Camels & Friends

In Spring 2010, I took a trip to the Amazon Rainforest in Peru. I’ve been meaning for sometime to put a short video together of my trip and I thought it might interest those who read my blog. There’s a lot of cool animals in it!

I spent one week in the jungle and it was a very amazing experience. One night, my cabin was even attacked by night monkeys, who threw sticks and whatever else they could find at the building, which was only covered by a thick netting. I was also blessed with a beautiful thunderstorm one evening, just after I had finished kayaking in the river. By the next night the trails were so washed out that walking in them sank me in mud down to my knees.

In the video you can see some of the animals I was able to film. Spider Monkeys, leaf-cutter ants, a blue and gold macaw, a blue morpheus butterly, some of the local dogs I met and more. I also saw caiman and capybaras, but didn’t take a video. You can find a picture of the caiman and a few other photos I took in the jungle here: Amazonia.

For anyone thinking about visiting one of our rainforests, I highly recommend it. It’s everything you could imagine and more.

Camels are able to eat things we could scarcely think about touching! In this video, Nessie doesn’t even think twice about taking a prickly pear cactus from me and devouring it, thorns and all. It may look painful, but camels have a tough leather-like mouths protected farther with long raised grooves (think of a Koosh ball!) that are not easily penetrated by thorns. Pretty cool, huh? Camels are truly amazing beings.

My grandmother visited last week from Indiana. The last time she saw Nessie she was only a few months old- what a change now!

Nessie approached with her familiar sweet disposition and took my grandma’s offering of a banana from her.

Just a beautiful video from today.