cute and domesticated as all getout (not depicted— them fighting to blood 2 minutes later)
cute and domesticated as all getout (not depicted— them fighting to blood 2 minutes later)
Llanos tour slideshow part 2
Llanos tour (slideshow part 1)— TONS of driving, and on top of that lots of “safari” (driving while looking for animals), but hey, the boat safari and horseback ride were worth the 80 mosquito bites, terrible food, and forced comingling with random middle-class euros (crossing paths with the jaw-droppingly airheaded americans in the next cabin and their psychopathic massage-creep tourguide put THAT in perspective).
Tayrona Natl Park photo slideshow: spiders, geckos, disappointing pre-colombian ruins, crabs, naked MV…
the fern room (near the giant out-of-season orchidarium) in medell’in’s crazy high-rolling botanical garden was awesome!
waterfrontage
and good landscaping!
this is that green patch barely visible a few photos back. those tiny black specks are a red-beaked variety of mudhens, my spirit animals.
adobe wasps, chan chan
frigate-cloud. note the engorged red chinflaps! mating season is creepy.
near puerto pizarro they breed crocodiles to bring them back from the brink of extinction in a “zoo”. kind of underwhelming animals to watch…
puerto pizarro (tourist trap near tumbes): frigate bird in flight
tumbes sobstory: the rough guide mentioned a conversation agency that was the sole provider of tours to a mangrove reserve. the number provided didnt work; googling the agency name got me a number, but when we called that number we got a 21yr old guy who had no idea what we were talking about, claiming to be (presumably, actually being) the university-aged son of the proprietor. we scheduled a tour with junior, not senior, and got taken to a tourist hellhole that was about as natural as the jersey waterfront, where we were uncomfortably expected to pay an exhorbitant amount for everything, a price scoffed at by friendly locals with whom we ate street-ceviche out of a bucket with. being a tourist in this country fucking blows, even if you’re an internal tourist!
máncora: found this little mugu-buddy lying dead on the beach, just as a man walked by with two seahorses in a decapitated 2L plastic bottle. andrew is depicted in corpse-pose. said buddy was about the only cool thing that happened in that wierd yank-filled beachtown transplanted from southern orange county (10soles for ice cream!?!?!?). totally overrated!
young mangrove shoots
