The artifice of an Oil Operation in the Jungle

Yesterday was a proper day in the tropics, with the sun shining and it was humid and glorious to be outside. We had three vultures wheeling over the barren plant site taking the thermals to glide high and away. I went for an early walk down the river to see if I could identify some new species, this is going to be a hard thing as I don’t have a bird identification book but I went to see if I could see something that looked familiar from Costa Rica. Birds are a clever lot really, they always fly away and hide in dark undergrowth and sneak about like burglars and it is always tricky to get a close look without feeding them and hiding close by. The hummingbirds I feed back home in Costa Rica are succours for sugar water and will come within 6 feet of you if you stand still and not act like a predator and it is fantastic to see them queuing up for their turn and even fighting when they get hungry. But here I was meant to see nothing other than a few dark silhouettes. There is one pretty bird that isn’t shy about being seen. It is the Tropical Kingbird, we have these in Costa Rica and hunt all day long like some crazy drugged bird darting up and down and twisting to make the catch and then flying back to its perch. There are many of these birds here.
I sat on the river bank and watched a flock of pretty black and white birds roosting on the island across from me and my binoculars are just too weak to see exactly what they were, they could have been some kind of nightjar but I know they are usually solitary and there was about 50 or so roosting in a large group. while I noticed a few bugs tickling my hands so I kept swatting them away and waving my hands about to swish them off my head but there were loads and becoming a nuisance. I stood my ground and watched the mysterious birds for about 30 minutes before I wanted to wander further but I was shouted by the guard and I assumed someone was wanting me on the plant, ‘oh God,’ I thought, there is an emergency and they couldn’t find me on site. I am meant to be on standby. But as I got to the guard he just wandered back to his hut and I left back to the plant wondering what had prompted him to shout me. I still haven’t identified the birds and I don’t know why he shouted me, many things are a mystery to me here as I struggle daily with the language. I did learn Gerencia yesterday but management doesn’t spring into the conversation very much. I am trying poorly with the language, I spend so much time writing mail and doing my Blog that I hardly seem to have time to learn it and everyone here loves to try their English with me, I have had several requests to teach people English. This I will not do as I don’t have the time and I need to learn Spanish. I also have fallen foul of my training regime since I had my flu. I haven’t done a stroke since and I have had to cut back my food intake to compensate and I don’t like doing that really. So I will for definitely think about going to the gym tomorrow night, for certain unless I feel tired or lazy then I will not think about going to the gym. Getting motivation here is tricky as I am isolated and have no-one to go with and its not a convenient time as I eat at 6 and then leave the office at 7.30 and I am still feeling full of food at that time and by the time I am feeling OK its time for bed. What a strange world in which we live that I can only complain about not having the motivation to go to the gym. Sometimes I forget that I am many miles from civilisation and that this working environment is totally alien to the whole of the Amazonian. A couple of the guys were telling me that while working out on one of the flowlines that go back to Lima, they were working in a very small fenced compound and one of them noticed that they were being observed by what they call the non-contactables, these are the indigenous tribal people that have no normal contact with civilisation. They live by hunting and still dress as they did 10,000 years ago. They were dressed in penis sheaths only and were carrying bows and arrows, I still forget that I am from an alien world to most in Peru. I walk around this site and all the non engineers stare at me. I am tall, much taller than them and I am white in comparison, they are very dark skinned. I am wearing my previous site clothing and it looks like a military uniform and the guards all salute me as I walk in the gates, very amusing, wish I had this effect when I am travelling everywhere, it would be good.