidity level was almost 100 per cent.
That night, a jaguar strolled into the scientists’ camp with a boldness that suggested it had never encountered human beings.
Suddenly, pink-toed tarantulas don’t seem that dangerous after all.
