Wildlife

The Drums of War

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Tunki, Cusco. 14.12.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing in the news today. It’s like the world is going to Hell. Here in Cusco, you’d never know there was a terrible war taking place far away, over the mountains, across the ocean and the great sea of sand. Trump might have a habit of talking big game, but he is backed by the mightiest nation on the planet. I fear for the people of Iran.

As if I didn’t already feel cut off from everything that is going on, I am about to go off grid for six whole days. I don’t imagine there’s much signal in the Amazon rainforest, and I would rather not use up my phone battery trying to find out. During that time, Peru will elect its next president and Trump’s deal with have to be met – or else.

Once again, I find myself wondering with no small amount of irony that the most dangerous stretch of my South American adventure will be the layover in New York.

But isn’t that what this was all about? To get away from it all for a bit – from work, from loneliness, from the depressing chaos of global politics?

Having bought the boleto turístico, and with one day more in Cusco than I’d originally planned, I decided to go all in. 130 soles for 16 sites may sound good, but at 20 soles each, the average traveler is more likely to save money by paying at each site. Some are far away, like Tipón and Pikillaqta, four are in the Sacred Valley, one of them is in the middle of a roundabout in one of the busiest streets of downtown Cusco and two of them are art galleries.

However – I bought the ten day pass, so now I have to get my money’s worth. Tipón and Pikillaqta are too far away to be reached without hiring a guide and a vehicle, but I reckon I can do everything else on this ticket. At least now it feels like a proper challenge!

With Sacsayhuamán already achieved, first on my list was the Museo Histórico Regional. It’s worth visiting solely because it was the house of the incredible Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, a 16th century Peruvian nobleman for whom the expression “main character energy” might have been coined. Though Spanish by birthright, he was also the great-grandson of the Inca Huayna Capac, one of the last rulers of the Inca Empire known as the Tahuantinsuyo. Raised primarily by his Inca mother and uncle, he developed a profound admiration for his heritage and, assisted by the lavish education his Spanish father provided for him, he became the first great writer of the Americas. At 21, he left Peru for Spain, fought for the Crown in the Morisco Rebellion, and published many books about his native land and its people.

Understandably, El Inca is venerated here in Peru as both a defender of the native people and one of Cusco’s most illustrious native sons, whose works were influential for many famous statesmen and philosophers.

Another of Cusco’s greatest heroes is Tupac Amaru II, also of royal descent, who started a rebellion against the Spanish after witnessing multiple abuses of power at the expense of the indigenous peoples of Peru through his work as a muleteer. Unlike El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, however, Tupac Amaru met a grisly end, torn apart in a public execution in Cusco’s Plaza Mayor as a punishment for his resistance.

It’s worth noting that Tupac Amaru II was the first public figure to abolish the slavery of Black people in the Spanish Americas. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Afeni Shakur decided to give her son the name of this legendary figurehead of indigenous resistance, knowing that such a powerful name could only inspire the young 2Pac to great things.

While it’s not on the list, I had to head downtown to find the enormous mural I’d seen on my way into town on my first night. I love a mural, especially when it tells a story, and one day I’d love to see Diego Rivera’s historical paintings in Mexico City. But for now, Cusco has its own retelling of the history of its people.

There are just so many details to pick up. The way the Spanish soldiers merge with the bodies of their horses, like centaurs, in imitation of the confusion the mounted soldiers caused among the natives, who had never seen a horse before. The war dog held on a chain by a Cistercian monk. The conquistadors gambling with dice over their stolen gold. The indigenous painter portraying the scene as a righteous conquest aided by a winged Santiago, under the instruction of a Spanish cleric. The bolas weapons of the Inca and the Spanish cannon.

You could read a hundred accounts of the Spanish conquest of Peru and still learn more from a painting like this.

This morning, I ticked off another two on the list: Puka Pukara, the Red Fort, and Tambomachay, the Resting Place. You’ll be offered a visit to these by any of the guides hanging around Sacsayhuamán, and they’re well served by the white servicio turístico vans – but, me being me, I decided to walk there.

It’s not that far. Tambomachay, the further of the two, is about an hour and a half from the centre of Cusco. It is mostly uphill, however, and I was lucky the weather was on my side: be it a favour of the Lady of the Marshes or no, I was protected from the sun by a merciful cover of cloud all the way there and back. I had my rosary on as I often do when I’m not sure if the road is safe or not, so I’ll chalk it up to a little divine intervention.

Even on foot, I still got there before the bulk of the morning’s tourist traffic arrived. It was worth the hike – steep though it was – to see a part of Cusco that I might otherwise have missed.

It also gave me the chance to check out Huayllarqocha’s small wetland reserve, which will have to be my substitution for Huacarpay. I didn’t see any of the grebes that supposedly live here, but I did see an Andean flicker (an American species of woodpecker) and a number of Andean ducks, a smart relative of the Ruddy Duck that can be found in North America.

Now that I’ve had some rest, I should go and pick up my washing from the lavandería down the road. After that, I should pack for tomorrow, before checking out the two art galleries and, with any luck, a performance of local music and dance at the Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo.

I’m not sure if you’ll hear from me tomorrow. Like I said, going into the Amazon may well mean going completely off-grid. Either way, I’ll try to keep writing. The next six days are likely to be red letter days, both here in Peru and out there in the wider world.

Hasta la próxima. BB x

Violetears and Metaltails

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Tunki, Cusco. 17.42.

Six hundred years ago, under the vision of the Inca Pachacútec, a team of architects were tasked with turning an existing settlement in the Sacred Valley into the cultural nerve centre of an empire. For their inspiration, they chose one of the most powerful of all the animals with which they shared their world: the puma. The city of Cusco is believed to have been built in the shape of a resting puma, with the Tullumayo and Saphy rivers marking the outline of its body, the citadel of Sacsayhuamán as its head (ears and all) and the Huacaypata – the present-day Plaza de Armas – as its heart.

The puma was an incredibly important spiritual entity for the Inca. Legend gave it tremendous power: their spit was hail, the blink of their eyes thunderbolts, and their roar was the roll of thunder.

I’m writing this in Casa Tunki’s restaurant, with the heavy roll of thunder overhead. I have been exceptionally lucky with the weather thus far, but it’s still the rainy season out here, and the rain has finally caught up to me. It has spelled disaster for tomorrow’s expedition to Waqrapukara, which the operators have had to cancel due to landslides in the area. Luckily for me, I have three whole days after returning from Manu, so I am not too troubled. I could always try again when I return.

My wanderings today took me to a quiet corner of Cusco. Tucked away in the hills to the south of the suburb of San Jerónimo is a tiny hummingbird sanctuary, nestled on a forested slope off the 123 highway. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never be able to find it.

My guide Benjamin picked me up from the hotel and, together with his companion and driver Jeremy, we set out. It was just me on this tour, so for the first time out here I had the chance for a proper conversation.

The sanctuary itself – titled the Pachacútec Bosque Andino – is a strange mix of what looks like a garden centre, a Zen garden and a hiking trail. At different times of year, different birds can be found here. I got the impression from my guide that other guests have come here seeking the Bearded Mountaineer, a Peruvian endemic. He seemed a little anxious at first that I might be pinning my hopes on finding one. I hope I gave him the impression that I wasn’t a lister. I was just happy to be out of the city and surrounded by nature again.

One of the sanctuary’s starlets, a young trainbearer, put in an early appearance. The adult males of this species have enormous tails that nearly double their length, but this one still has a fair bit of growing up to do.

The primary residents of the sanctuary – as in the hills around Cusco itself – are the violetears. They’re extremely territorial and will fight off just about anything that gets in their way, no matter the size. I saw them take on metaltails, thrushes, tanagers and even the giant hummingbird that was trying to use the feeders.

Yesterday, I found them by sound and movement. Today, I hardly needed to try. They didn’t seem to be bothered by us at all.

Whenever the violetears were busy fighting everything that came too close, a tiny metaltail popped out of the bushes to chance a quick feed at one of the flowers, before darting away the moment the mechanical clicks of the violetears announced they were on their way back.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that hummingbirds and flowers have evolved simultaneously, with some flowers only admitting a certain species of hummingbird to visit them. It explains why their Old World equivalent, the sunbirds, remain stranded east of the Atlantic, while hummingbirds can only be found in the west.

The largest hummingbird species, the giant hummingbird, was surprisingly shy – though that may have more to do with the aggressive violetears than any inherent skittishness in its nature. They’re considerably larger than their diminutive relatives, being about as large as a small thrush, and they sound a lot less like bees when they fly overhead, though they still move like the clappers.

Well now – now that I have a whole day free, I think I’ll take it easy tomorrow. I’ll try to make more use of my boleto turístico, the ten-day ticket that covers most of the historic sites and museums in Cusco.

I’ve finalised the arrangements for the Amazon, which is now only a little over twenty-four hours away. The two Americans in the hotel next to me are busy discussing which nautical themed tattoo they should get (as they’re considerably cheaper here than back home), but I will be putting all of this behind me for a week. I am quite looking forward it that.

Fingers crossed my luck holds out for some wholesome companions! BB x

Cuscotopia

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Tunki, Cusco. 14.22.

Overnight, I’ve gone from one of the tallest people in town to one of the shortest. Or at least, on a par with the locals. That’s because Cusco is awash with tourists, as it surely has been ever since Machu Picchu was rediscovered. Towering Germans, athletic Americans, French and Italian girls walking around in legging shorts that seem at odds with the local custom of long dresses, heavy socks and boots.

I could go off on one of my usual rants about the vapidity of some of these tick-box trekkers. But I won’t. You’re bored of hearing it and I’m bored of repeating it. So I’ll focus on the other things I’ve seen. It is worth knowing, however, just how much the tourists seem to run this town.

Today is Easter Sunday, so I allowed myself a proper night’s sleep (my first in a while) and had breakfast at the hotel before going to the cathedral for prayers.

I have, at last, noticed the altitude. It’s not debilitating like I thought, but it is certainly a factor that cannot be ignored. Going to sleep last night was a drawn-out procedure, not because some of the Picchu junkies wouldn’t stop talking at the top of their voices, but because it felt like I was eternally short of breath. Every yawn and every deep breath felt incomplete. I guess that’s simply a factor of living at this kind of altitude – there’s simply less oxygen to go around.

By the morning, however, I was feeling much better, so I had all the energy I needed to go out and get my bearings.

Semana Santa came to an end this morning with the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection in the Catedral de Cusco. They had three Masses back to back and I caught the tail end of the second.

The cathedral was almost full to bursting, so I said my prayers in front of the shrine to Mary with a few of the local women. Unexpectedly, I felt something. Not for the first time, either. I’m not entirely sure what it was, but it moved me.

I scoped out the HQ for the Amazon Wildlife company so that I would be able to find my way there easily tomorrow. There was a local man with a very violent nosebleed being attended to by two policemen outside. I hope that’s not a potential symptom of altitude sickness!

Speaking of which, as it was still fairly early, I decided to climb up to the old Inca fortress of Sacsayhuamán that sits on a hilltop above the city of Cusco. When I say climb, I mean it. The ascent is no joke. It’s supposed to be good practice for the Inca Trail, but as that’s not on my itinerary, it served as a beginning for the Waqrapukara and Inti Punku side quests I have planned.

Sacsayhuamán is a large Inca complex, parts of which can be found all around Cusco, since the Spanish took a leaf out of their former Moorish rulers’ book and cannibalised much of the fortress to build their churches and colonial houses and estates. The rocks that remain are mostly the largest and most cumbersome, retaining their masterful stonemasonry – each of them cut in just such a way as to slot together without need for mortar.

There’s no gold here – any that there might have been was stolen by the Spanish may hundreds of years ago – but it is still quite an impressive complex. It’s certainly more than ‘just a pile of stones’ as one English father remarked to his wife and son on their way up the hill…

I decided to throw any idea of self-consciousness to the wind on the way back down and spent about forty minutes or so hunting hummingbirds. The winding path up to Sacsayhuamán follows a Eucalyptus forest, which was uncommonly alive with birdsong (those poisonous trees are usually devoid of life). One particularly noisy resident is the beautifully named Sparkling Violetear, one of the many hummingbirds that can be found in the hills around Cusco. They’re notoriously hard to photograph, but patience is a virtue I have learned through this hobby, so after enduring the stares and multilingual remarks about the size of my camera by all the passers-by I was rewarded with a close encounter with one of the sparkling little gems.

I saw a giant hummingbird, the largest of its kind, on the way up, but it didn’t stick around for very long, so the violetears were my main success this morning. I’m going to a hummingbird sanctuary tomorrow, so I might well see a great deal more of them, but for now, I’m happy with what I saw and heard.

I found a spot in town for lunch that wasn’t crawling with tourists (in fact, it was almost entirely Peruvian in clientele, which is always a good sign). A huge bowl of caldo de cordero and a drink cost me a grand total of forty soles, which is a little less than £9. I’m going to miss how affordable this country is.

I’ll also miss how handsome the people are. What a royal profile these Peruvians have! And to think that some people pay for a rhinoplasty to have their noses shrunk… What a travesty! I find it quite a fetching look, myself.

I’ve taken it easy today, otherwise I might burn out – it is a pretty full on adventure, and I’m conscious that I’m back to work the day after I return, so I need to fit in some time to rest during this holiday.

But that won’t stop me going out for supplies and another wander this evening. Maybe I’ll be able to find something new in the twilight! BB x

Mirrors in the Mountains

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Aeropuerto Internacional Alfredo Rodríguez, Arequipa. 16.20.

I have often seen it written of Uganda that it is Africa in miniature – that is, a concentrated version of the vast array of biomes you can find across the continent. The more I travel Peru, the more I’m convinced that this is South America’s equivalent: jungle, desert, glaciers, prairie, megacities and coastal plains. Peru really does have it all. No wonder it is home to the second largest number of bird species in the world (after Colombia).

If the Islas Ballestas are touted as the “poor man’s Galápagos”, then today I paid a flying visit to the poor man’s Salar de Uyuni. While my original plan for this adventure ended with a trip to Bolivia’s enormous salt flats on the edge of the Atacama Desert, my decision to go all in on an Amazonian side-quest to Manu got in the way. I really didn’t want to leave South America without seeing the salt lakes, though, as they were a fairly major inspiration for coming out here in the first place.

Luckily, there’s one tiny outlier of the Uyuni salt flats tucked away in the mountains east of Arequipa, within the Reserva Nacional de Salinas y Aguada Blanca. Getting there is a pretty arduous journey, but if you can find a way, the views are out of this world.

My onward flight to Cusco leaves at 18.05, so I needed to find a way to the salt flats and back in time to catch my plane. As luck would have it, there was a tour on GetYourGuide that fit the bill perfectly. It meant another early start, but after yesterday’s 2am kick-off, a 5.40am pick-up felt like a lie-in.

Not a bus or a people carrier this time, but a Land Cruiser. There were only two other travelers on board – a bilingual couple from Texas and Veracruz – so I got the front seat. Result!

Ah, but I’m not that naive. If something feels too good to be true, it’s usually because it is.

We had one more passenger to pick up before leaving Arequipa, but in a turn of events that would probably be familiar to a US Homeland Security officer, that one passenger turned out to be a family of five – they’d simply “forgotten” to mention they’d booked for more than one.

Not for the first time, being young and single became a major liability. As the most expendable passenger, I was asked if I would be so kind as to sit in the back.

I didn’t mind overmuch at the time – after all, one thing my superzoom isn’t very good at is in-transit photography – but I hadn’t considered the terrain… or the supreme manspreading abilities of the couple squeezed in next to me. The tarmac road stops shortly after leaving the Arequipa suburb of Paucarpata. From there on out, it’s a dirt track all the way up to the salt lakes – and the road winds a lot.

For all of two hours, I was rocked about in the back of the car, bumping my head quite a bit – which is more than can be said for the state of my legs! The relief when the lakes came into view… words can’t begin to describe!

There was a fair bit of activity around the edge of the lake – mostly free-roaming llamas and alpacas, but a couple of small herds of vicuña, too.

We stopped by the lake’s edge for a closer look. The herd’s dominant male wasn’t particularly chuffed, but he had his hands (or hooves?) full keeping one of the younger males in line with much running around and snorting.

Before going out to explore the area, our driver took us to the tiny lakeside community of Chilitia for a light breakfast. As an apology for the cramped conditions of the journey, breakfast was on the house for the three of us on the back row. Granted, we’re talking a grand total of 15 soles, but the gesture was very much appreciated – my legs were still pretty sore!

As always, the stop was also an incentive to buy local alpaca products. It’s getting to the stage where I’m considering breaking a lifelong aversion to souvenir shopping, but I’m still very conscious that I have to carry everything I have on my back – and it’s already a tighter squeeze than the back seat of that Land Cruiser once my lens is packed away.

So I just contented myself with watching the llamas and enjoying the palliative effects of a coca tea.

The most amazing thing about today’s adventure was the unrestricted freedom of it. Once we’d reached the water’s edge, we were given an hour and fifteen to go wherever we wanted – even out onto the flats, if we so desired.

Music to my ears! I’d already clocked a number of things I didn’t recognise, so I was anxious to get to work.

One of the big draws of the Salinas – at least for a naturalist like me – is that all three of South America’s flamingoes can be found here. The red-kneed Chilean flamingoes stayed far out in the centre of the lake, but a few flamboyances (yes, that is the collective noun) of Andean and James’ flamingoes were a little closer to the shore, so I tried to see if I could differentiate them by sight.

It’s mainly a question of checking their legs. Chilean flamingoes have black legs with distinct red knees. Andean flamingoes have yellow legs, and James’ flamingoes have red legs. If your eyesight is sharp enough, you’ll also notice that James’ flamingoes have red lores – that is, the patch of skin between the eye and the beak. Simplicity itself!

In the winter months, these lakes dry out and turn bone white under the unforgiving Andean sun, but now it’s the shoulder season, and there’s still enough water to keep the flamingoes around. Once it’s gone, they’ll leave these mountains and make for more permanent wetlands along the coast, like the Pántanos de Villa in Lima.

I’m still a kid at heart, so I scoured the lakeside for flamingo feathers. I found three bright pink ones, but they were kind of wet (as you might expect) so I cleaned them up using a couple of napkins I’d brought along and pocketed them. When they’re properly dry, I’ll put them in my journal with the others I’ve picked up along the way.

While there’s water, the salt lakes form an altogether different kind of miracle: an enormous natural mirror, broken only by the tiny ripples around the feet of the flamingoes. It’s places like this that make you especially grateful for clouds, because under a clear sky, half the magic of these magic mirrors would be lost.

Flamingoes aren’t the only knock-kneed stars of the altiplano. A familiar and yet unfamiliar call alerted me to a couple of Andean avocets, who sounded like the ones we have back home, only… accented. As though they’re speaking a different language. Which, I suppose, they are!

This one spent a long time chasing sandpipers. I’m not sure what threat it thought the tiny little waders posed, but it wasted no time in putting all the sandpipers in the immediate area to flight.

I spent about half an hour exploring the lakeside before turning inland in search of highland species. I found quite a handful, all of which I had to look up later: cream-winged ciclodes, Andean negritos, Cordilleran canasteros and crested ducks, to name just a few.

But the star find was a pair of adorable seedsnipes – a tiny wader distantly related to the plovers, but looking for all the world like a finch-sized partridge.

If it hadn’t been for the driver whistling me back to the car (fifteen minutes early, mind!), I’d have stuck around to see if I could find some more of them.

But alas! My traveling companions were bored and had seen all they had to see, taken the selfies they wanted to take, and were ready to go home. So I was summoned back to the car and we set off on the return journey to Arequipa.

Mercifully, I fell asleep for the first hour of the journey – probably on account of the sun! – but the last hour was even more cramped than the journey up had been, with both of my neighbouring passengers spread out in slumber. Once we were back in Arequipa, it took the best part of an hour before my legs had recovered completely.

That’s enough cramped conditions for one day. I’ve found my seat on the flight for Cusco and it’s wonderfully comfy (LatAm, you are a dream come true).

It’s time to go up again. The Inca stronghold of Cusco awaits! See you on the other side. BB x

Good Friday

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hotel Riviera Colonial, Arequipa. 19.00

Some days I am extremely grateful for being an optimist. Today was definitely one of those days.

I was up at 2.30am – by far the earliest start of the whole trip – to catch the tour bus to Colca from outside my hotel (or rather, the hotel I originally booked, as they made a mistake with their booking and put me in a sister establishment seven minutes down the road). Unlike the social media savvy PeruHop, I didn’t have an awful lot to go on as to precisely which bus I was meant to be looking out for… just a vague indication that I would be picked up from my alojamiento between 2.50 and 3.20am. I got there for 2.51 at a very brisk walk, passing a couple of buses along the way, and as the time went by and no bus appeared, I began to wonder whether I had missed it. It would be a first for South America – an extremely prompt bus – but your mind plays those sorts of tricks on you when you’re tired and traveling solo far from home.

Just as the numbers on my phone’s screen switched to 3.20am, a man jumped out of a small people carrier at the end of the road and asked if I was Benjamin. I was evidently their last pick-up, because as soon as I was on board we set out on the three-hour journey to Chivay, the gateway to Colca Canyon.

Unlike my companions – Peruvian to the last man – I’m not sure I managed any sleep. The windows were so heavily fogged up with their breath that my continued attempts to clear a viewing panel never lasted any longer than a few seconds. Even so, between the twilight and the condensation, I spotted my first herds of camelids out on the altiplano. Vicuñas, I suppose – I don’t think you get guanacos this far north.

Today’s journey took me up into the Andes for the first time. We stopped at a mirador some 4.910 metres above sea level, which is easily the highest I’ve ever climbed in my life – and this isn’t even the Andes proper. The ground was covered in a thin layer of frost, turning the many hundreds of stone cairns all around into petrified snowmen. A few hardy native women wrapped up from head to toe in colourful scarves were bravely plying their wares to each and every bus that stopped by – which, this being Good Friday and thus a national holiday, was no small number.

The snow-capped peaks of the Andes were all around us now. Away to the west, one of them was producing its own clouds, billowing slowly from its summit: Sabancaya, the Tongue of Fire, a volcano that erupted into life in 2015. I’ve heard an active volcano before, way back when I was looking for mountain gorillas on the Congolese border, I’ve experienced their terrifying tremors and I’ve even seen the sky glow red from their magma, but I’ve never actually laid eyes on one.

From the frozen heights of the Mirador, we climbed slowly back down into the valley below to the town of Chivay, where we stopped for a light breakfast of boiled eggs, flatbread and a watery but absolutely delicious kind of porridge. While the others dosed up on coffee, I made sure to sift through the teabags and find the one containing mate de coca. I had a feeling I was going to need it. I even took a couple extra for the road.

From Chivay, we made straight for the canyon. The sun was just about at that optimal point in the sky for thermals, and everybody knew it. Our daring driver tried to overtake a particularly stubborn tour bus on at least four occasions, but their driver was having none of it.

Fortunately, despite the potentially alarming number of graves and shrines at the side of the road, the bus cut a safe path through the canyon, treating us to spectacular views along the way.

We reached the Cruz del Condor at around 8.45 – along with the rest of Peru, by the looks of things. And we couldn’t have timed it better! I had barely managed to get the camera strap around my neck when our guide pointed out a huge shadow cresting the ridge, right over the heads of the gathering crowd: a juvenile Andean condor. I didn’t need the lens to work that one out, since only the adults have the telltale white scarf.

I had to make a choice: climb up to the melee of the Cruz del Cóndor itself, or try my luck at the quieter vantage point further along the ravine.

I went for the former – which, in the circumstances, was absolutely the right thing to do.

I found a space for myself near the top, where a young couple had lately been taking selfies. I didn’t have to wait long. Another enormous shape – this time a fully-grown adult – came soaring up the canyon toward us.

I knew the odds at Colca were good, but I had no idea the views would be quite this good. As my guide put it, I “came prepared with the big gun”, but I might just as well have brought the 300mm, since they came so close. I might even have got the whole bird in the frame, especially when one of them flew straight overhead at so low an altitude that I could hear the whoosh of the wind in its massive wings.

I’ll be honest with you – and with myself. This is why I’m here. It was condors or bust. The Amazon tour awaits – though that feels like a very distinct holiday – and the things that I have seen so far have been incredible, but it has all been a crescendo up to this moment. I am, unashamedly, a vulture fanatic, and there probably isn’t a greater quest out there for a vulture fiend like me than tracking down the largest vulture on the planet.

Genuinely, I’d have settled for a distant sighting against the backdrop of the mighty Andes, like the one below, but somebody up there is being extremely generous.

My only regret is remembering the continuous shoot mode on my camera after I had got back onto the bus. Then again, with 1,400 photos already on my memory card out of a possible 4,000 and six days in the Amazon still to go – other adventures notwithstanding – perhaps I could afford to be conservative!

There are plenty of other high montane species to be found around the Colca Canyon, including giant hummingbirds and hillstars, but I was quite happy to give all of my time to the condors – especially as we only had forty minutes. It’s moments like these that remind me (with no small amount of relief) that I am a naturalist and not a twitcher.

That said, I did finally manage to catch up with Peru’s answer to the house sparrow, the handsome rufous-crowned sparrow, as there were a few of them scampering about the car park.

Leaving Colca and its condors behind, we returned the way we had come, stopping in the mountain hold of Maca for a bit of souvenir shopping. I’m useless at buying souvenirs, so I used the time to explore the town and its church. Earthquakes are common in this part of Peru, and Maca’s church – like every other church in the canyon – was held up both outside and in by a scaffold of supportive struts. Many of these churches date back to the time of the reducciones, when the Spanish forced the indigenous Quechua people out of the mountains and into the towns and villages, where they could be counted, controlled and – most importantly – taxed.

There are a number of statues and sculptures in town, but the one that really caught my eye was one I’d spotted on the way out, featuring an Inca warrior fighting off a conquistador. Apart from the churches, this is actually the first obvious reference to the Spanish invasion I’ve been able to find. I was expecting more. Perhaps they will become more obvious in Cusco.

The next stop on the tour took us to a river valley near Chivay famous for its hot springs. Most of the others went for a dip in the baths, along with hundreds of other Peruvians enjoying their Good Friday holiday. Following a tip-off from a blog I’d read recently, I set off in the opposite direction and climbed up into the hills, where it was significantly quieter. From there, you can see all the way up to a range of snowbound peaks where, if my guide is correct, the Amazon river is born.

I had another run-in with the tiny, sparrow-sized ground-doves that seem to be the only animal in Peru with a healthy fear of man – I hadn’t been able to catch a photo of one for love nor money! I also disturbed a tinamou, a Peruvian gamebird more closely related to the ratites (rheas, emus etc) than to the partridges and pheasants which they resemble. It too was much too quick for me, disappearing into the scrub below before I could distinguish anything more than a jagged crest. I’ll have to check later when I have signal, as there’s been precious little up here in the mountains.

Lunch was a spectacular buffet with a wide array of Peruvian options, including alpaca (tough and beefy), lamb (in a delicious green Andean sauce) and chicharrón, an old favourite. The trout soup I had for starters was one of the best I’ve ever had in my life, and tasted almost exactly the way I always imagined Yeto’s superb soup in Zelda: Twilight Princess (right down to the rich cheesy flavour).

Half of our group was suffering from the effects of mal de altura, especially the young family of four from Lima (with the possible exception of their eight-year-old daughter, who seemed utterly immune to its debilitating effects). I thanked my stars for my constitution, my luck or the coca tea I had earlier in the morning, because I didn’t seem to have been affected at all.

The return journey to Arequipa took us back across the altiplano which we had crossed in the darkness this morning. Once we were down and out of the high mountains, we reached a large stretch of Andean prairie, pockmarked with spongy pools. There was a small herd of alpacas grazing, but they weren’t alone. With the weather still holding out (and only just), I had the chance to see the vicuñas I’d only glimpsed this morning, grazing not too far from the road.

Alpaca wool is world-famous for its warmth and softness – and justifiably so – but vicuña wool is in a class all of its own. Like chamois leather, there must be something about a life lived high up in the mountains that makes their pelts unbelievably soft. I’m quite happy to see it on the body of the animal it belongs to, but I was concerned that this blog was becoming less informative and more “I went here and saw this”, so I thought a fact or two might even things out!

As well as the vicuñas, there were four other altiplano specialists in and around the pools: Andean geese, Andean gulls, a number of very handsome Puna teals and, further off, the swamphen-sized giant coots that can only be found high up in the mountains. It was only a five minute stop, and I’ll be back tomorrow to explore this part of the reserve, so I prioritised the gull and teals.

Teals of any variety are always well-dressed birds, as though the Creator gave them first choice of evening wear, but I thought these blue-billed mountain ducks were especially smart.

One last stop – a glorified toilet break, I suspect – set us down at the edge of the altiplano, with stunning views of the conical volcano that lords over Arequipa, known as El Misti. It was quite a sight as I touched down in Arequipa yesterday, but even more impressive without the sprawl of the city at its feet. The influence of El Misti is everywhere in Arequipa, also known as the White City, since most of the buildings are constructed out of the white volcanic ashlar stone that gave the city its title. It hasn’t had a major eruption since the time of the Inca Empire, more than five hundred years ago, but it remains an active volcano – and a potential threat to the city of Arequipa which lies at its feet.

Today started out potentially dicey and wound up being the best day of the adventure so far. I’ve had Good Fridays that were memorable, but this one really takes the biscuit. This was a very, very Good Friday. I’ll be sure to give the Lady of the Marshes the thanks she deserves tonight.

Once again, I am reminded that optimism is the right outlook, no matter how bad things get. It’s also categorically impossible to be worried or sad in a country as full of natural wonders as Peru.

This country has won me over. The Peruvians are so kind and seem to care a great deal more about the natural world than the average European. The salespeople understand boundaries. The food is incredible (I’m aware I’ve used the phrase “best ever” at least twice now). The mountains take my breath away, without leaving my head spinning (so far). The women are beautiful – and they give you the time of day. The plants are fascinating, the animals are incredible and the birds are nothing short of spectacular.

I’m often asked by my students which, of all the places I’ve been, is my favourite country. Spain has been uncontested for all my life, and it always will be. But at least now I have a definitive second place where there wasn’t before. Someday, God willing, I’ll be back. BB x

Penguins in the Desert

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Pariwana, Lima. 8.05.

Today is a travel day. My onward flight to Arequipa doesn’t leave until 5pm – a luxury in a trip full of early starts – so I’m having a proper rest this morning.

It also gives me ample time to give yesterday’s adventure the write-up it deserves.

When I leave Lima for Arequipa on Thursday, I won’t see the Pacific again until I return to the capital for my flight home in just over two weeks’ time. That means saying goodbye to something awesome and powerful that has been the eternal backdrop to my Peruvian adventures thus far, and trading it in for the majesty of the Andes, the longest mountain chain in the world.

I couldn’t leave without going out onto the waters of the Pacific at least once, so today I jumped onto a trip to the Islas Ballestas – the Ballista Islands – run by the Peruvian tourism colossus, Peru Hop.

Paracas is a proper schlep from Lima – four hours, to be precise – so the company’s iconic red bus picked me up at 5.30am. One of the backpackers from my hostel panicked because it wasn’t there bang on half past, which I thought was surprising from a person who had been traveling South America far longer than I. In any event, the guides came looking for us at each hostel along the way, which I thought was bloody efficient, given the size of Lima itself.

Peru goes to the polls to elect its next president on the 12th April, and there are billboards for the various presidential candidates everywhere. Comedians. Bankers. Career politicians and military generals. Relatives of former presidents. Every district seems to have its own champion. If it’s a two-horse race like it so often is elsewhere in the world, you’d never know at a glance.

I’ll be deep in the Amazon rainforest when it all goes down, but at least I’ll be here. What a time to be in Peru!

The bus to Paracas was packed – every seat taken. Mostly young backpackers, but a scattering of older couples as well. A British woman all in pink ended up next to me – pink crop top, pink smartwatch, pink nails, pink leggings, pink lipstick, pink stripes on her shoes, pink cover for her phone, pink handbag… An Essex Elle Woods if ever there were one. I suspect she was off to Pisco and Huacachina for wine-tasting and dune-buggying, rather than a tour of the national park. To quote an old friend, “you don’t need foundation for a safari”.

In Paracas, all three buses in our convoy were disgorged onto the steps of the Hotel Residencial Los Frailes, before being led straight to the jetty for the boat trip to the Islas Ballestas. Honestly, I was expecting more hassle from local touts on route, but my experience so far of Peruvian hawkers is that they are considerably less aggressive in their tactics than their African and Asian counterparts. I wasn’t hassled once.

There’s plenty to see before you even leave the still waters of the harbour. Neotropic cormorants are just about everywhere, perched on the hulls of almost every skiff in the bay, but they’re far from the most obvious residents of Paracas.

Far larger and more impressive are the pelicans, with a seven foot wingspan and standing at around five feet tall. That’s as tall as the average Peruvian woman. They’re not exactly shy, either. While they’re more commonly observed resting on boats and skiffs or crashing headfirst into the sea in a clumsy imitation of the Peruvian booby, they can often be found right at the heart of human activity. There were a few loitering around the jetty in Paracas, but I had a boat to catch, so I made a mental note to swing by later.

The Peruvian coastline from the sea is nothing short of mesmerising: undulating deserts of marbled rock set against a powder-blue sky that lightens toward the horizon. The cliffs are scored with white, a combination of thousands of years of accumulated salt and guano, the bird droppings that once made Peru one of the richest countries in South America.

One of the most iconic sights in this corner of Peru is the enormous geoglyph, “El Candelabro”. This 170 metre tall symbol was carved into the earth some 2,500 years ago and, due to the extreme scarcity of rainfall here (it rains for an average of thirty minutes a year), it has never been washed away.

Scholars believe it may be related in some way to the Nazca lines, which can be found further inland along the coast. I had originally planned to see these for myself, but they aren’t on my itinerary this year. Maybe next time.

Everyone on the boat got up on their feet to get a photo or selfie with the enormous geoglyph, but I was quite happy with the one picture I had. I was a lot more trigger-happy with the feathered denizens of the cliffs – the pelicans, boobies and Inca terns – which were fishing all around us. They made for quite an awesome sight against the backdrop of the desert.

After visiting the geoglyph, the captain turned the boat around and stepped on the gas in the direction of the islands. The Islas Ballestas take their name from the crossbow used by hunters long ago against the thousands of birds who call these craggy cliffs home.

Incidentally, that’s also where the name “booby” comes from. These beautiful seabirds were bobos to Spanish sailors – stupid – because they were so unafraid of people that they came right up to the boats, only to be captured and clubbed to death. Boobies are extremely monogamous, usually pairing just once during their lifetimes. It is said that they will perish of a broken heart if their partner is killed. As such, they are also known in Peru as “bobos románticos”.

It says a lot about the human character that we once saw such devotion as something foolish.

These islands were once home to an enormous colony of guanay cormorants – the primary source of the guano on these cliffs – but they have all but evacuated the place. The reason is not hunting or overfishing but the vicious avian flu epidemic in 2022, which cost the lives of nearly six hundred sea lions and fifty-five thousand seabirds, decimating the islands’ populations of boobies, pelicans, cormorants and penguins. The colony is slowly recovering, but the cormorants that once turned the sanctuary cliffs black and white are now just a shadow of what they once were, especially outside of the breeding season.

One of the biggest draws on the islands remains its dwindling colony of Humboldt penguins. We saw only seven of them, but there may have been others out hunting in the open ocean, as the breeding season is now long behind us. How these bipedal creatures made it high up onto the cliffs beats me, but it was fun to see them waddling down to the edge to watch us sailing by.

The last of the feathered residents of the islands that deserve a mention are its Inca terns, an especially smart seabird with handsome “whiskers” beneath its eyes. They’re known colloquially as “ladrones del mar” on account of their habit of stealing fish from the neighbouring cormorants and boobies, but I didn’t see any thieving today. On the contrary, they were showing remarkable success in their own fishing endeavours around the islands, and like most terns, they’re tremendously acrobatic and quite a joy to watch.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the fur seals and sea lions that live on these islands. They’re not as fun to photograph as the birds, and as we’re in the middle of their breeding season, we weren’t allowed to get too close to their sanctuary beach (males and females live apart, with only the dominant male having access to his mighty harem). The fur seals were mostly lounging around in the midday sun, but I did see a few sea lions chasing our boat there and back, and a mother and pup playing in the surf not too far from the boat.

The return journey to Paracas stops at a buoy, which is apparently a favourite haul-out for the seals. Why here, halfway between the islands and the coast, was not explained, though I suspect it’s because the waters are especially rich in this spot. There was a huge amount of activity from both birds and fishermen around here.

The captain drove right up to the buoy, which spooked the fur seal that was already in the water, but the others didn’t seem to troubled. It was already pretty hot, and with the waters in these parts carrying the Antarctic chill of the Humboldt current, it must be nice to have an isolated spot to come and warm up, out of reach of the blue sharks that hunt them further out to sea.

Back in Paracas, I made sure to revisit the pelicans, who clearly hadn’t gone very far since we set out. I suspect they’re enticed by a couple of savvy local touts who hope to draw in tourist traffic by keeping a few of these mighty creatures close at hand, but they didn’t give me any trouble. One advantage of having the mighty zoom lens on me is that I don’t need to get too close, especially when to comes to birds as big as the Peruvian pelican.

Swooping in to steal the spotlight, however, came a cousin of the gallinazos I spent so long with yesterday: a turkey vulture. If black vultures were the stars of yesterday’s adventure, the turkey vulture worked overtime to take its place today, starting with this happy chappie who had a large fish all to himself – once he’d scared off the kelp gulls who had found the thing first.

Seeing the vulture tucking in reminded me that, bar a light street food snack the night before, I hadn’t really eaten a square meal since departing Colombia on Monday. As such, I was quite prepared to go all out for lunch. There were plenty of spots offering ceviche, a Peruvian specialty, but I was much more interested in the parihuela, a crab-based seafood stew laced with Peruvian lime.

Honestly? One of the best meals I’ve ever had, and that’s not only because my hunger was keen. They left the entire crab in the bowl to intensify the flavour, and I very nearly ate the entire dish, defeated only by a couple of spoonfuls.

One large bowl of the stuff was enough to keep me going all day and well into the following morning. I wonder if that’s a healthier way to live? It sure makes a nice change from three school meals a day.

After lunch, I swapped buses with the tour heading into the national park. There were only nine of us including the two guides, Deborah and Paul, which made for a much more peaceful and reflective adventure into the desert. I wound up next to a chatty English girl on her gap year, who was headed for Panama and had struck it out alone for most of the journey. There seem to be quite a few types like that out here, wending their way up the continent, and with bus and flight prices being why they are, I’m hardly surprised.

The Paracas peninsula is special in that it is one of the last stretches of the Atacama Desert, the driest desert on the planet. True to form, there was very little to see by way of life from the bus. No vegetation, no water, almost no sign of life at all.

That is, except for the turkey vultures, which have a colony of their own along the cliffs.

In the late afternoon, with the wind picking up, these handsome creatures ride the thermals along the coast and can be seen at eye level as they glide up towards you from the bay below.

It’s always special to see a vulture from above, as they’re usually specks against the firmament. I’m fully expecting that to be the case with the condors, but if I should be so lucky, I might just get the same experience in Colca tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

Right – that will do for today. That took me the best part of two hours to write. Now I should really think about packing up, checking out and heading into Lima for lunch before taking my onward flight to Arequipa, the next stop on my journey.

The world around me is about to change. Quite literally, it’s only up from here. BB x

Vermilion City

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Miraflores, Lima. 15.00.

Where do I begin? Where do I even begin?

I’ll start with Uber. Lima is absolutely enormous – a 2,672 square kilometre metropolis with over ten million inhabitants – and it’s pretty daunting to get even from Miraflores to the coast, and especially when you’re lugging around some pretty expensive gear.

Uber to the rescue! For little more than the price of a meal deal, I was able to get to my destination this morning: the Pántanos de Villa, a wetland reserve sheltered within the city itself.

I actually had cold feet about my plan this morning. Was I doing some ridiculous by striking out on my own to a corner of Lima well off the usual tourist trail?

Then again, if I didn’t, would I regret it? The answer was a resounding yes, so I hailed an Uber and set out. But not before seeing my first Peruvian bird of the trip: an eared dove which was kind enough to wake me up this morning.

Uber drivers aren’t a very talkative lot, but their choice of radio is always interesting. My first had YouTube on and was watching/listening to a bizarre Peruvian comedy show featuring two men with oversized prosthetic noses commenting on the imminent Paraguay/Brazil football game. Whatever they were saying was hard to follow beneath an overactive soundboard, rotating between all the classic meme sounds after almost every line. Soundboards seem to be a feature of modern mass media, but I confess myself surprised to find it already taking root out here.

The most obvious sound by far is car horns – which are technically banned in Miraflores, though that doesn’t stop them being part of the sinfonía limeña.

The Pántanos are a sanctuary within the hustle and bustle of Lima. Even if birds aren’t your thing, it’s good to come here for a bit of peace and quiet. I got there for 8.30am, which is when the website said the reserve opened its doors, but I was told very politely that the guides would be there at 9am, if I would be so kind as to wait.

I had no issues waiting – one of the thing I was most excited to see in Peru was already here. So many of them, in fact, that I lost count.

Introducing the black vulture, known in Peru as the gallinazo, which might be translated as “enormous chicken” – which fits quite nicely, I think.

They’re about the size of a turkey, and the only sound they make is a sort of grunted sneeze. My guide, a knowledgeable young tourism grad who was working her way toward a posting in Arequipa, pointed out how skittish and shy they can be – which was the only thing she said that made me raise an eyebrow, because it feels like nothing in this country fears the presence of man like they would in Europe. I’ve never been so close to so many species in a single day. I wonder why that is?

The Pántanos’ star resident is the Siete Colores de la Totora, a seven-coloured gem of a bird that is surprisingly hard to spot as it feeds among the stems of the reeds. Seeing one would, according to my guide, be a very “buen augurio” (good omen), but I made it plain that I wasn’t here to tick boxes – I just wanted to see any and all of the magic that Peru would offer. We got incredibly lucky and saw a wild cuy, a species of guinea pig that are native to the marshes, but it was much too quick for my camera.

I had more luck with one of the reserve’s most beautiful treasures: a vermilion flycatcher, surely one of the most spectacular birds to be found in Peru – and they’re quite literally everywhere!

I needn’t have worried about the Toledo night heron being so distant, because there was one sitting right next to the visitor’s centre. I’ve never had the chance to appreciate their bright red eyes from so close, an evolutionary adaptation to hunting by night – hence the name!

Not to be outdone by the vultures, a young Harris hawk swept in to investigate the cuy situation. These incredibly intelligent birds are a favourite of falconers – if you’ve been to a bird of prey show, you’ve almost certainly seen one – but they’re native to this part of the world. They’re also one of the few species here I knew on sight!

I saw my first hummingbird of the trip: an Amazilia, I think, though I haven’t gone through my sightings with a guidebook yet. They’re damned near impossible to photograph until they land, being about the size of a finger and moving with all the agility of a butterfly. I’m trying to snap everything I see so I can log them later, but at least I recognised this little fella: a striated heron, one of a number of familiar species that are shared between Peru and – of all places – Uganda.

To reach the last circuit of the Pántanos de Villa, you have to leave the wetlands and walk about ten minutes further along the road to the coast. The road passes through a private residential estate, but they’re quite used to naturalists from the Pántanos passing through, so I was waved through without any ceremony. I could have stopped a number of times in pursuit of an unfamiliar birdcall, but I didn’t particularly want to draw attention to myself by pointing my zoom lens into somebody’s garden, so I contented myself with the mockingbirds that followed me inquisitively for half of the journey.

Out past the condominium is the Circuito de Maravilla, which – at the right time of year – hosts an enormous flock of Franklin’s Gulls, which come all the way down to Peru from their breeding grounds in the prairie lakes of central Canada and the Dakotas.

This was obviously the right time of year.

Hundreds of them had gathered at the lagoon, making ready to begin their 15,000 kilometre migration to their nesting grounds. Some were already sporting the handsome salmon pink chests and black hoods. They were joined by a huge flock of skimmers, a bizarre bird whose lower mandible is longer than its upper, so that it can skim the surface of the water to catch its prey.

Beyond the lagoon, however, is a sight even more impressive than anything I’d seen thus far. The Pacific.

If I’m mentioning it a lot, it’s because I’m bewitched. I’ve never seen or heard an ocean quite like it. It booms just like I’ve read about in books. Not the slow, salty roar of the Atlantic, but a genuine boom like a distant cannon. It has to be heard to be believed.

I had to sit and watch it for a while. I wasn’t the only one with that idea, either: I was joined in my vigil for most of the morning by a local man with a baseball cap and a Disney princess carrier bag. He simply stared out to sea for the best part of half an hour.

So did I. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who can lose time just staring at the beauty of nature.

The Humboldt current which flows up the South American coast from Antarctica keeps the water cold – and extremely productive. This is one of the richest seas in the world, and you won’t be allowed to forget it for even a moment. Gulls, terns, cormorants, boobies, pelicans and an attendant host of shorebirds are constantly in sight. I suspect I’ll have better results at Paracas tomorrow.

It wasn’t just birds, either. While I was scanning the open ocean from a washed-up palm stump, I saw something dark cresting the water, then another – and another. A whole family of dolphins were feeding just off the shore. They didn’t breach, but they stuck around long enough to count them: eight of them in all. And all because I stopped to watch the waves for a while.

The sun came out from behind the clouds around 12, at which point I thought it sensible to consider a retreat – the Peruvian sun can be a cruel god, and I hadn’t brought my sun lotion (I hadn’t expected to stay so long!). Some of the Franklin’s gulls came to say goodbye, looking even more smart in the sunlight.

I made it back to the shade of the Pántanos visitor centre and rested for a bit. I could have hailed an Uber there and then, but I wasn’t quite done with the wetlands, and when I saw a couple of visitors head into the reserve on their own, I followed suit.

No sign of the cuy, but while I was searching I saw something moving among the reeds. My buen augurio had come to see me off: a seven-coloured rush tyrant. It’s only a youngster, so it’s not as dashing as it will be in a year’s time, but that’s neither here nor there. Peruvians say they grant wishes. So I have made mine.

I could have included even more photos, but I’ll try to pace these posts – there’s simply too much to report, so I must be choosy!

I’m currently taking it easy back at the hostel. My camera definitely needs charging after a serious workout, as do my own batteries – and I could use a shower.

That’s enough work for the Nikon today, I think. I’ll switch things up tonight and explore the human side of Peru for a change! BB x

Pit Stop

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Alonso, Madrid. 20.56.

Of all the days to have for a twenty-four hour pitstop in Spain, I had to pick the one where the temperature dropped a full ten degrees. My light fleece couldn’t handle the Arctic chill of 11°C (a good warning for Peru). Tomorrow it’ll be back up to 24°C here – but this time tomorrow I’ll be far away, waiting for my connecting flight in Bogotá. I still can’t quite get my head around that.

After an exquisite dinner of rabo de toro at Las Brasas del Vulcano last night (easily one of the best if not the best that I have ever eaten), I managed a relatively early start this morning to catch the first bus to Toledo. I think I had it in my head that I’d see all sorts of wildlife along its riverbanks, but it was very windy today, and I had also promised myself I’d do Palm Sunday Mass – a much-needed blessing to give me luck in the weeks to come – so it wasn’t as busy on the nature front as I had imagined. All the same, I saw what I came all the way to see: a night-heron.

Seems a little foolhardy, no? After all, night-herons are one of the very few Old World species that you can also find on the other side of the Atlantic. However, night-herons have a special place in my heart because I can date my career as a birdwatcher to the day I first saw one of these handsome fellas in Córdoba in 2005, on the day Pope John Paul II died.

The last time I visited Toledo was in 2013, when I was backpacking across Spain on a budget of 200€. I was eighteen, my Spanish was passable and I was already dangerously underweight, on account of not really considering food and drink a necessary expense. Fortunately, I have grown up a lot since then, and learned that, of all things, food is the last thing that should be omitted from the budget.

On that mad adventure, I have a particularly distinct memory of treating myself to a sopa castellana – my first meal out in a week – and feeling like my whole body had been healed at a stroke. As such, to my mind, that simple peasant dish remains the sultan of soups. If it is on the menu, I will have nothing else.

I treated myself to an upmarket lunch as a Spanish sendoff at Restaurante Palencia y Lara – and what an incredible find it was! I can’t decide which of their sopa castellana, cordero lechal or tarta de queso was the standout.

Sopa castellana isn’t an extremely complicated dish. It only really consists of bread, egg, stock and a good few cloves of garlic. But it is a restorative like none other.

I will be traveling around a lot during Semana Santa, so while I will be in a country that also celebrates Easter properly – even if it is on the other side of the world – I will probably miss a lot of the festivities. That’s one of the reasons I insisted on seeing Toledo’s Domingo de Ramos procession, celebrated from its Catedral Primada de Santa María.

It’s been a while since the time I celebrated Palm Sunday in Rome with Pope Francis, so I’d forgotten how long the reading is (they relate the entire Passion). All in, the ceremony lasted just shy of two hours. But I have come away with a sprig of an olive branch, and I hope it will bring me luck on my travels around the Americas. I’d have brought my lucky vulture feather, but I’m a bit too attached to that to chance losing it along the way.

Toledo was stunning in the sunshine. I’m glad I came here for a pit stop, even if only for a day. It’s nice to be somewhere familiar and nostalgic before pitching myself headfirst into a world that is totally alien.

T minus ten hours. I’ve decided not to chance the first Metro of the day and booked an Uber for peace of mind. Once I make it to Barajas, I can relax a bit.

After that… well. It’s in God’s hands, I guess. See you on the other side! BB x

Five Hundred

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

When I set out for Peru next week, the number of bird species I will have seen in my lifetime will be a clean five hundred. I’d like to say I’m not usually the record-keeping sort, but that would be pretty unbelievable. The fact that I’ve kept this blog going for the best part of eleven years says otherwise. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with list-keeping, but it does border on the nerdier, birder side of birdwatching, and there is a lingering part of me that still raises a wary eyebrow at the prospect of becoming an anorak. However, since Peru is generally considered one of the world’s finest destinations for birdwatching, I thought I’d cave in for a change, do a little spring cleaning and get my affairs in order before I go. And that means working out just how many birds I have seen over the last thirty-two years or so. It took me a few days to collate the various lists I have held onto over the years, and longer still to whittle down some of the more fanciful additions that may or may not have been added in haste, leaving me with a perfectly square total of five hundred species exactly. It’s a start.

I have been very lucky. I haven’t been as committed to my old hobby as others my age, but even so, my travels have afforded me encounters with a number of species I might otherwise never have seen: pygmy cormorants in the silent marshes around Torcello, Berthelot’s pipits in the Teide caldera and Rwenzori double-collared sunbirds in the clouded hills of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. I thought I’d share a few of my favourite encounters below.

Griffon Vulture

Vultures are far and away my favourite creatures on the planet and I make no secret of that. Cinerous, Egyptian, Palm Nut, White-backed, Hooded or Griffon – I’m not fussy. Something about their enormity, the way their wingtips spread wide like fingers, the silence with which they rule the skies… It’s spellbinding. They’re easily the fondest memory I have of my year in Spain when, aged eleven, I traded herring gulls for griffons for a year. I think I can be excused for being occasionally distracted in class when a tawny giant with a nearly three-metre wingspan happened to be passing by the window. I still get the shivers when I see that silhouette, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for an even greater shadow in the sky when I go in search of an Andean condor in Peru’s Colca Canyon.

Nightjar

Something of a late discovery for me and inseparable from the Camino de Santiago, where it is the nocturnal yin to the diurnal yang of the stonechat – since both species seemed to follow me all the way from the French Pyrenees to Santiago. Nightjars can be found in the UK, but I’ve never seen them, despite searching the forests and heathlands where they are said to breed. On the Camino, however, one is so often up before the break of dawn that it’s virtually impossible not to run into these cryptic creatures at some point. Their endless churring sound must be very strange indeed to those who aren’t aware of its maker, sounding more like a giant cricket or a miniature UFO than a bird. Reports from Manu NP indicate that there may be nightjars to be found along the Madre de Dios river – I shall be keeping my eyes open.

Abyssinian Roller

I could have put any number of the more than two hundred and fifty species of bird I saw in Uganda on this post, but this one takes the top spot because of our story. Having never had any luck with European rollers in Spain, I was amazed to learn on the very first day of my stay in Uganda that there was a particularly handsome Abyssinian roller in the neighbourhood. But I’ll be damned if I thought photographing it might be a cinch – the bird gave me the run-around for most of my three-month stay, fearless and indifferent to my presence when I didn’t have my camera to hand and skittish in the extreme when I came prepared, as though it were camera-shy. In the end an act of God intervened on my behalf: an explosion of winged ants in the neighbour’s garden brought every winged insectivore within a hundred miles to the yard. With more than forty kites to worry about, plus a host of other raptors including shikras, lizard buzzards, grey kestrels and falcons, the roller had his mind on other things and I was able to get in a good shot or two. Sometimes it’s hard-fought encounters like that one that make a photo more compelling than all the editing in the world.

European Bee-Eater

Much like the roller, the bee-eater is an explosion of colour in avian form – at least, to a British birdwatcher’s eye, since most of our native birds are rather drab by comparison. They’re incredibly captivating creatures to watch as they flit through the air like oversized moths, but it’s their call that I love the most: a cheery whirrup that heralds the spring in Spain just like the merry twitter of the swallow in Britain. The sound alone makes me feel warmer – it takes me back to the sands of El Rocio and the dusty scrubland between the Madre de las Marismas and the Palacio del Acebron. One day, it may be warm enough for bee-eaters to colonise the UK. They have bred here with occasional success in the last few years, but it remains to be seen whether they will follow the example of the egrets and move in for good. A part of me hopes they don’t – they are far too tied to my image of Spain as a special paradise. Some things you should have to travel to behold, to see with your own eyes. That’s what I think.

Purple Swamphen

What list would be complete without one of my all-time favourites – the bird that probably kickstarted my obsession with Spanish birds? The purple swamphen is unmistakeable: a moorhen on steroids, with bigger feet, a bigger face-shield and a bigger attitude. I saw them first in El Acebuche, but since then I have found them in several other places: the rice paddies of the Brazo del Este, Uganda’s White Nile river and under the Roman Bridge in Merida. Like griffons, they lose nothing with each successive encounter, and I confess that my eyes are always on swivel-stalks whenever I’m crossing the bridge in Merida in the hope of catching one of them in the reeds below.

Red and Black Kites

WordPress won’t let me upload the images I have of the hoopoe, Iberian magpie and Montagu’s harrier, which would bring the total to ten, so I will have to finish with another old favourite: the kite. Specifically, it’s black kites that have always held sway in my heart, due to their association with the Elysian stone-pine forests of the Raya Real, but since red kites have pretty much exploded in number in the UK in my own lifetime, they’ve earned a spot in this list too. Despite nearly twenty years of active pursuit, I have yet to take a decent photograph of a black kite (in my defence, I have often been without my camera when the right moment presented itself). Had I brought my DSLR with me on the Camino last summer, I would have had the opportunity of a lifetime when I stumbled – quite by chance – upon a feeding frenzy for the local kite population in a rugby field a day’s march from the Spanish frontier. But, I didn’t, so I just took a few photos on my phone and watched the spectacle.

Kites are something of a bait-and-switch story for me. Since their whistling call was used in the BBC’s Land of the Tiger whenever vultures were on screen, I came to associate that sound with those kings of the sky. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised that vultures are pretty much silent (when they’re not squabbling over a carcass, that is), but by then the spell had already been cast. I would travel all the way to the Raya Real just to hear that sound. Of course, I’d go for more than that: the music-box melodies of a nightingale, the flute-song of a golden oriole, the oop-oop-oop of a hoopoe, the beak-clacking serenade of a stork and the descending whistle of a woodlark. But even if all those voices should fall silent, leaving nothing but the trill of a kite, I’d still make that journey. That’s how precious a single sound can be.

T minus one week. It’s getting closer! BB x

Bitterns and Boomers

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The Flat, 21.03.

It can be done! After living in Somerset for the best part of two years, I finally made it to the Avalon Marshes. It’s a little out of the way – as fenlands often are – and, being without a car of my own, impossible to reach outside of term-time, but with a little planning I managed to successfully navigate the one bus there and back again after school this morning. Worth it? Absolutely!

The Avalon Marshes are a network of pools, channels and reedbeds that stretch from the west of the festival town of Glastonbury across the Somerset Levels. Being naturally averse to crowds, Glastonbury and its ilk have never even crossed my mind as a way to spend the summer, so I’ve never had any cause to come this way before. Evidently, I was missing out. This mystical corner of the British Isles has a real charm to it. The 376 bus dropped me off outside The Royal Oak in neighbouring Street and I struck out across country for the marshes from there. Along the way, I walked in the sightline of the legendary Glastonbury Tor. It was a balmy spring day – the fourth in a run of consistently sunny days – so the Tor was drawing a growing crowd of sun-seekers, like a sweet on an anthill. If I had a little more time, I might have gone and had a look myself.

The magic started before I even reached the Glastonbury Canal that runs into the fens. I had just come upon the first of the reedbeds that herald the Avalon Marshes when I heard the sound that I had come here for: a low, pipe-like boom. A sound that inspired many a myth and folktale in the British Isles, and that once was surely heard all across this island. The noise belongs to the great bittern, a singularly beautiful and cryptic variety of heron that is surely the prince of the fens. I can’t remember whether or not I have ever conclusively heard a booming bittern before – my memories of a possible encounter with one in Stodmarsh when I was a lad are a bit hazy – so I have hesitated to add them to my life list thus far.

Today, however, I was left in no doubt. I must have heard at least six different individuals booming all across the fens, including one that was so close that I could swear I heard its resonant intake of breath before each boom. The great bittern is a master of camouflage, however, with a plumage so perfectly suited to its life within the reedbeds that it is almost completely invisible when “bitterning”, so despite the fact that they were making enough noise to be heard from Glastonbury, I never saw so much as a feather. But I wasn’t disheartened in the slightest. Just to hear that booming sound was worth the journey out here. I’ll have to do it again sometime.

While I was scanning the reeds for one of the bitterns, a swan came swimming by, giving me something to train the lens on.

The swans weren’t the only great white birds in the marshes. Another species that has drawn me to the Avalon Marshes today is the Great White Egret, a relative newcomer to the British Isles. The largest of the egrets is actually a heron, a fact that is obvious from its size, which is considerable. I’ve seen these beautiful birds before on the continent, but this would be the first time I’ve seen one here in the UK. When I was a kid, this would have been a very rare find, but much has changed since then. The Avalon Marshes have around fifty breeding pairs, which is frankly ridiculous, considering that they only started breeding here a few years ago. Even the other birdwatchers in the Avalon Hide barely batted an eyelid when one flew into view. It’s a sign that, no matter how bad things may seem, life always finds a way.

On that note, I feel I have to talk about one of the things I haven’t missed about birdwatching: the manspreading. The term didn’t exist when I was a kid, but it certainly does fit the bill.

I thought I’d check out the Avalon Hide to see if I could find one of those elusive bitterns, but it had been staked out by a very different group of boomers, who had each selected a window to themselves and laid out their gear all about them: a panoply of scopes, binoculars and cannon-like lenses that made even my monster zoom lens seem like a hand gun. Only one window was available, which looked out back the way I had come. I stuck around for about twenty-five minutes, listening to their familiar birder-talk, but it quickly became apparent that they meant to stick around until sunset to see if either the bitterns or the resident barn owl would make an appearance, and as I had to catch a bus home, I had to cede the hide to them.

I explored the “cattle class” alternative screens below the tower, very much aware of the scopes poking out of the windows above me like artillery. Sometimes a bird-hide can look a lot like a pill-box.

A friendly chap and his wife restored my faith in the hobby when they pointed me in the direction of a water rail they had just seen, but it never did reappear from its hiding place in the reeds, so we went out separate ways with a shrug. Fortunately for me, there was plenty to see: perhaps sixty or seventy shovelers out on the lake, along with attendant flocks of gadwall, mallard, tufted duck, teal and coot, as well as a few noisy great-crested grebes. Most of them were much too far for even my faithful 500mm, but a robin that followed me out of one of the hides was perfectly happy to let me take his photograph, which definitely made up for it.

As this was my first sortie to Avalon, I didn’t want to end up stranded by missing the last bus home, so I left with plenty of time to get back to Glastonbury. It was a quiet walk once I’d put the birders and the bitterns behind me, and I only ran into two other walkers out with their dogs along the trail. There seems to be a small gypsy community on the edge of the marshes – something about the layout of their encampment seemed strangely familiar, not to mention the presence of two old and very battered horse-drawn caravans in the yard. When I reached the edge of the marshes, I stopped to look back in the direction I had come, and when I turned back to Glastonbury I saw something staring back at me from the edge of the reeds. I thought it might have been a muntjac at first, but it was much too big for that. It was, of course, one of our native roe deer. Fearless as ever, it didn’t even flinch when I raised my camera.

One thing’s for sure: I’ll be back. It’s only a £3 bus ride from Taunton and, while the return journey is broken up with a layover in Somerton, it’s perfectly doable in a day. I’ll be back for the bitterns, either later in the spring or next year, depending on how busy my duty weekends are after the holidays.

This time next week, I’ll be in Madrid. From there it’s only a matter of hours until I set out for South America. That has come around shockingly fast. I’m starting to get very excited! I’ve had a full month to put the camera through its paces and I think I’ve got the hang of the lens and its demands now – the way it handles, the settings it requires for optimum output and, of course, its weight. Now all I need is to be out there already. Thank you Avalon for being the last stage of boot camp for my trusty Nikon companion. Here’s to the next grand adventure! BB x