I spent the morning catching up on the blog while Stu, Greg and Leslie went for a walk about. The temperatures here are very warm and the humidity is very high. While I was sitting in a very comfortable outdoor lounge the others were walking in the town checking locations for lunch in the humidity. They were all warm and moist when they returned. Tena is the location on our itinerary where mosquitoes could be carrying Yellow Fever. Greg and Leslie have had the vaccine, Stu and I looked at the risk of the vaccine and the risk of contracting Yellow Fever and decided not to get it at this time. We do have shirts that contain bug repellent and our repellent wipes. So we don the shirts. wipe the wipes and head of into the jungle walk that is just across the Rio Tena via the pedestrian bridge close to where we are staying.

The jungle walk has seen better days. We start on a boardwalk path the soon looses its boards so that it just raised concrete bases that you had to walk like a wide tight rope. The railings were mostly rotted out as well. We left the boardwalk to take a down to earth path that led us to the river.

We are seeing some amazing tropical plants. They are like the ones we find in plant stores at home only super sized.

We come across this amazing tree that I dubbed the Tree of Life as soon as I saw it. It is called a Cieba Tree. The branches start about 30 feet off the ground. There is an information board for this tree that is very difficult to read. We can make out that this is a male tree so it does not create seeds. It does have flowers that are pollinated at night be bats. Very interesting.

Here are a few other photos of Tena. It is trying to be a tourist destination and have done some pretty good work towards that end.

Stu and Greg go out for a walk about to scout dinner locations and pick up beer and snacks for happy hour. They return with cold beer which we enjoy while playing our second game of Hearts of this trip.

After the game we head out for dinner. We bring our rain jackets as we are hearing thunder out there. We make it to the restaurant before the skies open up.

We order our meals. The grill is right behind our table and we see A LOT OF CHICKEN on it. We say, that can’t all be for us! Wrong, it is all for us. Way way too much food. We do our best but vow to share from now on. The photo on the right is my chicken dinner. Must be 6 pieces of chicken, sliced tomatoes, avocado and 8 pieces of fried plantain. The other is Stu’s fish. He had more of a manageable portion. He gobbled up the fish that was up until 20 minutes ago swimming around in a tank in the restaurant.

By the time we were ready to roll ourselves home the rain had thankfully stopped.

My phone updated it’s system today and I found this new feature. 😉