[jopperm2]

Here's how Mr. O'Rourke says one of these tours begins.

The ten loud women were assembled by theri tour guide and led loudly away. The guide for my tour, Julio, came to get us in a bus made of wood, like one of those arts-and-crafts-store toys that people without children without children give to kids.

"Where can we get a beer?" said Tom, an ex-rodeo rider. Tom turned out to be a Republican. His wife, Susan, may have been one, too. . . .
If so, we were the first eco-tourist group with a Republican majority since Teddy Roosevelt explored the Amazon in 1913.

On the accomodations:

ALthough this tour company is owned by an urban corporation, the people who run it and who build its facilities are either Indians orriberenos, the poor people who live along the river banks and are a mixture of Indian, Spaniard, rubber planter, river boatman, and whatever. It would be interesting to know what people who live in humble circumstances think of creating humble circumstances for people who live in luxury to come visit. But they were too polite to say.

Whatever the employees' opinion of their task, they accomplished it with grace. The lodge had ice for drinks, plenty of hammocks, fresh fruit, fried plantains, wonderful little Peruvian potatoes, and excellent (very large) catfish fillets. And, except for a biology professor from Lima and his assistant, we were the only guests. THere was twice as much staff as us. A perfect wilderness adventure, or it would have been except Julio inveigled us into a nature hike.

Sounds like saving the earth to me.. This is what he said about nature hiking and how horrible it is.

In my reading about the rain forest, however, I have found very little description of what it is like to actually be in a rain forest. There's a good reason for this, the same reason little girls' baby dolls don't actually smell like babies. Not that the rain forest smells. You'd think something so wer, hot, and biological would stink like boiled Times Square, but it doesn't. Jungle has a nice fresh scent, the reason being there's so much life in the jungle that anything which dies or is excreted or even gets drwsy is immediately a picnic for something else.

But what is it like to actually be in the rainforest is hot and sticky. When you get out of your hammock and go nature hiking, you're immediately covered in sweat. your underwear clings, your shirt clings, your pants cling, and things that EEK! aren't part of your clothing at all cling to you. You're also immediately covered in bugs. And the rain forest is, as its name would imply, rainy. Hence, WHOOPS! slippery. You're immediately covered in mud, too.

On the incredibly proactive conservationist activity of birdwatching:

I did like the flocks of parrots. They'd all sit together in a tree sayin, in unison, "I'M A PRETTY BOY!" No. But I don't see why, wiht patience, they couldn't be trained to do so. Even the beautiful things in nature can be made interesting if you put your mind to it.

It was strange to see parrots, toucans, macaws, and c0ckatoos flying around without perches, cages, or a jungle covered in newspapers. Actually, the toucans and macaws weren't that wild. They were hanging around the lodge, squawking and begging like New York homeless. A Macaw ate the shudder release off Shelly's camera, and one of the toucans stuck its huge beak into Michael's coffee cup, slurped the contents, and got jittery and irritable.

Sounds like they were conserving the wildlife to me.

He then discusses harassing estuarian dolphins in the river, and buying bootleg rum from riberenos.