My Gap Year

         This week has just gone so quickly……the time has just flown by!!The week started off with the usual 5:45am start on Monday, which is always a bit of a shock to the system but you slowly get used to it. Both Soph and I had to do some bird watching which isn´t too strenuous and is always very interesting, the birds in the rainforest are just so beautiful and their colours are just amazing!Then on the monday afternoon all the volunteers and a few of the staff went up the river to the home of a guy called Enrique. Enrique is actually originally from one of the Peruvian tribes from deep in the rainforest, but due to project abroad he has been funded and encouraged to move to the edge of the rainforest and provide a talk for tourist and volunteers about life in the tribe and how they survived, it was such an in teresting talk, though it was all in spanish we had a translation!

         Throughout the rest of the week we have just been doing the usual conservation tasks, got to do lots of work on the farm that project abroad works with called New Farm. We had to repair the fencing around the goats and donkeys, we had to pick the coffee beans - I was so suprised by how the coffee plants look before they are peeled, they kind of reminded me of oversized holly berries! Soph also had to plant some new chilli plants, they are a special kind of chilli which are extremely hot, wasn´t daring enough to try one, but another voluteer did and I think he definitely regreted it after he tasted it! I also got to do some donkey trainging this week which was really good fun, they have 4 donkeys at the farm at the momment, however one of them is pregnant and another one is just a baby, so we got to ride two of the donkeys around a special track set out for them, have to admit riding a donkey isn´t quite as comfortable as a horse, but it was still really good fun!

         On Wednesday this week all the volunteers got taken by Stuart and Nando who are the two in charge of Taricaya Lodge to a settlement down river from us for the morning. It was really interesting to visit the place, though there wasn´t actually alot to do and it was a really hot day so we wound up just sitting in the little shop there having drinks. Nando and Stuart were having to sort out some business, as the one major problem in the settlement is the rubbish as the locals don´t have any rubbish system so they literally just throw it onto the ground around them, and as a result the place is actually very dirty, so what Nando and Stuart have agreed to do is give the settlement one of our donkeys and a specially made cart which they can use to go around twice a week and collect up all the rubbish!!That afternoon we also didn´t have to do any conservation work, instead we got given a talk by Stuart about bats, it was a really interesting talk and made you realise how clever bats are!!

       At the end of the week there were quite a few sightings of packs of Peccaries, which are basically wild pigs, however unlike pigs they are one of the most dangerous animals in the jungle along with panthers and jaguars, and if you come across them then they have the ability to kill humans. So of course all of the sightings were quite dangerous, but no one got hurt and everyone lived to tell the tale! I came across a pack of the Peccaries when I was on a walk through the jungle with two other volunteers, it was so amazing to see them however when one started to run towards our direction it wasn´t so great, but it was all ok and we successfully managed to manouvre our way around the area that they were and get back to the lodge safely!!

       All in all it has again been a really good week in the jungle, and we can´t wait for next week!!! 

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.