Just in case someone offers to give you an exotic trip for the holidays, I'd 
recommend:
Birdwatching in Tambopata, Peru 
We went a year ago (1st week of November marks beginning of rainy season and 
end of touring season, so you'll have lots of time to plan).
Tambopata is located in a large biopreserve in southern Peru, in the 
rainforest foothills of the Andes.  It is EXTREMELY remote, and getting there 
involves a 6 hour motorized canoe ride upriver from the nearest town.  
Why go?
The research center at Tambopata is located at the world's largest known 
riverbank clay lick.  Hundreds of amazons, conures, and Macaws (5 species of 
Macaw) converge on the clay lick each morning, and you could be standing on 
the gravel spit across the river watching.
This is the place featured in the Discovery Channel piece with Kim Basinger.
The research center is funded via ecotourism.   You will have nature walks 
guided by graduate students doing research there.  The research center has 
been creating nesting cavities for macaws and pulling the second chick from 
nests (the second chick rarely survives in the wild) and hand raising them.  
While the staff are currently working on techniques to raise the chicks 
without having them imprint on humans, the chicks from the first two seasons 
are now mature, free-flying birds who come to the research center every 
morning for food, often bringing their wild-born mates.  The hand-raised 
birds are not pets, but they are unafraid of humans and will hang out at the 
research center.
The research center accomodates only small groups, about 25 people, max.  We 
got lucky--as the last trip of the season, there were only 6 of us, plus 3 
researchers from Germany who came on some of the walks, and Hans the famous 
Peruvian Nature Photographer, who also came on some but not all of the walks. 
 Activities were bird watching at the clay lick around 5:30 am-7, breakfast, 
morning forest walk (topics for walks could be mammals, birds, plants, water 
ecology, etc), lunch, afternoon forest walk, dinner, possible evening 
activity (the night walk was phenomenal).  There is usually plenty of "down" 
time to shower and recover, but the guides are graduate students, and if you 
are interested in a given topic, an activity could run overtime.
This trip requires you to be reasonably fit and ready for the fact that 
rainforest is hot, humid, and buggy.  While the research center is 
surprisingly clean, your walks into the rainforest will leave you sticky, 
you will be doused in insect repellant, and the showers (we hear they're 
using solar heaters this year) use river water.    
We're tremendously glad we decided to go.  I can't describe the thrill of 
watching pairs of blue and golds wing overhead, their colors shifting from 
blue to yellow on each up and downbeat of wing.   
Numerous tour operators will get you to the Tambopata Research Center.  
Rainforest Expeditions is affiliated with the Center, and will end up taking 
you from Puerto Maldonato to the research center, no matter who operates your 
tour. 
BEWARE:  Lots of other ecotours operate out of Puerto Maldonado, but don't 
get you nearly as far away from populations (Tambopata Inn is NOT the 
research center).  As part of the trip back, we spent a night in town.  The 
next morning, we ran into a group of elderly Canadians who had stayed at one 
of the closer places.  They said that they did not see enough birds.  We 
didn't have the heart to tell them . . .
 
--- MacWoof 1.5.3
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