Okay, so this post starts off much as the one before it did, but the clouds and silhouettes of the trees, together with that big ball of fire just did it to me. Having been in the mountains for so long, I hadn't seen a decently spectacular sunrise/-set for ages. To put it in the words of a good friend who is much enamored with open spaces: "so viel Himmel!"
I'm not quite sure who was sleepier: me - having gotten up at 6am - or the birds. That's one very good reason why there will be no pictures of me taken at that ungodly hour.
Kingfisher and his pole. Didn't see him dive for fish, but he did tease us by letting us draw just close enough for a picture and then taking flight.
So we went out on the canoe again, this time just the two of us. The eagle is a regular on the lake and doesn't seem to scare easily. "If you don't move while the canoe sails right past him, he won't scare and take flight!" Well that was Rodolfo's take on things...
...but apparently I had moved and did so repeatedly: it's hard holding a 300mm lens steady for a few minutes at eye level without moving! But basically that's what most of my shots from the jungle are like: half-captured shapes, blurry and of slightly different colour than the surrounding vegetation.
Another case in point, Macaws: we repeatedly saw green/red as well as blue/yellow ones flying far off in the distance. That's the original size pic at 300mm and f/8 (450mm in reality, due to the small-size sensor on my Canon EOS 350D). Zooming in a lot, you can find patches of colour on the birds, but the details and sharpness fall apart, because I had to use ISO 1600 to avoid motion blur, thus making it very pixelly. Frustrating and of absolutely no interest save to photography nuts.
A typical view of most of the birds on the lake: flying away from us when we drew too close. All of the sudden, piercing the morning stillness, there'd be a mad rush of wings and reed being pushed aside and a shape would emerge from the totora.
The selfsame Mr Longneck seen in the pic above (I think), watching carefully.
When I say "piercing the stillness", in fact that's not quite correct: there was a constant background din of howler monkeys justifying their name that started up around first light and kept going for 10-15 minutes on end. It's just that you get used to it... I even went to sleep at night in spite of theor noise.
The first person who comments on the fact that it's pretty much all blurry in this picture has to invite me out to dinner (drinks included).
The laughing longlegged birds just before taking flight and laughing at us some more.
Ah the Serere or Hoatzin, an incredible clumsy bird and apparently a bit of a remnant of a bygone evolutionary era. A pure vegetarian, it carries with it an extra load of bacteria in its stomach to digest the tough cellulose, much as cows and other ruminants do. The precise biological details are lost on me, suffice it to say that due to all that crap it has to carry around, this bird can't really fly very far! 20 meters is about the maximum anyone has ever seen it do.
So as far as birds go, it ranks with the Ouilleouilleouille for sheer entertainment value ("Vous savez ce que c'est un Ouilleouilleouille? C'est un oiseau avec des toutes petites pates et des grosses couilles et quand il se pose il fait ouilleouilleouille")
Okay, so refinement has definitely gone out the window...
These little yellow and black birds build their nests hanging from branches, so that they look like oversized fruit. They keep up a constant chatter and flutter around them, but unfortunately I didn't really get a good pic of them.
Is it a heron? Do you think? Love the neck!
Okay, so I mucked around quite a lot with contrast and saturation in these, but they're nice because JUST FOR ONCE, there is little motion blur. And that would be due to the fact that the bird doesn't move its wings very fast, for which I will be eternally grateful!
Patos (Ducks, they called them), seeing us off as we travelled upriver toward Rurre again.
And that's pretty much the end of my jungle trip. Okay, so pics of cockroaches and rats could have been taken over the next 18 hours until my flight left for La Paz, but that's just not so pretty.
Overall, a great place which I can recommend on account of the people, the sheer exposure to nature, the flexibility of the schedule and the serenity. They even do longer trips into the jungle, so if you fancy spending 20 days on end at the beginning of the rainy season, they can help you out (not sure about how sane you'd have to be to do that).
Drop Madidi Travel a line or swing by their La Paz or Rurre offices for more info.
Thank you for your hospitality to all the staff at the lodge and their offices, especially to Rodolfo for putting up with my plodding progress across the jungle (stopping every 20m for pictures) and to Rosa Maria for her enthousiasm and interest in my pictures!
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