Scarlet Ibis 07/22/07

The river trip was fun and we saw a lot of herons, king fisher and even bats. I guess not all bats fly at night, but then where we saw them the mangroves grew like a tunnel over the now narrow river and it was a bit dark. We die read though that there is a fish eating bat in these mangroves. We drove as far as we could go, turned around and pulled of by a clearing and went for a walk. This area used to be a shrimp farm, but an earthquake put it out of business and now it's overgrown with all kind
of desert looking plants. We found a cactus that had bright pink fruits, they looked like 1 1/4 inch jalapeno peppers. Diane said that they taste good in salads, well I tasted one right there and it tasted more like some sort of berry, the inside is whitish with little black seeds like a kiwi has. The second day Diane and Doug went for a hike by themselves and she returned with a bag full of them, so we had a salad with the little pink fruits in them, it was tasty and is now on our menu whenever
we find them again. We had a great time with Salacia exploring the river but the most memorable thing was around sunset scarlet ibis returned from their day long feeding trip and landed on top of the near by tall mangrove trees. The second evening Sid and I snuck ashore and hid in the mangroves, but non showed up in the tree they were the previous night, so we rowed closer to where they were and rowed into the mangroves. They now were almost above us, but something scared them and they all took off
and all we could hear was the sound of their wings and the sky through the mangrove leaves turned scarlet read. They settled down again and something again scared them and they did that circle above us once more. It was incredible and we returned with yet another wonderful adventure on our minds.
A very good weather window opened up and we took the opportunity and headed back to Laguna Grande where we'll spend tonight and get an early start to head around the Araya Penisula for Isla Coche. We had a great sail and flew the spinnaker for most of it.