Annelies en Dolf in de wereld: Getting ready for Cambodia

Huh, Cambodia? People who knew our trip planning will be a bit surprised. We have changed the plans and go to Cambodia instead of Vietnam. Instead of research in the rainforest we will be doing biological research under water and we will spend 4 months diving in Cambodia. For those of you who would like to know more of the project, have a look at www.marineconservationcambodia.org. In the end, we decided that this project would probably be more interesting.

We had a great time in Madidi national park and made indeed some nice pictures. Unfortunately, we didn’t bring the camera during our night walk, so we have no pictures of the different frogs we encountered. We saw a lot of birds, a howler monkey with young clung to her back and various insects, frogs and lizards. We visited a cliff one early morning with a beautiful view over the rainforest, and more important, a good view on the aras and loros who were nestling in holes in the cliff and sitting on tree branches. We have taken some incredibly good pictures and enjoyed every minute watching them with our binoculars. Sometimes they were getting so close that the binoculars were not even necessary. We had visited the same cliff in 2002, so we knew we would like to return here.

Last night we had a nice bbq with live music with the people of San Miguel, to celebrate that they won a football tournament between different indigenous villages the days before. Some of the guys played actually really well, considering the fact that the field wasn’t level and had quite some holes and the grass was only partially grass with little plants which makes it difficult for the ball to roll. Each time San Miguel scored, a fire cracker was lit. The tournament was in another village across the river from San Miguel, so even the people who were not watching could hear when San Miguel scored a goal. After the tournament the village looked liked the Heineken music hall after a concert, waste lying everywhere on the ground.
At the end of the bbq we saw some big lights coming down. It turned out that some people wanted to get their kayak out of the river, but their cars got stuck in the mud. It took a digger quite some time to get the 3 cars out of the mud, because the rope to which the car was attached broke several times. That was an interesting process to watch. Even the army came by to help.

Now it’s time to pack and finish the final things. We will spend a few days in La Paz, which will help to survive the temperature during our stopover in Holland, since the temperature drops down to 4 degrees during the night, while in Rurre we sleep most of the time with the ventilator on during the night.