No more chickens!

No, Dolf did not shoot al the chickens down with the catapult. Actually, the catapult broke again a few times and is now in a garbage bag. Another solution found its way to us in the form of sleeping  dogs in our garden who love to chase the chickens away. We were adopted by three dogs who live nearby (no, not the other way around) and at some point they decided that sleeping on our front porch was more interesting then sleeping on their own porch. We were accompanied by them in every visit we made and sometimes they ran after the motor as well when appointments were at the other side of the city.

We are now in La Paz, with sniffing noses and a headache because of the height. But we are lucky. Last week it was still -5 degrees at night, but now the sun shines during the day and the breeze is warm instead of cold. At night, we sleep under two blankets and Dolf was wearing two sweaters, a shirt and a long sleeve to keep warm in the evening. Tomorrow we fly to Mexico city to visit Auke and Joli.

Sorry, it has been a while since our last post. A few weeks almost nothing happened because of the school holidays and in the last weeks we have been so busy that we hardly had time to do anything else.

Almost 300 students have been on their field practical. Of course not without the usual problems, but we managed to execute the most important part of our project: getting students into the jungle where they learn something about ecology and get enthusiastic about the local plant and animal life.

Some groups were lucky and saw capibaras, a large stork or squirrel monkeys in the wild which are difficult to encounter when you're walking with a 10+ size group of chatting people, while others flowed through the beautiful mystic morning mists in a boat to the jungle.

One of the excursions was on the other side of the river and included a short boat trip and a sometimes tricky but exciting path through secondary and a little primary forest. The other excursions was to an animal refuge with an agro forestry area and a part of primary forest with some trees over 600 years old. The animal refuge had two marimonos (slingerapen in dutch), who will climb on people as well especially if you give them some food.

The students enjoyed themselves and most of the teachers as well. One path was a bit difficult and went up and down, and unfortunately one of the teachers slipped, but no further accidents happened. We have plenty of pictures, but we will upload them in Mexico when the internet connection is better.

We have some mixed feelings about the project this year. We had planned much more, but because the teachers were busy, a change of holiday (can you believe that in the Netherlands the government would decide two weeks before the holiday starts that the holiday already starts next week) and a lot of planned meetings where people did not show up we had to cancel some activities.

We did develop website with educational material for teachers. Instead of working with the teachers to develop the material we made it for the teachers. Have a look on www.leccionesamazonicas.org. Of course it is all in Spanish.

We were a bit sad to leave Rurre after almost 4 months. We have made some good friends including dogs, which we will sorely miss, but one of them will be in the Netherlands for a meeting at the end of August because he is in Germany now, following a summer course on the university.

We will be in Mexico for three weeks, first in Mexico City and the final week on Yucatan to dive in the cenotes, fresh water basins in the middle of the jungle who connect with each other through caves (no don't worry, we are not qualified cave divers and will therefore not swim through caves for a long time because you need additional exams and equipment before you're allowed to do that).

We will fly from Cancun to the Netherlands on August 23 and spend several weeks there before we fly onwards to the Philippines for our new job as science officer at Marine Conservation Philippines.