CUBA!!!

I know it's been more than two months since I got back from Cuba, but hey when I say I'll do something I will, so here is my posting for my trip. Photos tell the best story, and I just had too many to put up in here, so I've made an album and here's the link:

http://picasaweb.google.com.au/anitacole/Cuba

As you know I am very wordy and can write a lot, so my captions are sometimes quite long, but hey had to put it all in context. Anyway, sit back, have a cup of tea and here are my pics - Enjoy!

Brief update

well my nomadic ways are still continuing - everything I own is packed into my car and I am on my way down to Melbourne from Brisbane. I've decided to finally name my car "rustie" as in good ole' rust bucket - but it's treated me well thus far and hopefully will get me down there all good. I just hope it doesn't rain because when it does, it starts dripping and leaking on my foot and into the back seat - hmm...i really should get that fixed.

Anyway, am going to be in Melbourne until January, living it up in Brighton in my new place with Wai and two other guys who I am yet to meet, but I'm sure are all cool.

Coming soon: New zealand & Cuba, so keep on checking...

Lambs are cute...and tasty!

Arrived in Wellington on Friday night and was met in the airport by Uncle Ken and Aunty Laura, who took me back to the house we were staying, which they were using with a house exchange program. It's a pretty cool program where you exchange your homes with another family and you then get to use everything they have including the cars and even mobile phones. So we've always got this free place to crash at in Wellington and we can then use the cars to drive all around New Zealand.

Anyway, my first day there was pretty relaxed, but we then went out and met an old high school friend of AL's, Hui Pee, who has lived in Wellington for almost 20 yrs. Here's a picture of the three of them:

We did a tour of the parliament building and library, which was actually quite interesting - and free - ahh..the golden word. Hui Pee then let us know about the start of the tulip season at the botanical gardens, so we went to go check it out, which was really pretty.

We continued to walk around the gardens and up to the highest observatory point and looked out all over Wellington, which was really cool. It's a really beautiful city - based around this huge bay, with hills everywhere giving a lot of the houses hillside water views. Anyway we then went and had dinner at Hui Pee's house, which was really nice and they fed us this huge feast. So friendly.

Emily arrived the next morning and we went to go and pick her up. This is the first photo she took, which I thought was pretty funny - and so did she.

Translation for the british-speaking impaired: rubbish = trash ;)

Querida's Pie

This is a really top casserole pie we had in Kerikeri:






1 Chicken (cooked - flake flesh)
1 1/2 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup milk
3 tbsp flour
4 tbsp butter
1 tin creamed corn
1 onion
mushrooms
1 capsicum
Salt & pepper



Put chicken into deep oven proof dish with lid. Add corn, mushrooms, onion and capsocum. Melt butter in pot and add flour then liquid (stock and milk) gradually.
stir with spoon till thick. season



TOPPING
3 slices bread crumbed
1/2 tsp mixed herbs
2 rashers bacon
2 tbsp butter



Crumb bread, add herbs and melted butter and chopped bacon. sprinkle over chicken.



Bake 3.4 hr @ 350F (180C).

Goodbye Ecuador!

Today is my last day in Quito and my last day in Ecuador. Tomorrow I leave for Havana, Cuba for about 13 days. At first I thought I was just going to be travelling by myself, but now it´s happened that Geoff is actually going to be coming and this other guy I met several weeks ago, Andre. Really really cool - i´m totally psyched. It´s going to be so much better travelling with other people, especially people who can speak spanish a lot better than I am - although I have heard worrying things about the spanish they speak in Cuba, that it is almost impossible to understand because they just speak so fast and quite differently. Well should be an interesting trip.

So I´m going home now to pack up all my stuff and get ready for our whole day flight tomorrow - it was really hard to get flights out of Quito and direct to Cuba, so what we ended up getting were flights that take us to Lima then San Jose in Costa Rica and then over to Cuba. I think it´s something like we leave at 7am and arrive in Cuba at 11pm. I love making my contribution to global warming - Makes me feel part of something big =)

So not sure what the internet cafe situation is going to be like in Cuba, so we´ll see if I can post again but I´ll try!! Happy reading! =)

The Amazon

Over this last weekend, I travelled to the Amazon with my friends, Sarah and Geoff with a tour for four days to Cuyabeno (a particular Ecuadorian reserve that´s part of the Amazon). It was absolutely amazing and really fun. We travelled everywhere by motorised canoe - shown below: Sarah and Geoff are the ones behind me.

And the scenery and jungle was really amazing. Here are some pics to give you the gist of what it was like:


There were several families and houses living on the side of theriver and we´d often zoom past them and see the kids having their baths in the river, washing their clothes, fishing and just playing.

This is the entrance to our lodge, which was really nice. It was a very jungle-y, with these lodges with palm frond roofs and hammocks - very relaxing.


The main area of the Cuyabeno reserve is the laguna grande, which we went to check out on the first day. It was so random, but we were the only canoe of people out there in the middle of this humungous lake, and then we saw another boat and we could see that it was full of soldiers - armed soldiers and we had no idea what they were doing out there and we were just going to go past them, but they waved us down and they actually did a police check on us. So completely random! What was even funnier about the whole thing is that while we were taking photos of them, for some reason they had cameras as well and were taking photos of us! Not sure why - still not sure what they were doing out there - maybe holiday or they were actually out there to do police checks on people going around the lake. So weird.



Anyway, we went swimming in the lake, which had huge pockets of hot and cold water - not sure why they couldn´t just mix and be generally warm, but still it was quite nice. Surprisingly it was really shallow and I could stand without problem. Apparently we were safe swimming because there is no seaweed in the lake, thus no little fish, and thus no piranhas. So that was a relief and we did make it in and out of the lake without getting attacked or anything. The little boy on the right accompanied us everywhere on our trips - Jose Carlos - and he was such a cute little boy. Totally always happy and playing around. It was cool having him around.

Some nice scenery pics of the sunset on the lake:

The next day we ventured into the jungle for a several hour trek. I was happy when we got some machete action - seemed so intrepid =) And there were these massive trees everywhere with lethal spikes protruding out, which you had to be really careful to avoid.

Anyway during the trek, our guide, W ashington, offered us to try these lemon ants. Here´s a pic of what they looked like

And here´s a video of me eating them - mmm..yummy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWVx2seAJNU

It was seriously not that bad. It was like licking lemon sherbert off my hand. You couldn´t feel the texture of teh ants and they didn´t crawl around in my mouth or throat or anything.

Also during the tour we went piranha fishing, which was really fun. Here´s a video of how you catch yourself a piranha:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-pqHrJBp5w
Strangely enough you have to totally agitate the water to attract the piranhas because I think it simulates the noise of a dying animal or something. Strange things piranhas.

We had a good go at it for about an hour and despite being in a totally tiny canoe, with water constantly pouring in, we didn´t sink and Sarah, Geoff and I actually caught a piranha each. I actually technically caught 3 piranhas, but two of them were flung over the canoe as I tried to jerk them out of the water. One of Geoff´s fish, flew up out of the water when he tried to pull it up and it totally hit another girl in the back and bounced out of the canoe. Ooh..soo close. But we did all catch one though. Here´s mine:

There are three types of piranhas - red, white and black, and apparently the red ones aren´t good to eat because too many bones, so we had to chuck mine back, but Sarah and Geoff caught white ones, so we fried those up and had them for dinner on our last night.

Check out those teeth! It wasn´t the greatest tasting fish and was really bony, but overall not too bad.

Here are some pics of the whole group having dinner. The food there was really really good and for the first time since I´ve been here, almost every meal was vegetable rich - yum...veggies....

OK so the group starting from the front left is Sarah, Anna (Holland), Kristel (Holland), Tse-ring (Switzerland), Nicole (switzerland), me and geoff.

It was funny because after every meal almost there would be some leftover rice that we didn´t finish so it became geoff´s job to finish it off. Here he is obligingly doing his task =)

On our last night, due to lack of enough cervezas, we all went out in search of more from other lodges that we suspected were somewhere around us (but in reality totally not, which we realised during the daylight hours). It was quite a journey..haha...no lights nothing to guide us, no direction, water pouring into the canoe, sarah frantically bailing with a randon tupperware container we found, and geoff´s "steering" guiding us to and fro banging into each river bank - thank goodness Sarah had the sense to suggest going back to the pier before we lost it forever and were lost somewhere in the amazon. haha...totally funny.

We also went and visited a shaman. We were all totally prepared for something touristy and were joking around when the shaman wasn´t ready to see us when we first arrived that he was back there in a black metallica shirt and shorts watching the simpsons or something and had to put on all his gear for the gringos. Here´s geoff outside the house:

So while the shaman was getting ready, we explored the jungle behind his house. Our guide used achote (on left) to paint all our faces. It´s what all the indigenous use for that. And yes I am holding a rusty knife, but it just went so well with the jungle background.

So off we headed into the jungle and it was really interesting. Washington was very informative and would show us all these different plants for different illnesses and problems. He even at the ingeniously made us really good fans from palm fronds, which I would have died without out there in the incredibly humid jungle.

This flower is a hallucinogenic and the shaman uses it all the time to see his visions etc.

I took this photo for you Meni - I´ve got no idea how on earth they would have ever discovered that these leaves could prevent caries, but I guess it does.

So after our long hike, the shaman was ready for us. And here he is:

The whole thing was really quick - he just basically explained how he became a shaman, what he does etc and then to finish up with he sang a song and waved these leaves around Sarah to expel her bad air and then that was it. We tried asking him questions like Geoff asked him what he thought was the meaning of life and what he thought happens after we die. I think he believes in a heaven and a hell - my spanish still isn´t the best. But he didn´t answer the meaning of life thing. I asked him why he has that spike through his nose and he said the way he dresses is modelled on his king and his king is apparently a person he sees when he hallucinates and has visions.

Anyway, so the trip really was about trying to see animals and birds and so here are the animal and insect pics that I took - I have a lot of pictures of just greenness when I was trying to find a distant bird or monkey in amongst all the greenery, and so it´s difficult to sometimes pinpoint what exactly I´ve taken a photo of, but here are the pictures where it´s obvious what we saw.

Yes I know I said I´d show the obvious ones, but I thought this one was still interesting - those red dots you see are the cayman eyes we could see through the mangroves.

It was only a baby, but it was still cool to see a cayman up close and to actually hold it. Surprisingly it was quite soft - it was pretty cute. To actually get this litle guy, one of the guides just got out of the canoe, bare foot, headed into the mangroves, into the area where we could see all these red glowing eyes of the caymans - but he didn´t seem phased, and just like that he snatched this little baby and brought him back to us. Totally cool.

More pics of other caymans we saw.

Some frogs (ranas):

One of my few good clear monkey photos. It´s so hard to take photos of them as they´re jumping from tree to tree in amongst all this foliage, but although I might not have the photos as proof, we did see about 4 types of species and we heard howler monkeys, which sound totally freaky.

On our noctural tour, we saw several cool spiders. We actually saw a tarantula that was absolutely gigantic! And scorpion spiders, this spider with totally long legs, almost like antennas. The picture on the right, can you spot the leaf cutter ants? They were crawling all over that log, carrying huge leaves compared to their size.

That pic on the right is of a lobster grasshopper. That is the biggest grasshopper I have ever seen in my life - hard to get the perspective from the photo, but it was gigantic! And it really did look like a lobster with its really hard exoskeleton.

One of the coolest sightings we had were of the river dolphins. I had never even heard that such a thing existed - dolphins living in freshwater rivers, but we saw them and we actually managed to see both types - the pink and grey ones.

It was incredibly hard to take photos of them because they wouldn´t surface all that much above the water and so this is actually the best photo we took. Most of the others are just little ripples on the water surface. But still we did definitely see them.

A cool spider outside the shaman´s house:

There were soooo many buterflies all around the jungle and they would follow us when we were travelling in the canoe - almost like dogs follow you when you´re on a bike. They are surprisingly fast and could keep up with our motorised canoe for quite a while, just fluttering around us. Geoff and I had two land on our hands and clean our hands for about 30min! Longest time a buterfly has ever stayed on me before. Geoff and I had a competition to see who could keep their butterfly for the longest and I guess I have the sweetest hands, because mine stayed on for ages!

Unfortunately I couldn´t get a photo of it, but there were these absolutely massive blue butterflies all over the place - they were bigger than some birds and could fly quite fast. I totally loved them.

This was a tiny litle snake that we came across during one of our treks, and even though it was really small, it is deadly poisonous. It´s called "24" or "la gata" - not sure why, but that´s what it´s called. The guide quickly distracted it and cleared the path for us to continue on after that.

The chances of us seeing an anaconda were almost slim to none apparently and we did go on a bit of a search for them on our last morning, but couldn´t see anything, so we just left the reserve and made our way back to the nearest city (by canoe) where our bus would get us. And with about 20min left of our canoe ride to go before arriving, we actually managed to see an anaconda! Really cool. I sort of expected it to be this gigantic thing like you see in the movies or something, but I think this one was a young one and they do actually grow to be that big. But still cool to say we saw anaconda even though it was a baby.


So I don´t have photographic proof of all the animals, birds and insects that we saw, but here is what we did see:

kingfishers, owl, turtles, crocs, bats, squirrel monkeys, cappuccino monkeys, sacy (black monkey with big tail), butterflies, parrot, sangrias (?) - duck type bird, massive massive coackroach, iguana, not sure of the name but it was this huge prehistoric looking bird with this punk type crown on its head, little brown snake, anaconda, spiders, pink dolphins, grey dolphins, caymans, leaf cutter ants, lemon ants, red piranhas, white piranhas, sloth, king vulture, vulture, puma bird, fireflies, big blue bird (very technical names here), frogs, herrons.

Overall quite successful sightings I reckon.

This is a final group picture on the pier leading to the lodge. It was an absolutely perfect tour because we went on the right day and got the better guide, had the perfect weather (it started raining when we got in the bus to leave the jungle) and just generally the people we travelled with were really cool. I felt bad for the group who arrived the day after us and got the not as good guide, had bad weather on the last day and didn´t do or see nearly as much as we did. Ah well...that´s the luck of the draw.

And then of course the whole tour wouldn´t be complete without a flat tyre on the road back to the town. The road was soooo insane and I really really appreciate tarred roads now.