Amazon: 22-26 May

After several plane trips and an hour and a half boat ride, I arrived at the Uakari Lodge, deep in the Amazon jungle. I was inside the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve, which together with the Amaná Reserve and Jau National Park make up the "rain forest corridor". The corridor, roughly the size of Switzerland (5m+ sq km), is the last redoubt of the jungle should the Brazilians prove unable to stop the slow march of deforestation.

The lodge floats on a tributary of the Rio Solomones in a quite u-bend of the river. The five houses (four small ones for sleeping, and the "club house" for eating, chilling, etc) are connected by walkways that shift and creak as the water slips silently underneath. The place appeals to my eco-conscience; we shower collected rainwater, consume electricity generated by solar panels, and eat food grown by local communities.

The Amazon is a gigantic sink that collects a huge proportion of the continents fresh water, funneling it into gigantic rivers. In April every year, the snows melt in the equatorial Andes and gush eastwards into the Solomones river. This mighty river, 2km wide at some points, simply can cope, and so Amazonia becomes a giant flood plain with large swathes of jungle submerged under 5m or more of water.

I arrived at the height of the flood season, just as the waters reached their highest mark and the jungle has been completely transformed. Each morning we rose at dawn for a canoe trip out into the flooded forests. Our guide paddled us expertly through the maze of dangling vines and around crisscrossing foliage. We slid silently through the water, cutting a neat track through the black water. I closed my eyes to listen more intently. Sounds evocative of the "rain forest" section of the zoo filled my ears. The haunting bark of the howler monkey providing the variation to the insects' melody; the tap-tap of the red-necked woodpeckers drowned out by the squawking of the hyacinth macaws; the languid flop of a fish next to the canoe putting an end to the mosquito's buzz. All around me was life. Insects ruled the air in incessant swarms. I picked some bark off a strangler fig tree and discovered a colony of fire ants. Spiders - big fury ones - darted for the far side of the tree trunk as we approached. Plants were everywhere in stunning shapes, colours, and sizes.

But easily the forest's biggest celebrity resident is the uakari monkey, a red-faced, white-furred, black wiry framed species endemic to the Mamiraua Reserve. In my mind I felt like one of those old colonial hunters (though I lacked a pith helmet) as we stalked the uakari monkey silently in our canoe. Twitching trees and the plopping of fruit as it fell from the forest canopy were our only hints as to where the uakari might be hiding.

Perhaps it was the vivid geography lessons at primary school, or maybe I should blame Sir David Attenborough and the Beeb, because I've always thought of the Amazon as a sort of mysterious and magical place. How can one river contain almost 20% of the world's fresh water? How did a rain forest become a huge lung sucking up all the nasty carbon dioxide? Why were there no roads here but just canoes? How was it possible that thousands of plants, insects, and animal species had yet to be discovered?

Well, seeing, hearing, and experiencing the Amazon made me believe. It brought out the wacky deep green ecologist in me. I felt like we should simply seal the forest, keep man out, and leave nature to itself. But of course it's too late for such sentimentalism. And like the Mamiraua Reserve is showing, it's only by involving local communities, providing money for training and equipment, and offering alternative incomes, can we hope to preserve the pockets of pristine forest for future generations. Of course that's ignoring the impact of climate change...