When we arrived in Buenos Aries at the start of our trip, we were very excited to see Monk Parakeets strolling around the lawns. Half an hour, and many photographs, later we had noticed that everyone else was ignoring them because they are so common! That was our introduction to a group of birds (parakeets, parrots and macaws) that we grew to be very fond of over the course of our journey. The sound of a flock of parakeets flying overhead became something of a home comfort to us. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Amazon
Birding from the Yellow Van I: An overview by two complete amateurs
Filed under Topics
Birding from the Yellow Van II: A more detailed record for the keen
There are so many places to see birds in South America, covering a wide variety of habitats and ecosystems. In the second part of our blog about our experiences of birding in South America, I will talk a bit about some of the places we visited. To make it a bit more cohesive, I have roughly grouped them into seven themes, each with its own accompanying gallery of some of our favourite photos. Continue reading
April down the Amazon II: Down river to Manaus
One thing that Becca has repeatly said during our trip is that she would like to see an opera at the opera house in Manaus. Manaus is right in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, on the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon, and emerged as the capital of the rubber boom in the late nineteenth century. When things were going well, it was such a rich city that building a grand opera house, importing marble etc. from Italy, seemed a reasonable thing to do! Manaus is down stream from Iquitos in Peru, so once we had done our conservation trip, we thought it would be an interesting experience to travel down the Amazon by boat to get there.
April down the Amazon I: Doing a bit for conservation
Something like a third of South America is taken up by the basin of the river Amazon. The outflow into the Atlantic is greater than the next seven largest rivers in the world combined and accounts for 20% of the freshwater flowing into the world’s seas. So we just had to visit it at some point on our trip. After spending the last week of March 2016 with a bit of a beach holiday in Zorritos on the north coast of Peru, we flew to Iquitos on Friday 1st April to start our Amazonian adventure with a conservation cruise up river of Iquitos. Part II of our Amazon blogs will describe our journey down the Amazon to Manaus in the heart of Brazil. Continue reading
Filed under Postcards
Yellow Van Days 