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Wattled Jacana, Uraba, Colombia
Opening the set for day 2 in Uraba, Colombia. Plan for the day was to visit the indigenous community living in an enormous mangrove area. To make way there, you start from the local dock, fair through the canal, and then 20 minutes into the open sea.
The canal is heavily used for the export of bananas. They are placed in containers on large flat carriers, which are dragged into the open sea from where they're loaded onto bigger ships. The canal is heavily secured. Each carrier has dedicated staff to ensure nobody puts extra "goods" onto the ships. Furthermore, there's dedicated military boats, one of which stopped us. A lot of machine guns approaching you may come across as intimidating, but they really are friendly, constructive, reasonable, and just doing their job.
They asked for permission to make a photo of us for book keeping. Jokingly, I said that given the differences in hardware between the two boats, approval was no problem. They laughed and took off.
Still in the canal, we settled on shore on the sides to do some quick birding, but it was at quite a distance.
The Wattled Jacana, "Jacana jacana", is a wader which is a resident breeder from western Panama and Trinidad south through most of South America east of the Andes.
comments (3)
They're after getting their military card. You can't get ahead without that card. You can't go and study, most employers wouldn't consider you without that card. Once in the military ("voluntarily" or just picked up from the streets and loaded into the truck), our guide told us there's a game of chance where you draw a colored ball. The color determines the location they sent you to.
Another fun occasion was where the soldiers in Bahia Solano (until recently a relatively dangerous place) told us to keep our headlights on during the night tour (you sometimes turn them of when looking for owls). It was just a thought that indeed, perhaps sneaking up to a Colombian soldier in a disputed area at night is not the best of ideas. Posted 7 years ago