Hanging around in Peru

One of the ways to help save the Amazon is to sleep in the trees, writes Hugh Thomson.

THE night before I fly to the rainforest, I stay at a hotel in Cuzco. Stretching the length of the dining room is a startling mural that shows a fantasy of an Amazonian paradise: bare-breasted maidens bathing in pools surrounded by compliant jungle animals.

I'm not quite sure what I expected from the Amazon. It has become such a romanticised ecological symbol that it's hard to see the trees for the wood. This is why I want to spend some time in it, on a small, malaria-free reserve near the Peruvian town of Puerto Maldonado, near the Bolivian border.

Specifically, I'm headed for Reserva Amazonica, owned by the hotel group Inkaterra, which has built a luxurious bedroom 27 metres high, 35 ground-level cabanas and a canopy bar.

When the lodge first told me I'd be sleeping up a tree, I had assumed it was merely Latin hyperbole; but no, here is the tree house, clinging to the slender trunk of a cepanchila. To get here, you must climb a wooden tower and a series of rope walkways.

As the first guest and guinea pig (not a comforting concept in Peru), I'm issued with a panic button so that, if necessary, a member of staff can rush in, strap me to their chest and abseil to the ground. In the end, I keep my finger off the button, although sleeping so high is certainly an intense experience.

The nearest analogy I can conjure is that of being in a small cabin at sea, with the wind and outside noise amplified, which is quite something the night a troupe of monkeys rattles the walkway and plays on the roof.

The dawn chorus is raucous and spectacular, from the horned screamer bird that some say sounds like a donkey drowning, to the "water-dropping-from-a-giant-tube" gloop-gloop-gloop noises of the oropendola. There are also tree frogs that sound exactly like digital cameras bleeping.