Off on adventures once again

This will be the last blog for a few weeks as we are off adventuring again.

For those of you who enjoyed the story about Lammie and Algie, I have written a second story about their adventures which you will find under the Norway button. For those of you who haven't read the first story, it is also under the Norway button.

This story came about when I found a small broken branch of a tree, with the bark still attached, but with a deep jade green coloured centre. Alongside this on the path was a large area of reindeer hair, as if an animal had been shorn where it lay. I decided to keep the same characters as the first story. The Tengmalm owl came into the story as when we were in the grass roofed hotel, I heard a strange owl calling and by referring to the book, decided it could only be a Tengmalm. We then learnt that there was a Tengmalm living in a nest box which the hotel owner took Paul to see. Willowherb flowers grew everywhere but it was interesting to find clumps of a very pale pink variety, which were woven into the story.

Our adventures this time take us into one of the Earth’s greatest wild places, deep into the Amazonian rainforests of Peru. We will be based on the Ayapua, a restored and remodelled riverboat from the Rubber Boom era, working with a team of skilled Peruvian biologists to collect information about the wildlife populations in the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, along the Samiria River, a major Amazon tributary. The research is helping to conserve the Amazon Basin's pink dolphins, giant river otters, monkeys, turtles, fishes, macaws and more.
From a motorized canoe, we will be undertaking tasks like conducting surveys of dolphins, fish, and river turtles. We will also count macaws and conduct land surveys of peccaries, tapirs, deer, monkeys, and game birds. Night time will see us searching for caimans with a spotlight. We will spend time meeting and talking to the local people about their fishing, hunting, and conservation efforts.

I’m not looking forward to the heat and humidity, I’ve experienced that before when I lived in Fiji and found it very difficult, but this promises to be the experience of a lifetime.

Watch this space . . . . . . See you when we get back!