Mosquito Count: Middling.
Mosquito Complaint Count: Too high I wish the American would zip it.
This is going to sound like a bad joke, but I went into the Pampas, with the following characters:
The Australian
Think The Kinks song Apeman... An out of time hippy, who is an ethno botany student, and has hair down to his waist, and a greying bandana to keep off the sweat. Fondly called Michael Jackson by the guide.
The American.
A Miami born wannabe Israeli, who puts on an Israeli accent whenever negotiating a deal, as he thinks it has better results. He equates Mitt Romney with the messiah. In the list of Kinks references this guy thinks he is David Watts. He is dating a Persian princess.
The Irish.
The honeymoon couple, a nurse and a health and safety expert (apparently they exist in Ireland.) The nurse is lovely and relatively normal, apart from the fact she married a health and safety expert who has more vocal opinions on life than the australian and american combined. He loves Hitchens. Due to the amount of complaints about the Irish economy and general these two are definitely the well respected man meets dead end street.
You might have guessed I found a Kinks album on my blackberry, after the three hour drive to the river. The politics were hotter than the weather.
After the human political safari had quietened down a bit the actual fun began. We all clambered in to an old fashioned canoe with an enormous outboard motor for a four hour trip up river deep into the Pampas. the Pampas is an area of the amazon basin, which is wetland. It is populated by savannahs, swamps, and a few rivers. It is also swarming with alligators and caimen (south American crocodiles.) Oscar the guide likes to get as close as possible to these. I don´t.
Other highlights include:
The largest and most attractive rodent in the world. The Capybara.
And pink river dolphins.
Then we arrived at a lodge, before heading off to see the sunset at a bar in the middle of nowhere.
And there in the middle of nowhere was Beth Rugen... Turns out the world is really quite small afterall, or coincidences are quite large. I was at Worcester with Beth for three years.
We returned to the lodge in the dark dodging the enormous alligators and bats.
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