Could This Be My last Departure From The Jungle

I am leaving the jungle camp here in Peru this morning and I am now wondering if this is going to be my last time, I had hoped that my last departure was the last but here I am again. Let me first say that it really isn’t that bad it is just that there is nothing to do and zero fun, I don’t get do anything other than work and sleep, this isn’t life. I want more than doing hours at work and trying to get a reasonable nights sleep. This is nothing more than an open prison. I can console myelf with the fact that I do have another project to go to but that is also nothing more than an open prison in Russia, but at least it will be new and I will be interested in taking a look around the place and flying into a new country and speaking with ethnic Russians, it could be entertaining for a while, as long as my company keep to the agreement of two rotations only and then I leave for a warmer country in the middle east, I need warmth, I cannot function below 55F. my blood turns to treacle and I slow to a crawl in cold climates, Just like the Russians I think. I am hoping to get home and relax for two weeks before they send me, so I can watch some cable TV and eat some nice food, drink a few beers and be a normal part of the real world. I am thinking about going to live in Spain for the summer next year in my little town house I have there. It needs some maintenance and I need to be there to supervise it. It would be nice for me to go back and actually spend some time there nearly 4 years after I left the place. I have some plans to tear off the roof and put on a sun terrace and a large master bedroom with on-suite shower, to make it a proper summer house. I could also put in a walled garden an maybe even a garage up in the pines at the back, that would be a nice touch and add significantly to its value. We will see how things shape up

The house from the road in the pines

Lost in a Time Warp

I have seemed to have dropped into a time-warp, a bit like groundhog day, every day seems the same, I get up, walk into the same miserable little office and then download pictures of birds all day long, I take two small walks to the plant and have a walk round, recover a few butterflies and say hello in my terrible Spanish. This has happened every day for the last 12 days and I am miserable with my daily routine, I have been desperate to get away from this place for 7 months now and after I left last time I was elated with the fact I wouldn’t have to come back to Peru, but shit happens and the replacement was rushed away to Tunisia to some even worse shithole and they needed a guy to replace him for two weeks only and as I lived very close, it was me. I didn’t really mind as it was only two weeks but as the days have gone into “groundhog day” then I am feeling that horrible gray cloud around my head again. Perhaps the idea of doing an interesting job has eluded me again and I am destined to be working like this forever, I may just quit and spend my house money on a world tour for the next 25 years, or I could finish this goddam bird book and live like a pauper on the lousy income, hawking it around all the tourist hotels in Costa Rica. At least travelling around Costa Rica sounds good, I need a long holiday, I have only had 4 weeks at home in the last 12 and I may only get 1 week at home after I leave and then another 4 weeks plus all the travelling time to get to Sakhalin island. At least I haven’t spent nearly two years in India like my old buddy from Ohio, Slyght, he has had the misfortune to be in that stinking country for al this time but at least he had a companion that stopped him feeling despair, his job is finished but they will not let him go yet, they like him, or do they just want to torment him until he cracks and kills everyone on site. So I am trying to get an extraordinary general meeting arranged for my condominium and that is hard as nearly everyone works away or long hours so now I find out that I may not get home to attend this meeting and as it is involving the money we pay for maintenance and security it is very important to me, we have two guards on the main gate and at night they just sleep and I hate paying for a guy to sleep, he has to be fired and I can save a lot of money, plus we can change the way we use the day-time guard , he can become the caretaker of the condo and wash cars and do all the gardening and washing the windows and painting the houses and do all those things that normally makes life miserable. At the moment the guard just sleeps and opens the gate, we have to get that made automatic to allow the caretaker to do more tings around the houses for us. Life is such in Costa Rica.

Oh To Be Living and Working In a Normal Place

I have some great news, I have just sold my old house in Costa Rica and this means I have lots of cash now to be able to do all the things I am wanting to do, holidays and maybe buy the plot of land behind my new house so I can convert it into a large garden. Doing this is an extravagance but I love sitting in a nice garden and if my sister ever does decide to come and live with me then she needs a garden to expend all that dynamic energy she has all the time. She is a fanatic gardener and a tropical paradise is what would suit her the most, plus I would get all the fruits of her labour, namely fruits and vegetables.

I posted a picture of what I thought was a rare parrot in Costa Rica and I sent the picture to many bird sites thinking I had a rarity, I also sent it to an editor of a Costa Rican web site dealing with bird guiding there and he identified it as a less rare Crimson-fronted parakeet, not a really rare bird. I am rather sad at the fact that my bird wasn’t such a rarity, I also realised that my photography is very amateur, I need better lenses and they are fantastically expensive, I priced a medium lens up and it was over $6,000 a long lens was over $8,000 and I was shocked to say the least. But it is critical to the taking of high quality pics of birds, also a good tripod is also critical. Not so expensive but still a horrible thing to take around with you. I just wanted to be able to have my camera around my neck and click away and get great shots, not so, you have to take shots in RAW form not .JPEG, as this reduces the quality, also you have to process them with several different programs to get the quality right and then you may have a good shot, not the instamatic type approach I was hoping for. Anyhow I still get some good shots with the new camera.

Big expensive lens

Life With 7 Days Unitl I Leave Project Malvinas Forever, I Think

Well I am trying to get through my last few days in the jungle here in Peru with as few complications and as stress free as possible. The problem is people keep asking me to do things, now I am finding it irritating and resent them asking me to do anything, I am only here to kill time until I fly to Russia. I am still playing with my pictures from the internet and finding some nice interesting bird pictures, I found a photographers site that had some quite fantastic pictures of birds in Costa Rica but he did make them a little small, normally you have to download every photo one at a time let it open before you can then copy it, he had loaded some code into it to stop copying it from the page but I went to the gallery directory and he had made a bad directory and all the files were just stored without any permissions set to look at the root directory, so I just right-clicked myself to death copying everything in there, over 1000 high quality photos of the nicest birds in Costa Rica, it took two hours even then, but some are already incorporated into my book. “Why” do you say am I doing it, well in this sort of job you have to have a time killer, something that takes away the boredom of just waiting for things to happen. Now as I have always been a keen ornithologist or Hornythologist as some others would say, I have had a love of all things wild and birds especially. So looking at some fantastic bird shots to me is relaxing and heavenly. One important factor in me starting this was that I have been searching for a book that gives you actually photos of the birds, to be able to make a correct identification, but there isn’t one and I always wondered why, I found out the other day why, I asked a photographer how much he would charge for the licence to use some pictures of his, I was shocked to find out how much, $50 a picture for a 7 year licence. I calculated how much it would cost me to use all the pics I have got, it would cost over $1/2 million for a 7 year licence. That is just a non-starter, there is no way anyone would ever speculate that sort of money on producing a book that may sell a few hundred copies a year maybe a few thousand, you would have to charge $1000 a copy, totally unfeasible, so I decided the only way to do it is by not using licensed pictures. Borrowing them for an unlimited period, In Costa Rica copyright means nothing and the laws do not exist to protect it, and if they do exist they would never be enforced, all the video shops are using pirated DVD’s and even have all the latest movies using cinema copies. So me producing a low number bird DVD is not even on the radar. I have just got to keep it within the borders. Or I may sell it on the internet, but not sure how to get the money paid back to me, I am learning many things on this project, like how to fix the background on the webpage, some fancy code somewhere. Anyway as long as my Blog-site doesn’t get censored like my old buddy Slyght of nomadic tendancies, the Indian government thinks he is a subversive and needs to be eliminated, he should be careful the Indian jails are pretty miserable, he would have to use two of the locals to sleep on for a mattress.

Feeding the Local Animals In the Park

Everyone must have been to the park to feed the ducks at some point in their lives and a lot of people feed the birds, what about feeding the fish in the local park. What about hand feeding the fish in the local park, what about feeding monstrous big fish that jump out of the water to grab whatever you had in your hand, i would be very worried about that but Tarpon are a very large fish that can jump out of the water to catch prey and at some fancy restaurants they actively encourage you to feed the large Tarpon, here is a very interesting pic i found on the net, i would be a bit scared about doing that.

Oh Woe!!! Is Jungle Life

Life is pretty tedious here in the jungle on operations, my daily tasks consist of making a screen capture of the operating machine to log the data, and I have a walk around the plant to make sure that we don’t have an oil fountain from a broken line, or that the whole contraption isn’t ablaze and the fire detectors haven’t seen it, or if there is a snake wrapped around some nice warm pipe to sleep on during the day. Well that is what I would like to happen to liven up the day. So I just go collecting butterflies from the fin-fan coolers and releasing them as I have been doing for the last year while I have been working here, this is the part I enjoy and find it a great release of tension to just forget the tedium and be away in my own little world. I have been watching the construction team building some new accommodation and I had already put my name on the room furthest away from the turbines to get less noise and just as I about to completely leave they are putting the beds in today, so they will be ready maybe in a week, I may get a weeks sleep in them. I have had one success here, I had complained many times about the amount of lighting in the plant as it was attracting an unbelievable amount of moths into the plant and finally my mails got to the right person and they have implemented a regime of much less lighting, changing the lights to low output and of a different type that attract less moths and actually around the turbines they have shut off the tower lights altogether. For me this is my towering achievement, having some light turned off, not really much to speak about is it.

The weather here is still as strange as you can imagine, this morning in the west it was a clear blue day with the sun blazing across the sky but to the east it was banks of fog rolling over the nearest hill and coming towards the plant but evaporating as it came across the open area of the plant, very spooky to look at and something that makes you stand back and look at for a while. The fog thing has always amazed me here, so unexpected. I am finding it hard to concentrate as I am just thinking about the next project I am going to, Russian Far East, and at this time of year it is going to be acceptable, and hopefully I am not going to be there for the winter. I am still trying to plan for my future project after Russia but in this game nothing is certain as we all know the only thing for definite is this life is death.

Furniture buying in Costa Rica

I have been shopping for some furniture for my new house, and it is tricky to get something that you like as a couple and doesn’t break the bank, we were lucky with the sofa and got a bargain in Costa Rican terms, but other stuff it is hard to find the right quality and something different, I am not a typical consumer and I don’t like production line stuff as it just looks fake. We have been trying to get some local made stuff as it is nice wood and sometimes interesting but it is far too predictable in its style and isn’t basically nice, so we have been touring round and round trying every shop possible, now we have moved to the other side of the city then we get different shops and we found one that was actually selling imported furniture from India and the style is typical Indian and we both fell in love with it straight away. There were cupboards with strange doors and crazy tables and crazy chairs, crazy everything, some things were so rustic to be laughable but still interesting, we saw some nice tables that had metal strapping holding the sides on and the legs were all pointing in different directions but it still looked interesting, we found several of these crazy table and also a very nicely made cabinet that was low enough to take a TV, again it was rustic but at least the door fit which a lot of the cupboards had non shutting doors or even non shutting draws, how useful is that. So we went round and round the shop trying to decide on what we would like and were it would go and finally we plumped for the 3 rustic tables with bent legs and the nice low cupboard that would take some CD’s and a few books with glass doors and take a TV also, total price, this is all nice wooden furniture remember, £300. I thought that was a bargain, but I am thinking in UK prices not Costa Rican. We celebrated by going to the cinema to watch underworld, fantastic movie, lots of crazy action and she looks great in that rubber or vinyl suit that she wears all through the film, must drive the rubber boys crazy.

Return to The Jungle of Peru

Well getting back into Peru was easy, even though I had to abandon my attempt to get a visa as I ran out of time, the British consulate had so many stolen passports to replace they were running out of time to do mine and even asked me to come back later. So I have my unbelievably expensive new British passport that was about $175. I was also expecting problems with the flight ticket as the company had bought the e-ticket for me but the TACA webpage had insisted that I would be expected to produce the credit card that paid for it, this put everyone in my office into a spin to make sure that I could get on the plane on time. So I got my ticket without a question and the plane was on-time and my flight was uneventful which was pretty good. I hate all the flying these days so a stress free flight is what I want. The next day I arrived at the airline desk to fly to the Malvinas camp and just as I was expecting a trouble free entry to the plane, she looked at my medical card and gave it me back, saying in a perfect English voice, “ sorry but your Flu vaccine is expired so you cannot travel”. I protested that I could have it in the camp, this was a serious error on my part, I should have checked but with all the other crap I have to do it had completely slipped my mind. She rang someone and I got the reply, “ you must go back to the main office and then go to the clinic for the vaccination and then get back here for the second flight”. This was a tall order as it is 20 Km each way, I went outside and jumped into a taxi and set about this task. The roads were packed solid and it took an hour to get back to office, I got my letter for the clinic and I was forced to hand over my medical card as they wanted to confirm that I had taken the vaccine instead of just filling in the card myself, I went to the clinic and you know how long it takes to give a vaccination, maybe 2 minutes at most but I was forced to sit and watch the clock tick round for 20 minutes until they called me in and the nice old lady only took 2 minutes to jab me, and let's face it this vaccination will take 2-6 weeks to get the full effect in my body so whether I took it here in the clinic or the camp is irrelevant, but you know rules are rules, oh how I hate that mentality. I got back into the taxi and he was pretty quick going back to the airport, in fact he was driving like a typical taxi lunatic. He was frightening me but the fact of missing the plane was more frightening, my brand new manager would have been thinking the worse of me, I have never missed a plane because of my fault and never got the to jobsite late because of my fault. So this would have been my fault and he would have given me a black mark against my name, this I don’t need when I am trying to get to Qatar. I got back with 15 minutes before flight time, I was given the ticket directly as they were waiting for me, I marched through the terminal and the gate was opened just as I arrived within 10 minutes we were flying, I had survived the trial of endurance. Getting back to the Malvinas camp was basically a return home for me, I have been here 6 previous trips and I know all the guys it was just the thought of eating steamed chicken again that gave me the shivers. The weather was fantastic, sunny and hot and humid, the turbines were running fine and life is good. I got down to some work to start with, I was downloading tons of great pictures of birds for my bird book, in fact I found a flickr site that had possibly the best hummingbird pictures I have seen and this was from an amateur. Just check out this hummingbird, called a black Crested Coquette fantastic, I hope I can keep finding pictures like this.

My First Endangered Species Photo

Well there is nothing short of normal chaos in my work life, I do lots of travelling and usually at short notice but as I am between projects things have become a little hectic. I am waiting for my visa for Russia and while doing some home improvements to the new house last week I got an urgent call from my manager telling me I am to go back to Peru for a small maintenance job and then hopefully have no problems I will be off to Russia for my short project start up. But getting to Peru is full of problems, I had to rush to get a new passport as the last one was full of stamps and this was taking 3 days and then also trying to get a flight sorted with my company credit card, which wasn’t accepted ove the internet for some mysterious reason. Going for a visa is something I may not even bother with as I am only going for 10 days, and where I am going is remote and highly unlikely to have a immigration officer. Luckily Peru is on the same time zone as Costa Rica and this will not give me jet-lag as I am still suffering from the last flight from Italy.

Once I had been called to go to Peru I rushed to the beach last weekend to get a small holiday as I haven’t been to the beach in 5 months, even though I only live 3 hours from the Caribbean. We arrived at our favourite little beach cabins and settled, even though it rains a lot here the temperature is nice and we sat about and relaxed and I was trying out my camera to get some pics of all the local birds here, they have a different range of birds plus lots of the ones that are country wide. The next morning Jenny woke early and opened the shutter ( No windows in this cabin only wooden shutters ), as she said there were some lovely birds singing behind the cabin, we looked outside to see some of the most exotic birds imaginable, we could see there was a trail of army ants on the forest floor and these birds called antbirds were waiting for insects to be flushed out of hiding to be gobbled up by the birds.
It was a fantastic site to see and I was clicking away like merry hell on the camera trying to get lots of shots for my upcoming bird CD. So once the birds had been frightened away by my ugly mug leering at them through the window I put the shots onto the laptop to look at them and I was horrified that they were all terrible and blurred. The fact that it was early and cloudy and I was in a dark cabin looking into the forest was lost on me as I saw those fantastic birds. It was all too dark for the camera and I lost all the shots, I was miserable, I tried shooting some birds that were sat on a telephone line and I was looking skyward, lots of light I thought but what happened was the light was bouncing off the birds feathers and giving me a glare so the light parts of the birds were all over-exposed and almost white, again I had no pictures worth anything at all. So the next day we went out for a walk ino the local countryside, a mix of forest and a few fields, I was snapping away at anything with feathers we saw some fantastic birds and we even saw a small parrot sat on a dead tee stump. I got a couple of nice shots and when we got back to the cabin I checked in the guide book to see what the parrot was.

My Endangered Species





I was shocked to find I had seen and photographed an endangered species called a Red-fronted Parrotlet. This was a day to celebrate as I could post the picture on the internet to claim my first rare species. It is only supposed to exist in the mountains but this was on the coast, some of the other shots were also perfectly exposed and will make good shots for the book, I have realised that digital SLR cameras are still tricky to get good pictures from unlike the instamatic digital things that everyone gets. But at least it is a delight to have the fun of seeing a good one from the hundreds I took.

Natural Drugs in Costa Rica

I would like to share with you a delight of Costa Rica that is something that only happens in the tropics. Do you know that feeling when you smell freshly brewed coffee or smell the coffee grounds in a freshly opened bag, that rich and intensely fragrant smell, it does something to your brain very nice doesn’t it. Well imagine that 10 times more powerful and almost like smoking the worlds largest spliff. While driving round looking for some new furniture for the new house we drive through the heart of San Jose along a couple of the main highways, and along these are dotted coffee roasting companies. Now during roasting time plumes of strong smoke emanate from chimneys and usually flow over the surrounding roads, when you catch a face full of this as we normally drive with the windows open, it is more delicious and more uplifting than any amount of freshly brewed coffee, it is almost an olfactory orgasm of the highest order, I sniff and sniff and groan and sniff am much as I can get while driving though the clouds of gorgeous smoke, it is so fantastic that I decided to enter it in my Blog, nothing can compare to it other than freshly burnt chicken fat from a wood fire and other highly tasteful foods, can you detect something of my true nature, I worship food and drink, drugs I can take it or leave it but nice food is my god and I bow down to a lovely mature cheddar. Here endeth the lesson on natural highs in Costa Rica

The Pleasure of Driving in Costa Rica

I am a lover of driving and drive all over Costa Rica and find the bad roads and mountain tracks an enjoyable challenge. The greatest pleasure is being able to do lots of terribly illegal things and not have the slightest fear of getting caught. Driving in the UK is now a chore and miserable in the extreme. Here I can weave about go as fast as I dare and overtake in any lane and go through red lights after a quick look, something I have only done a few times ever in the UK, here it is compulsory to do this or you get the continuous honking of the desperate drivers behind you who are also wanting to do dangerous and illegal things. Pure heaven, it makes for interesting driving and keeps delays to a minimum, the biggest drawback, other than a blue whales foreskin is the suicidal tactics of the totally uneducated illegal drivers who have never been to school never mind taken driving lessons. These folks take fate to its ultimate goal of usually killing themselves and a few others when they do their stunts, my view on this is that you go as fast or faster than them then you can avoid them and leave some poor truck driver to squash them. Which we see on the TV all the time, God Speed and safe driving in Gods Own Garden Country

My First Few Days Back in Gods Own Garden Country

My trip to Florence was not ordained by the gods and so everything possible was meant to go wrong, it did and I am back home in Costa Rica in my new house chilling and still trying to get over the jetlag 5 days later. If you remember I lost my bags flying to Florence and that took two days and again my bags went AWOL on the way home and arrived 2 days later. Luckily I was coming home but if I was a tourist going on holiday losing both of your bags would have been a horrible irritation, sweating and stinking in the same clothes until your late bags turned up in your hotel. Jetlag is my biggest pain in the ass with my job, I lose sleep on the plane as I cannot really sleep and then take forever to adjust to the time difference. I am still waking up at 4 am and falling over on the new sofa at 8pm, what can an old fart like me do about it. Just suffer is the answer.
Anyhow life in the real world goes on, the water tank is leaking in the new house just like was predicted by the security guard and it is pretty obvious why to any plumber, they have used bother metal pipe work and plastic fitting so with the differential expansion of the joints they leak when the water in the hot water tank gets hot, basically pretty crap, I am replacing the whole thing with an instantaneous water heater, using some pipe and a couple of hoses, I am talking like a plumbing geek but I am pleased I can do it myself rather than get some peasant in who lies saying he can do plumbing.
This new house is much hotter than my old house as it lies away from the mountains that surround the valley and we get about a quarter of the cloud so the house is warm all day and I can slide open the patio door for breakfast, really quite nice and so much nicer to have breakfast with a fresh breeze. I have come home to have the cable TV installed and high speed internet for the first time ever in my life, I can leech music and software and films to my hearts content now. I am looking at going away to the beach and taking my new camera with me to take some pics for my CD book of the birds of Costa Rica and I have already included 4 pics of the Rufous Naped Wren in the book, but it is just a start.




Probably a few more months or maybe a year before i start hawking it around the tourist hotels and souvenir shops




The header picture of the Index of the Bird Book contains 4 species of birds the majority are of species not from Costa Rica, this would normally be sacrilege but I stole the header picture and liked it a lot so I don’t care, it was actually two pictures and I blended two together cutting off the names of some hotel I think.


I have started buying furniture for the new house and went around 7 stores to find a Sofa as I have particular needs, I have an unusually long neck and need a tall back and lots of lower lumbar support, so we did the ass test on hundreds of sofas and realised that anything made here in CR is a horrible crappy made concoction and bad, loads of the very fantastic looking leather ones from both Italy and Mexico are great but feel strange in this very humid atmosphere and still never got one that was tall enough or cheap enough, I tested one that was $9000 and a large multi seat corner unit that was $14,000 , the ultimate in crazy prices. I sat on one in the biggest store about 5 weeks ago and it was huge and very comfortable and a nice colour and expensive at $1700, so I hesitated and when we went back last Saturday it was still there, we tested all the new ones and went back to the old one and again it felt right and we said yes we will have it, the girl who was serving us said there is a 20% discount for mothers day which is weeks away, this is a crazy country, giving us a discount after we said we would have it and for some cooked up reason, but I take 20% from anyone, that night while watching TV we both fell asleep on the wonderful huge perfect sofa, the best buy I have made in a long time, other than the house of course.