Just Another Day in Paradise

I tried to post about our trip to the "CEA" last week, but the photos wouldn't upload.  I was able to make it work today though.  :) Here's an email I sent to some family last week:

Today we went to CEA which stands for something i can't remember. ":) It is like a zoo, but not quite. It is more a place to protect amazon specific species. Very interesting but lots of walking since it is set up for animals and not ease of viewing. Jhon Sebastian was not a fan of the walking part.  But we saw some really neat animals. The "tigrillas" were small (smaller than a lab) but were kind of like cougars. They growled a lot.

 There was a really cute thing that I can't remember the name that was the size of a cat and had a long tail that was striped like a raccoon, with a snout like an anteater. 

We also saw a HUGE snail. This was just crawling, not "being saved" or anything but weird enough we took a photo. His shell was the size of a baseball!

One of the photos is of the top of a tall tree. There are all these hanging basket type nests that a certain bird here makes. The picture may be confusing but the nests are so neat!

It is hot and wet here year round, so everything grows grows grows!  EVERYTHING is GREEN.

I could do without the (many!) bugs, but otherwise, love it. The mosquitoes are almost non existent but the tiny ants are killer. We saw them devouring a gionormous beetle earlier. Weird. At CEA we saw some slightly larger ants basically eating a tree. One line running up the tree empty handed, the next line was going down the tree with bits of leaf 

Anyway, I'm having trouble loading photos onto blogger, so I thought I would just email a few.  I'll try and post some others this weekend. The beauty here is incredible and the photos just don't do it justice.

Can't remember what this was called. He wasn't too friendly.

This cat looked similar to a panther but was the size of a very large house cat.

This is a worker that was nice enough to serve as a bit of a guide. Here he is leading us to two ponds that hold the largest fresh water fish in the Amazon.  In the wild it can grow up to weigh more than 100 kilos!

These warthogs were awesome. The little ones were running around like crazy!