A Sykes monkey and a small, tented village housing about 15 other hikers greeted us under the namesake big tree as rain settled in for the evening.
But it's not like, say, Seattle's rain, which settles in and hangs low in the sky.
When the rain settled on the dull, aquamarine Great Sound in Bermuda on Monday, Peter Burling, the skipper of Emirates Team New Zealand, beat his counterpart Nathan Outteridge, of Artemis Racing of Sweden, to their next mantle.
Bergamo, beautiful though it is, suffers from extremely bad air pollution: if there isn't any wind or rain for a few days, smog settles in the valley and develops to the point where the landscape is blighted by a disgustingly thick haze.
Planting requires the prepared seedling to be placed securely at proper angle in a pre-dug planting hole where the stem stands erect after planting and the soil settles in hole by gradual action of wind and rain.
Then, it just settles in.
With rain threatening I settled in the lounge with Maia, who made friends with the children of a local schoolteacher, while other passengers pulled out their guitars and harmonicas and began to play.
It has been a staple of the diet of the region's people since before recorded history: first the floodplain tribes who settled in the rain forest, now the people of mixed Indian and European ancestry who farm the area and live in widely spaced houses on the Amazon tributaries that thread the jungle like tiny capillaries.
And then, according to Isabel, soon after settling in, it rained for a full 12 months.
