Paradise :)

So I haven´t been updating the blog as often as I would have liked but I havent been coming into Guarayos (the nearest city) very much. Time has been going by so fast here! Im still working with Leo and Vanesso and things are going great with them. More volunteers have come and I came into town tonight with three American girls I´ve become friends with, which is ironic because I havent met any other Americans while I´ve been travelling. (and one of them is from Ocean Beach!)

Im going to be really sad when I leave here. I know I´ll come back here someday. Im definately excited to come home (and sleep in a bed that´s not made of straw!) but I will also miss the park. I can understand now how some people come for 2 weeks and stay for months. Yesterday a baby Jaguar arrived from a home in Potosi. Im going to get to see it tomorrow!

I´ve also been reading a lot here, which is good because my backpack is getting lighter as I give away the books I´ve read! I just finished reading two really interesting historical books, Sarah´s Key and Trudy´s Promise. One of the French volunteers was telling my that Sarah´s Key is famous at home. It was about one of the thousands of jewish families that France deported to concentration camps during WW2 - something I didnt even hear about in school. Thanks Mom for choosing awesome books!

I dont have much time on the internet tonight cause everyone is waiting for me to go to dinner, but Ill be updating again before I go to Peru in a few weeks.

So many stories, such slow internet!

This week was definately the most eventful so far in my trip! Ill start at the beginning ... working with Leo and Vanesso has been amazing. Even when you´re sick, hot, dirty, and exhausted you still want to go out into the mosquito infested jungle to walk your cat!

Vanesso´s previous volunteer only had a few days to train me so we didn´t get a chance to walk all of his trails. In addition he has quite a few and they haven´t been maintained very well so there is a lot of patuju (big leaves) growing over. One day he decided to walk his long trail to the lagoon and I though no probelem. Well we walked and walked and he was perfectly content but I eventually realized that we must be on another cats trail because we had ben walking forever. The cats at the park ever interact for many reasons, one being that it can be dangerous (for the cats and the volunteers) and is very stressful for the cats to even smell another cat around their cage or trails. I figured this was no serious problem, I would just backtrack and find the original trail. How can you get lost in the jungle when you´re on a trail?

Easilly, especially when there are a lot of trails! The general procedure when you get lost is to wait until it gets dark and the volunteers come looking for you. But, there have been a few people who wandered out of the park because they went off trail (not sugessted) and acctaully slept in the jungle with thier cats! I think Vanesso finally realized we were lost- the cats are very perceptive to your emotions and decided to climb up a tree and wait it out. Luckilly I could hear the road and so I tied him to the tree and finally found my way back to camp via the road that runs through the park to get some help. We found Vanesso right were I left him and eventually got back to camp around 10pm. So I got to walk a cat in the jungle at night!

It´s currently the wet season and the dry season normally arrives in March. This year there hasnt been much rain but I think the past few days made up for it. It downpoured for three days straight this week and the soil in the rainforest does not absorb water quickly. Everything was flooded! Including the baños! Two of the boys have dug a new toilet now, but it accross the road which isn´t fun in the middle of the night. There is no drainage system at camp so we had to dig new canals so that the rain wouldnt flood all of the buildings. The trails were another story. Vanesso´s entire cage and the surrounding area was under at least a foot of water and in some parts it was waist deep! It was like walking through a lake! Leo gets really excited in the rain so walking him was fun that day. Im glad the rain has stopped thought because Im already tired of being wet all the time!

Im currently training a new volunteer, Rhys from New Zealand on Leoncio. The last guy I was training got eaten. (joking!) He is sick and didnt get on too well with Leo and Im not sure if he´s staying at the park much longer. Im heading to Santa Maria (the town near the park) for some dinner tonight with some other volunteers because one of our friends is leaving. I cant believe I´ve been here for 3 weeks already! I´ve decided that Im going to stay until at least the 15th of April because I cant imagine leaving any earlier. I know I´ll be back in SA again and have another chance to see Machu Picchu anyways. Until next week ... besos!

Leoncio y Vanesso

I´ve been at the park now for 2 weeks and Im having a great time! It´s hard work, but definately worth it. People are always arriving and leaving because some only volunteer for 2 weeks and others stay for a year. I was a little sad that some of my friends left last weekend but I´ve met lots of new people. Now I´m working with two cats, Leoncio (the puma) and Vanesso, an ocelot. There´s only about 25 people here now so most of the cats are on half days. Vanesso´s owners thought he was female so they named him Vanessa but when he arrived at the park they changed his name because they realized he was male!

Working with an ocelot has actually been more dificult than working with a puma because he´s really small and likes to go off trail into the bush which is really diofficult to walk through unless your a small cat! He also enjoys hunting reptiles ... and unfourtenately there are tons near his trails. The first day he found a lizard and I got to witness his usual routine ... he carried the animal to an open spot (keeping it alive) and then ¨plays¨ with it, which is basically tourture until a slow death! He loves it thought.

The challenge with Vanesso is that when walking him you have to also protect him. There are a lot of things in the jungle that can injure an ocelot like chanchos (wild pigs) for example. A wild ocelot knows what its predetors are and can easilly run up a tree to escape them but since Vanesso has always lived in captivity he could easilly try to chase something that would normally eat him. Today he got ahold of a snake and I tried unsucessfully for an hour and a half to get it away from him ... this was interesting. At first I tried to fling it away with a stick. No chance Vanesso was letting the snake escape. I was getting worried because every few minutes he would bat at it too hard and it would bite him. After another unsucessful attempt at tug of war (me and the snake vs. Vanesso) I decided the safest thing would be to just kill it then at least it wouldnt bite eaither of us. He finally got bored of the dead snake (after another 45 min of waiting and being eaten by mosquitos!) I checked with the vet when I got back to camp and now I know how to tell a venomous snake from a harmless one. It was an eventful day :)

New volenteers came, so I´m training one guy from Austrailia to work with Leoncio. Some of the cats require two people to walk for saftey but Leo was actually trained to walk by following someone who is walking ahead of him on the trail. He is very well behaved and the worst he´s done so far is nap for an hour on the trail when he gets lazy or it´s too hot out. I took a video of him but the internet is so slow it´s taking forever to upload a few pictures. There is a small village about 15minutes away from the park that we go to sometimes during the week. The park owns a house there that they use to house extra volunteers during the dry season when there are more people here. Tonight we´re going to have a bbq there because we dont eat dinner at the park on Saturdays since its only a half day and a lot of people leave for the afternoon. It should be fun and it was great to eat some ice cream in town today because its really hot and theres no electricity at the park which means no cold drinking water!