Around 3 hours by bus from Baños lies the little town of Misahualli (more easily remembered as Miss Hawaii), perched on the edge of the Amazonian rainforest. Although the town can't have more than a few hundred residents, it has a handful of tour companies more than willing to take you into the jungle, a few basic restaurants and a scruffy parque central complete with a gange of thieving monkeys.My crew and I chose to miss out on the 'indigenous museum craft workshop' type attractions and instead get as far into the primary forest as possible in one day - which is really not that far. A 3 hour 'canoe' ride (I'd call it a motor launch) takes you a fair distance up the Rio Napo, a tributuary of the Amazon itself. From there, we slowly trekked with our toothless guide, for 3 or 4 hours seeing a host of colourful insects, gigantic butterflies, noisy birds, shy monkeys, tropical edible fruits and some collosal trees. This was the real deal and I enjoyed it, although I still didn't have a real feeling I had actually spent time in the Amazon rainforest. Perhaps I needed a close encounter with a boa constrictor or puma to make it seem real.
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