La Senda Verde: Miscellaneous Magic

We walked to La Senda Verde (which we had heard about from a guy called Zac in Samaipata) from Coroico, which took between an hour and a half and two hours, what with me stopping for the odd picture. When we got there we were shown around the pool area where most of the monkeys live by Rob, one of the volunteers, and the bird and other enclosures by Holly and Jessy.

We committed ourselves to two weeks of volunteering and came down 48 hours later. We were taken through the procedure with the birds – macaws, parrots and conures to name the most colourful – and it seemed very straightforward. Of note was a macaw called “Primavera”, who pulled out his own head feathers in some act of rebellion against conventional notions of beauty that he was not able fully to articulate. It was like punk all over again. All of the birds are fed fruit and vegetables for breakfast and dinner, with seed for lunch; dry pasta can be included in each of their meals. Most of them are free to fly anywhere but hang around for the food. Ducks, guinea fowl and a noble cock make a significant floor-dwelling feathered presence.

I spent most of the time after my first day with the monkeys (see previous blog entry) but Jun stayed with the birds and “miscellaneous” for her duration. The latter was everything which was not a monkey or a bird, so she fed the cats, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, turtles and tortoises and the bear as part of a team. (The coati – or snookum bears – were left to find their own food.) With the exception of the cats, each of these animals had a living space that needed cleaning daily too. In that way, Jun probably dealt with three to four times as many animals as I did, and all alone once Rob and Sarah, Holly and Jessy had left.

While the other volunteers were still there (they arrived a week before us so left a week earlier) we had a few quiz nights based on information from the QI Animal Ignorance book that I originally borrowed from a Brisbane library and then ordered on Amazon and asked Julie to bring out. Jessy was a big fan but it was Rob who shocked us all by guessing the animal correctly from only this information: “When George Shaw made the first written description of [this animal] in 1799...” Do you know the answer?

As well as caring for such a great variety of animals and playing silly guessing games on a few occasions, the La Senda Verde experience was bolstered by the opportunity to see a few of the local birds and butterflies in their natural settings. Vultures flew overhead but I had already captured them and the crested oropendola on my Nikon (though I only identified the latter in La Senda Verde`s owner`s animal encyclopedia). My holy grail was the very large blue butterly which was quite common to see but hard to photograph as it rarely seemed to settle within sight. I did capture an image on the last day but the animal itself was damaged and the pic not the best. A tiny blip that doesn`t register. Ah, good days.

La Senda Verde: Monkey Magic

If you are one of those nutters who takes the word of the vicious Old Testament literally, you will believe that in the Garden of Eden there was no death. Kentucky`s Creation Musuem shows vegetarian dinosaurs alongside Adam and Eve as a way of fitting real knowledge into a mythical setting but at La Senda Verde, I was reminded of this paradisical state as dogs, cats and birds waited together outside the food preparation room every morning to receive their breakfast.

The other likely visitors were the squirrel monkeys – Jimmy and Elvis - who would launch themselves out of a tree at you in their version of foraging. My main responsibility as a volunteer at the animal refuge was another species, the capuchin monkeys, which were at the other end of the land divided between two rivers (and now bordered on one side by a disastrous gold-mining project that the locals are organising against). At 8 every day I fed them porridge prepared by the owners (Vicki and Marcelo), had my own breakfast at 9, cleaned the capuchin tables and houses at 10, fed them a mostly-fruit lunch at 12 and then a mostly-vegetable dinner at 5. In addition, I usually fed the spectacled bear (Aruma) and cleaned his compound twice a day.

The animals are all rescued, normally from abuse, poaching or orphanship. The young capuchin were untethered and playful though one – Kimbo – tended towards the cry-baby side too. Then there were 8 adult capuchin; Naranja, Luna and Sereza were timid females who tended to avoid eye contact with me, Danny and Martin were males who I could interact with, while Mirka was a one-eyed female who took to me immediately. My favourite is a toss-up between Mirka and shoelace and button undoing Martin, though the best moment was when Luna groomed me. The other 2 adults were Ciruelo, the alpha-male, who escaped early in our stay but returned on more than one occasion and was eventually drugged and re-tethered. He went for me more than once without success yet was friendly enough when it came to feeding time. The other male was Pekos, the only caged monkey, who had escaped once and severed a previous volunteer`s tendon, apparently.

Feeding him consisted in a safety-first process something akin to the part in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter goes through a routine supervised by two (later cannibalised) policemen.

There were three other species of monkey. The 5 spider monkeys utilised the whole of the refuge, one rushing into our cabaña while I was still in bed one morning and sitting with me briefly before leaving again. That was Zambo, who is the largest male and somewhat excitable: he frightened young visitors a few times. He habitually sat in great poses though and he was my favourite of this group, though the younger ones were predictably cuter. There were two owl-monkeys which (as the name implies) were nocturnal and therefore we did not have much to do with them. Finally, there were two red howlers, one of which was a baby which arrived just before us and clung on to the other (older but not yet mature female) who tolerated it for a few days and then left, not to return while we were there.

The work was hard after the other volunteers left, though more of it fell on Jun, but there were great rewards in the relationship with the other primates. If you ever find yourself in Bolivia with time to volunteer for a worthy cause, La Senda Verde comes highly recommended by this apeman.

Bolivian Vultures 101

On our first day`s walk in Coroico, we saw tens of what I later found out were turkey vultures and black-headed vultures. Although in their scavenger role they share many traits, I learned that there is some debate as to how similar they (or any of the seven species of New World vultures) are to Old World vultures. The similarities may be more to do with convergent evolution than taxonomy but time will tell whether the birds we saw hopping ungracefully and soaring magestically are more closely related to other vultures or to storks.

Some things that are known are that as well as reguritating to feed their young, they also vomit as a defence mechanism. The half-digested carrion will sting if a potential predator gets close enough. Alternatively, getting rid of a heavy meal will provide the vulture with the lift it requires to make a speedy escape should the need arise. Another charming fact is that these vultures piss or shit on their own legs in order to cool themselves down.

Iguazu to Santa Cruz

The first of four twenty-hour-plus bus journeys within a fortnight was within Argentina – from Buenos Aires to Puerto Iguazu and the Iguazu Falls there. It rained the Thursday evening we arrived and the skies remained overcast but the additional water only added to the experience: the Devil´s Throat inspired awe. Additionally, we saw a greater variety of wildlife than we have since Australia. Like the Perito Moreno glacier at the other end of this enormous country, photos don´t really do the place justice.

En route to Puerto Iguazu I had realised that its location afforded us the perfect opportunity of a side trip into Brazil before resuming our journey to a mid-June rendezvous with Julie in Peru. So it was that the day after visiting the falls, we embarked on an overnight coach for Rio. Accommodation costs were a nasty shock, so it was a pleasant relief that we were offered a sofa-bed for our (consequently lengthened) stay by Andrea and Eduardo. They also lent us bicycles and we rode to all the Rio sights – though didn´t go up Sugar Loaf as it was being recabled – as well as a few less touristy ones.
Eduardo proved a knowledgeable font of information about the minutiae of our experiences and drove us to a Samba Circle on our first night and a football match on our third. My Brazilian stay was further enhanced by the trying of several cachaças (30 Luas, Seleta, Pitú and Sao Paolo) and a vegetarian version of muqueca (usually made with caçao – young shark – but completed with mandioca instead) by chef Edu. Finally, I added 11 beers (Skol, Brahma, Bohemia and Bohemia Escura, Bavaria and Bavaria non-alcohol, Itaipava, Backer Trigo, Devassa, Antarctica and my favourite Xingu) to the list of those tried.
On Sunday 17th Edu got us to Rodoviaria Novo Rio just in time for the bus back to Foz do Iguaçu (the Brazilian side of the falls), from where we crossed into Cuidad del Este, before getting straight onto another bus for the six hour trip to the capital. The Paraguayan money we swapped our Brazilian Reals for reflected the fact that this is the second poorest country in South America: many notes were held together by sticky tape.
Asuncion is like other urban places we have been to on the continent, wires and flags abound in the streets, and there are a number of attractive colonial buildings. Another similarity was that the country went through a military dictatorship which tortured and murdered many of its own citizens. One pleasant difference was that there was a Plaza for the Disappeared, very close to the Palacio de Gobierno. In Brazil, Edu told us, there is never any mention of the victims of the military dictatorship and history is even being rewritten by some to suggest that the time was not so bad. Paraguay is ahead of its neighbour on that one.
On the third day in Asuncion, we came across a demonstration in front of the parliament. Workers, surrounded by hundreds of policemen, were protesting the planned appropriation of their retirement fund by the government. It afforded a good opportunity to practise our listening skills and take a few photos which were slightly different to the majority I have taken so far. Later, we came across a policeman browsing pirate DVDs, an image I would love to have captured.
We went to Aregua on the same day, just to see something beyond the capital, and that trip helped confirm that we were now in the part of the continent where we would encounter more indigenous peoples. The fact is that in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, the native population is largely invisible and that it is only now that we begin to see the colours and textures of the pre-Columbian population. Our dusty journey from Asuncion to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, at the end of the week has only reinforced this perception.