Fresh from my victorious performance of ‘Any Old Iron’ (see the experience ‘Amazonian Idol’!), we pushed the steel canoe into the Cononaco river and set off downstream and into the unknown. Our canoe was stocked with my tent, bottles of water, a machete and a few small items of food. The rest we would make for ourselves, and even before we had settled into the rhythm of the river, our guide was spinning for catfish.

Away from the hubbub of the village, the milky brown river was teeming with life. Caimans and turtles dozed in the shallows and otters bobbed up and down, checking our progress. In one exhilarating flash, a pod of pink dolphins leaped past us – a rare treat on any Amazon trip.

We found our pitch several hours downriver, on a muddy yellow bank opposite nesting scarlet macaws. Two little girls of eight and nine years old had come with us from the village, and before my ridge tent was up, they had made a sturdy palm-leaf shelter from scratch, and lit a fire.

While the girls concentrated on catching piranha and catfish, my guide Miguel took me to a still lagoon by traditional canoe, to spy a gigantic anaconda, lazily digesting a capybara in the sun. I was grateful for the makeshift field guide I’d put together for the trip, which confidently assured me she wouldn’t be hungry again for at least a couple of days!

After bushwhacking into the thick forest behind our camp to gather some lemon ants (lemon and pepper flavour – perfect for that catfish!), we settled into camp for the night. The fish, cooked on sticks over a fire and flavoured with the ants, was exquisite after a hot day on the river, and the girls entertained us, coating their hair with the yellow mud in imitation of my blonde, and telling wild untranslatable stories in Huaorani. I finally clambered exhausted into my hammock, and painstakingly tucked my mosquito net around me, with thoughts of tree snakes.

While Huaorani seem to never sleep, the forest fauna works in shifts. As the macaws and monkeys ease off their squawking at dusk, there’s a hush of only minutes before the night shift takes over, and the voices of the tree frogs and bats rise to a manic pitch. I lay awake all night listening to the forest, realising that it’s not a landscape; it’s a living organism, and hoping that the heat would break and there would be rain in the morning.

I got my wish and woke freezing cold, with clothes even damper than they’d been in the humidity the day before. I remembered a Far Side cartoon in which an explorer fails to check his boots, and peered into mine before hauling them on. Yikes! A pink-kneed tarantula glared indignantly out at me from the web he’d woven right through my wellington boot. Sheepishly, I waved an eight year old girl over to help…

Look out for more Ecuadorian experiences coming soon, including the Galapagos Islands.