So it was our second day in Tinkerani but we had a few issues with our return travel. To cut a long story short there were some potential issues with a little bit of civil unrest, road closings, poor weather for flying and possibly a small issue of confusion over what day it actually was. What day actually was it anyway? Because of this poor Dilwyn had been volunteered to trek back to Cuti to the satellite phone to make a few enquiries which left the rest of us to go trekking in the rainforest. Overnight we had some more illness this time with Clover and Jemma falling ill.
We went trekking with some of the kids from the village and some of the local teachers and we were led by Haimi. In fact not only did he lead us but he took us across the river where it was too dangerous to swim on a very small traditional raft one at a time. Carlos made me go first to obviously test it was safe and with a break down in our communication I thought he told me to lie down on my stomach which was to great amusement to everyone watching as I lied down as if it was a surfboard! I was then told to sit on it so sat down on it only to find that as we started to cross that the river flowed over it making my bum very wet – the best way I found out as other people crossed was to crouch down on it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBQd-bM5LOo
The rainforest walk was amazing just seeing some of the size of the vegetation such as the tree shown in the video thought to be around 500 years old. It was beautiful walking in such an amazing environment that I had never experienced before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3xFS8wa0rI
When we returned to camp Clover was feeling really bad and when you read on you may see why she went to bed, I think she knew exactly what was going to happen at the village meeting later on in the afternoon!
Dilwyn had returned and so we went to the village meeting where we discussed the work of Cool Earth, Ecotribal and what we were all doing there. We gave gifts and then we were given gifts. We then watched some performances and were entertained such as by the bird man who was brilliantly talented at bird calls.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P1ivYcUcbw
Then we were asked to do a performance ourselves… What? I at first thought perhaps I had misheard them – nope they definitely wanted s to do some sort of performance, we had a chat about what we could possibly do but we didn’t all seem to know the words to anything. Oh dear now I know why Clover was back at camp being ill, also for some reason Carlos and Dil were not to be involved and Matthias was also too ill to help in the performance. What came next was all that can be described as sweet music! I just wish that we could recreate that magic that happened there in the village here back home and we could be in with a chance of winning X factor. Seriously it was bad but they all seemed to enjoy it. You can watch the video clip below of the performance (if you can call it that. Please note the only reason I have not deleted this and have not put it live on the internet is because although it is something I am not completely proud of I am less embarrassed about it than some of my colleagues hence here it is.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNnM2mVFGYU
One of the best things about that performance was that Clover could actually here it all from her sick bed quite a distance away. So as we weren’t going to change our daily routine we all went down for a swim and a wash in the river – today it was much slower and me and Matthias had a swim around and managed to see two fishing spiders catching small fish on the bank of the river which was really cool.
It was going to be our last evening in Tinkerani and as it was going dark we began to see loads of bats and I mean lots of them. We had seen them before but there were so many which seemed odd however as dusk came we then realised why. As we sat down for dinner we quickly became dinner ourselves, talk about the last supper. It was if after the storm in the last day or so a million new flies had started their life cycle in the village, no wonder the bats were here and very active however there were simply too much food for them as they all disappeared probably because they were too heavy to fly. Our last evening was to be a feast but we were the buffet!
We woke up early in the morning and planned to start trekking back to Cuti at around 8am, we started to pack up the tents and discovered that we had been sleeping on a load of toads – now that’s why we had such a good sleep. We were angry at the toads as we felt they were not really doing their jobs properly as instead of sleeping under our tents they could have been eating all teh flies that were attacking us. In fact in a bizarre twist of fate we discovered the camps unusual food chain. The flies at us, which in turn were eaten by the toads but as you can see in the videos below when we discovered the frogs so did the chickens, so the chickens ate the toads which was interesting because we had been eating the chickens. Don’t ask me who was the top of the food chain? Possibly the flies!