I'm standing in a wooden dining hall with a lot of other people and I feel a pang of pain shoot through my foot. I scream in front of all the diners and look down to see a giant ant making a meal of me. Welcome to the jungle.

A few people have a good chuckle at my misfortune and turn back to their buffet feast.

Here at the Eco Lodge there's a table about four metres long at the front of the dining room, and it's full to the brim at breakfast, lunch and dinner with so much food and three types of very tropical (ie it was hard to determine the flavour) fruit juice.

My stomach still feels like a washing machine on the spin cycle so I've been eating soup and bread.

We arrived at the jungle on a sunny afternoon when the water was a sparkly grey colour and the boat was a basic wooden thing with a thudding motor.

The lodge is an enormous area in tall trees and everybody stays in cute cabins with a hammock room and neat single beds.

Ours is called 'picaflor' - Spanish for hummingbird.

The lodge grounds seem like utopia to me. Bushes of hibiscus plants add to the colours of the macaws which are screeching and saying "hola".

There's wild turkeys poking their heads out from under the verandas and in the middle of it all is a relaxing indoor pool.

And there is a routine at the lodge which ensures I wake up each morning with a chuckle. The guides don't seem to trust us to wake ourselves up so they come around and knock on each cabin and say "Picaflor, buenos dias, good morning" until we respond.

All around the camp we can hear people responding very badly to being woken up which was a hilarious way to wake up, even at 5.30 in the morning.

Next up: A very muddy first day in the jungle. Thank goodness they gave us gumboots.

Check out more photos from my trip in my Flickr album.

Find out about Peru.

Read more of Kelly's blogs.