We woke up around 6 this morning to head out on the motorized canoe at 6:30. First stop was a clay lick. Different animals have different places that they congregate and eat/lick the clay for the minerals that it contains. We were hoping to see some parrots and macaws, but unfortunately, the weather wasn’t that great, and there weren’t any there.

We continued down the river a little bit to do some more sightseeing and ended up following a pink dolphin for a while (though couldn’t get a picture, unfortunately)!

Next stop was an observation tower. Our necks had been hurting a little bit from all of the looking up at the trees, so it was nice to be on the animals’ level for a change. Most notably we saw a woodpecker and a yellow and blue macaw along with a lot of other birds.

We headed back in the canoe to the lodge. We ate breakfast then had some down time. We took the canoe out to a lagoon behind the lodge and paddled around, where we got a close up to some beautiful red, yellow, and blue macaws. We exited the lagoon onto the main river downstream of the lodge, then had to paddle back up.

Upon returning, we went for a walk through the woods with the native cook/keeper of the grounds. He showed us a root that was used for gastritis, as well as a palm fruit/seed that was used for burns. He also showed us some animal tracks.

We had some time after the walk to relax on the hammocks before (and after) we ate lunch. Next activity of the day was making chocolate! We had some beans that had been fermented and dried. We started out toasting them, then peeled off all of the outside shells. Next step was the grinder, followed by shaping them into bars. We did one with 100% chocolate, one with chocolate and milk only, and one with chocolate, milk, and sugar. We put them in the freezer to let them form into bars.

We went on an evening paddle downstream, where we saw another pink dolphin and enjoyed our last peaceful ride on the river.

After our paddle, we came back for dinner, and had some of our chocolate bars for dessert! After dinner, we packed up our things to get ready to go tomorrow morning.