November 26, 2010

After yesterday´s fishing bonanza I decided to sleep a little longer for once and get up with the others. We got up at around 7am. We have definitely established a different routine here than the “start at 11am” one we had in the US.

Today´s first activity was a visit to see a wolly monkey called Dorilla. The lodge works with rainforest conservation on a number of fronts. One of them is close cooperation with locals. They have managed to greatly reduce hunting of endangered species and are also actively working to reduce black market trading of animals. They cooperate with the police and sometimes when they arrest people who are in posession of illegal animals the animals are handed over to the people running the lodge. For primates they run a 3 month program where they keep them at the lodge and try to prepare them for the wild, then they set them out in the jungle.

Dorilla is one such animal which was saved from black market trading. Unlike many of the others she has stayed put in the area where she was set loose and can be visited. Whenever they drop by her they bring her bananas and other fruit. Easy food is always a winner with animals. Weninger told us she has found friends of the same species in the jungle and sometimes even bring them with her when she is visited. It has been 5 years now since she was released and she is healthy and doing really well.

On our way down to boat we were greeted by a pet animal kept at the lodge. It is a type of rodent they call a pacca. It is very cute and comes willingly to you so you can pet it and scratch its head. It seems to behave a lot like a cat towards humans, really; independent and seeking human company when it wants to.

It took us a boat ride of exactly one hour to reach Dorilla (photo time stamps are my friends).

On our way out, as always when we are in the boat here, we saw a number of large and/or cool birds. There are vultures in the sky

and vultures on the ground

And other cool birds:

Let me use the opportunity to show a cool bird we saw while in the canopy doing the zipline. This bird lives in the canopy and is therefore difficult to photograph, unless you are pulled up by a rope, of course.

Once we arrived Dorilla saw us coming and ran along the shore at great speed the last couple of hundred meters before our rendevous point.

She was in the boat the second we touched the shore.

She is a very friendly monkey, and her fur was really soft, softer than any plush animal I have touced. The kids fell in love immediately.

Dorilla wanted to stay with the boys, especially Adrian:

You can see that they are our relatives:

After 33 minutes with Dorilla it was time to head back.

On the way back we were visited by butterflies a number of times. In general there are many beautiful butterflies here, but they are difficult to catch with the camera since the darn´ little critters keep moving all the time. This time a couple of them decided to land. One of them on Viktor´s face,

the other on Adrian´s toe.

My wound from yesterday had managed the first 24 hours quite well. I bet there aren´t that many people who have used Norwegian bought Bacimycin anti-bacterial cream on a piranha bite. Having a closer look at it I realized I had been lucky to not lose part of my finger. Piranhas have an impressive force in their jaw. They are known to squash stainless steel treble hooks like they were boiled spaghetti.

After siesta and lunch we ventured out to look for an electric eel. After a 40 minute boat ride we had to hike for about 20 minutes. On the way we passed an enormous strangling fig tree. These trees start their lives high up in other trees. They develop inconspicuous slim branches who spread like tentacles before turning into the tree equivalen of Dracula. They find a host tree and start to encircle it. They follow the trunk to the ground and establish their own root system. In the end they consume the host tree and take over its place in the forest. It branches out and can take over many trees. Some have been known to grow big enough to cover the area of an entire baseball field. Whereas most trees only spend energy growing upwards, the strangling fig´s fascinating strategy makes it possible for it to also reach out in the horizontal dimension. Its many branches reaching both sideways and for the ground makes a single tree create an enchanted forest of its own. It was really cool walking for a long time under the many trunks and/or branches of the same tree.

The goal of our hike was one of the strangest lakes I have ever seen. The lake was formed about 4 years ago, from what I understood by the river biting itself in the tail as often happens in meanders. In those 4 years it had been completely covered in plants floating on the water. It´s difficult, without a trained eye, to see that this is a lake. Please do not walk on the grass. You risk falling in and drowning.

There are electric eel here and Weninger knows where they hide. Unfortunately he had forgotten to bring some meat to lure them out. Oh well, those things happen. He did manage to shake one of them up by splashing with a stick in the water. We saw something moving down at the bottom. We saw about as much of the eel as the first view you get of the garbage monster in the scene in Star Wars IV when they are stuck in the garbage onboard the death star. Here´s where we saw it. This small pond is actually quite deep and an underground canal going into the lake.

I really wanted to fish during the last hour before sunset, but we arrived back just too late for that. I did get to try for 20 minutes together with Adrian. We kept going until it was pitch dark. Result: Adrian 1 piranha, me 0.

After getting the kids to bed I wanted to do a blogging session but once again I was out of energy. I went to bed at 9pm and set the alarm clock at 5am. It is fascinating how early you get sleepy when there is no electric light around you. This is the environment we have been designed for.

Eirik

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