To be perfectly
clear, yes I have both, I got the latter as a present from students who thought
I needed one to fulfill the whole Indiana Jones image when traveling - although
due to awkwardly trying to explain to an official why I had I whip on one field
trip (not helped by catcalls from certain grad students), I don't take it with
me traveling any more, despite it being a great prop.
So today, the
morning was a bit of a disaster, the guide didn't appear and there was a big
phone around to track him down. Eventually persuaded a local boat operator to
go out to where he was staying and pick him up at his house. Having a guide was
pretty important because today was a canoe trip through jungle, and a journey
to what the locals called "the bat cave" (so I spent the morning with
the campy 70s batman theme running in my head). I was a little nervous of
having anything to do with a canoe, as last time I went canoeing, it capsized
(twice) and as a result of all my belongings getting soaked, I lost a camera
and iPhone, as well as my sense of humor and dignity. But all went well. We
paddled down narrow rivers through mangrove forest and dark avenues if palm
trees and ferns. It was a little like the (sadly already cancelled - didn't I
say I was a curse to TV shows) show "The River", or maybe "Heart
of Darkness". The highlight had to be passing under a two-toed sloth,
narrowly avoiding being pooped on in slow motion. I love sloths by the way.
They are amongst my favorite non-aquatic mammals the three toed sloth is
slighted cuter than the 2-toed sloth in my opinion as they look like "the
mystics" from the movie the Dark Crystal).
Sloth
The bat cave was
really interesting - packed with several species of bats as well as lots of
amblypygids, or false whip scorpions, and spiders. Definitely not a place for
people who hate creepy crawlies. The cave was flooded in parts, forcing us to
wade through freezing cold water (more a thick solution of mud and bat poo in
some parts), sometimes up to our necks. In one part of the cave, it was so deep
that the guide suddenly disappeared underwater, waving his hand in the air. I
tried to get some photos with a new underwater camera a friend gave me for my
birthday, and I'll be interested to see if they come out (sadly due to a
technical hitch I couldn't use it when snorkeling yesterday). Outside of the
cave, by the way, were a bunch of tiny red tree frogs - quite frankly it would
have made my day to see those, let alone bats and sloths.
Whip scorpion
But adventure
was not finished for the day. I headed off scuba diving, with a diving company
called "La Buga" ( not pronounced La Bug-Ah Divers as I was
emphatically informed). The location was an area where plantation boats used to
moor in the early 1900s, and decades of anchors scraping the seabed had carved
the underwater landscape. My dive buddy was Carlos, an ex-computer engineer who
had made a fortune and then retired to run an Eco-B&B and be a dive bum for
as long as he could. He told me that his girlfriend was a zoologist from the UK
who worked on turtle conservation, and so we had a good old chat about dolphin
hugging and marine critters.
The dive was
better than I expected. There was quite a diversity of fish, and lots of
brightly colored soft corals. Sadly too deep to use my little underwater camera
though. Carlos was obsessed by stingrays and insisted on chasing them whenever
we saw them - had he not heard what happened to Steve Erwin? The most
depressing thing that we saw on the dive were a number of lion fish. Although
these fish look quite dramatic and pretty, in case you don't know, they are an
invasive species that comes from the Indo-Pacific and were released into the
Caribbean Sea by an aquarium. They are voracious predators and will eat
anything they can find, but nothing in the Caribbean eats them. As a result,
increasingly you can find coral reefs picked clean of fish except for a few
obese lion fish and a small number of survivors. They are like the terminators
of the fish world.
And talking of eating ... before I sign off, I'd just like to give a little praise for the delicatessen next to the hotel. This tiny little shop seriously gives Trader Joe's a run for it's money. My picnic brunch today was ciabatta and goat's cheese, and smoothie made with organic chocolate from locally grown cacao. The fact that I can munch on this while lazing in my hammock, chilling in a cool sea breeze ... well it doesn't get much better than this.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment