Iguana Break Free

We took a day to go sight-seeing.  First stop was the Jaguar Rescue Centre where, inevitably, there were no jaguars but then perhaps the guy named it after his car.  It was however, a really interesting place with the tour guide giving us a very entertaining and impassioned explanation of what each of the animals were doing there, sometimes as the result of calamitous human intervention but often just accidents in the wild.

This little guy (or maybe gal) really liked licking people because apparently we're just walking salt licks...

And these sloths were pretty cool.  In addition to these big guys, they'd just taken in a brand new baby who was being hand-fed.

You were also allowed into a very enclosed cage with young spider monkeys but no cameras allowed in there and, having once had a pair of glasses whipped off my face by a monkey (and then just snapped in front of me for good measure), you get no complaints from me about that policy.

It;s hard to beat toucans though.  This one just tore about the place!  You could touch his beak but seeing as what I saw him doing mostly was biting stuff, I declined that offer.

Most animals and birds here are being trained to leave their cages and hunt for release back to the wild but some, they know, will never hunt again, so they have to come up with alternative plans.  An old ocelot was going to be released back into a specially acquired reserve so that he could die as a free animal - this is tougher than watching a lassie movie!

After the rescue centre, we took a walk through the rain-forest, which runs right up to the sea.  You really need to do these walks with a guide because these guys see everything.  We'd only walked two metres and he stopped us to see if we could spot 3 iguanas in the trees nearby.  It took us about 5 minutes to find them and that was only because we knew we were looking for something.  In a two hour walk, we saw snakes, sloths, monkeys and ate some termites (because lunch was included).  Actually I wasn't crazy about the termites - they tasted rather like wood, unstrangely enough.  And Paul, by the way, was remarkably adept at spotting sloths.  I'm not sure if this is some secret middle-management talent...

Last stop on the wildlife front was an Iguana farm.  Now, these things really do look amazing.  Literally, relics from a different age.

The females lay about 75 eggs, of which, in the wild only about 5% survive, but on the farm, they were rearing about 40% of them and from there, they were being reintroduced to habitats in which they were endangered.

Mind you, I kept calling them goannas, so despite all those facts and figures I just quoted, I couldn't have been paying enough attention.

And that'll do fauna.