Huffin and Puffin

I'm not sure where my fascination with puffins came from, but I was talking to a Scottish colleague when I was in South Sudan and she mentioned that puffins come to the Isle of Skye where she lives every year around April/May. An invitation was extended for me to visit, and as luck would have it, I had to go to the UK for work in May, so I was happily able to accept. Her neighbour captains a tourist boat, and he told me not to get my hopes up of seeing any puffins, as he hadn't spotted any for a couple of weeks and I might have left it too late. I resigned myself to having missed out, but went on a little boat trip anyway and was happy enough to spot a Golden Eagle and some seals.

After cruising around on the boat for a while, the captain suddenly cut the engine and we drifted towards three little birds bobbing in the water. I wasn't sure what I was seeing at first, but then the bright beaks became apparent and I squealed with delight. Unfortunately we couldn't get too close to them without scaring them underwater, so the photo above was digitally zoomed as far as my camera could cope. They were just so cute and expressive and I'm so glad they'd decided to stick around a little longer before their migration. Puffins!!

La Vultures at La Ventana

I've started avoiding photographs of famous places I plan to go to, so as to not spoil the surprise when I get there. The Iguazu Falls in Argentina were a slightly different case in point, as I really didn't know much about them to begin with, but was told by many other travellers that they were a must see. So I got on a bus in Buenos Aires and travelled for about 20 hours to reach the falls, which span across Brazil and Paraguay as well. It was a lovely warm and sunny day, which was lucky as any package to the falls includes a boat ride in which the pilot takes the boat under a waterfall, saturating everyone. Great fun indeed! Since I had no idead what to expect, I was eagerly awaiting the first waterfall. Well, it was a piddly little thing, and next to it was another small fall and so on. But then suddenly, there were huge waterfalls, stretching as far as the eye could see, and the roar of all that water was astounding.

After the boat ride, it was a short hike up on a nearby island, full of lush greenery and lizards and shade. My Spanish, though rusty, allowed me to translate the directional sign to La Ventana: The Window. The rocks, as you see, form a window that loks into one of the most impressive waterfalls in the area (though this is dwarfed by the incredible Garganta del Diablo - the Devil's Throat fall). And it must have been an excellent feeding ground, as there were many vultures circling around, and smaller birds darting in and out of the water.

These two vultures seemed particularly lazy in comparison to them.

Flight of the Flamingo

At 4125 metres above sea level, in a place called Laguna Hedidonda in Bolivia, there are thousands upon thousands of flamingos. During mating season, this number can rise to over fifty thousand, which I imagine would look like a shocking sea of pink. I didn't see fifty thousand, but I watched in awe at the strange grace of these gangly birds; all necks and legs. The flamingos spend their days hanging out in lagoons filled with borax, that's the white stuff, which we more commonly find in cleaning products (and which I've long said coats the water pipes in Brisbane causing the water to taste funny!). We've all heard the saying "as happy as a pig in mud" (evidence of which will be presented here at a later stage), but watching these birds led me to coin the phrase "as happy as a flamingo in borax"...go on, use it in conversation today!