different names for the same thing

I am in Iquitos on the banks of the Amazon. I was going to come here on a riverboat, taking three to five days, slowly sailing up the squiggly Rio Ucayali till it turned into the Amazon. But I heard in Pucallpa that the river was so low it was taking nearly a week at the moment, and I´d already lost a couple of days in Lima, so today I caught another little local plane. Iquitos is a cool little city full of grand buildings with dark blue tiling, left over from the rubber boom.

After checking into the Hobo Hideout hostel I walked a couple of blocks down to the riverside. The sky was grey, broken by patches of rusty light, the air was shifting around expectantly as though it was about to storm. Thousands of birds were flocking around a bunch of communications masts in the Plaza de Armas. Then I came out on to a high promenade that looks out across a sweep of lush vegetation and wet fields to the broad silver curve of the river, and the forest beyond it. There was a thick steel-grey curtain of rain coming in from miles away, with distant thunder and lightning. And now the whole sky was swirling with birds, all kinds of birds from sparrows to big scruffy buzzards, some flicking through the air just above my head, some so far up they were just tiny flecks.

People were strolling on the promenade or making out or selling sweets. A children´s play was going on in a little amphitheatre. I stood and watched the rain coming closer for a while, then all the birds suddenly vanished and I knew from the smell of the air that I only had seconds before it rained. I ducked into this netcafe and moments later, outside the open door, bringing a smell of hot wet concrete, the sky fell.

( a thing for rainforests )

The jungle around Pucallpa was scrubby, just the fringes, not the really old-growth forest with the huge ancient trees. Here, though, or at least 100km or so out of town, it´s the real thing, and I´m going there. In a few days I´m heading down the river on a boat and then hiking into the forest, and if they still have space on that bit of the tour I get to climb high up into the canopy, where a science team have hung a walkway for people to stand and watch birds and animals you can´t see from the ground.

It´ll be a delicious irony if I get eaten by an anaconda or something while I´m out there. But I don´t expect nature to love me back. I´m just glad to be here.