It was becoming a conditioned reflex. 6am alarm, crawl out of bed, contact lenses, clothes, camera, Diane, hat, sit in boat. Sometime later my brain would catch up and, with a jolt, I would be awake on a small boat in the headwaters of the Amazon. The early morning cacophony was often amazing. The sounds of birds and animals calling, invisibly, from deep in the forest. Occasionally, there were strange noises that I had no idea at all what sort of a creature it might have come from. The drone of the boat engine was an almost comfortably familiar background.
We were traveling up the Pacaya River deep inside the Pacaya Natural Reserve. There are several areas of reserves at the top of the Amazon basin. Their purpose is to protect the natural flora and fauna. Access is restricted, as is hunting and fishing. An education program has been established to help the locals understand why this is necessary. For generations they have hunted in this or that area. Now, at the behest of anonymous officials, they are no longer allowed. You can imagine, this is going to take a lot of explaining. Here we have a group of people that have lived in harmony with their environment for thousands of years. They have done nothing to cause the world’s great problems of climate change and pollution. Nonetheless, those who have caused the problem now require the locals to change their lifestyle. It is not quite this simple, but you get the idea. It is a problem repeated in many places worldwide.
Snapping out of my reverie, I spotted some terns on a sloping log. They were evenly spaced and mostly looking the same way. A very pleasing arrangement. It appealed to my sense of how things should be. There were also a few vultures and cormorants but they were just randomly hanging around looking untidy. Although nominally following the river, we cut across two large lakes. These were not obviously lakes because they were covered with a thick layer of vegetation. A great mass of leaves and flowers. The skiff slipped through this quite easily and we could follow various open water channels. On a lone tree I spotted an owl. It watched us, without comment, as we passed.
There were many egrets here. We had seen a few on previous days but the lakeside was obviously their place. Hundreds of them. Some flying but most perched in trees and bushes. Also, we saw turtles. Mostly yellow headed turtles. Young ones sunning themselves on logs by the side of the river. If we got too close they would quietly slip off their log and vanish into the water.
The linked lakes here gave rise to quite a different environment to the small channels. Much more open. We saw some brown monkeys that defied identification and a black one that was probably a Saki monkey.
Heading back to the ship, I managed to photograph a dolphin. It was a grey river dolphin. Not as exotic as a pink dolphin but a dolphin nonetheless. A fine addition to my large collection of pictures of ripples on the river where a dolphin has just dived.
After lunch we moved back downriver so as to take the skiffs up the Zapote River (I think). Here there were many types of birds. Egrets were still in abundance along with kingfishers, wood peckers, parrots and toucans. Diane and the rest of the boat tried their hand at fishing. I wanted nothing to do with it. Fortunately, she did not catch anything. Something, probably piranhas, nibbled all the meat off her hook. Twice. Sometimes it is best to keep your hands out of the water while fishing.
