I´ve been out of touch the last few weeks, because I have been volunteering in another sanctuary, this one very close to the Amazon jungle near a small town called Mera.
The sanctuary, Merazonia (http://www.merazonia.org/drupal/?q=home) couldn´t really have been more different from my last animal sanctuary but it was an interesting and beautiful place to spend a few weeks.
Getting there began with a bit of a drama. Getting off the bus at what I thought was this tiny town called Mera, I checked with the driver in my best Spanish (esta Mera centro?) which of course means ïs this Mera central?. I got an affirmative and off I hopped, and sat down to wait to be collected. After a while I knew that things didn´t feel right. I had been told to stay where the bus dropped me off, but also in the email it had said that there was a small town square. I was sitting where the bus had dropped me off, but there was no square in sight. I waited a bit longer and then after about 45 minutes, I knew something was wrong. I spied a blonde girl and went to ask her if there was some kind of central square anywhere nearby. She said that there wasn´t really and was I sure that they were to pick me up here and not in nearby Puyo. Yes I announced confidently, it was definitely Mera. ¨You´re in Shell, not Mera, Mera is the next town over, 15 minutes by car¨. Cursing my situation, I thanked her, and jumped into the nearest taxi, feeling that surely, an hour later, they wouldn´t still be waiting. But they were, amazingly, and the journey began!
To get to Merazonia, it is a 30-40 minute hike which would probably be quite pleasant without your pack, but with it, was pretty exhausting. Donned in gumboots I finally made it and got given a quick tour of the place, vowing that the next time I walked that trail would be to leave again. I had decided that I would rather live in complete isolation of the modern world anyway while I was there. An absolutely beautiful setting, the sanctuary isn´t right in the jungle, but in thick forest officially called Cloud Forest due to it being slightly higher in altitude. Whatever you call it, it was beautiful isolated, and I was quite impressed with their construction with volunteers having built everything that we used, including the kitchen, toilet and shower block (complete with composting toilet and gas showers to make them hot - one thing that Mera had plenty of was water)and the dining area/sleeping building which was an impressive 3 story wooden structure.
Our work, and this is where the sanctuarys really differ from each other, consisted more of construction level stuff with only little bit of animal care. Coming from La Sende Verde, with 50+ animals and all the work focussing solely around that, I was a bit surprised to find that there were only 3 tamarinds, 2 capuchins and 5 birds. It was definitely still a place in progress. However, I kept myself busy, painting, varnishing, fixing paths among other things. The other major difference between the two sanctuarys were the fact that in Bolivia, the animals were never going to be able to be released (I think it is much harder to release rescued animals there) so we were able to handle them a bit more (not handle but let them interact with us if they wanted to). Here, the hope is that one day they might be able to go back into the wild, so we were discouraged from letting them come to you. While I understand both points of view, from an experience point of view, obiviously the former will be more interesting for a volunteer, but although I am cynical about them ever being able to release the animals (due to too much input with them already) I really respected what they were trying to do.
One of my favourite animals that I saw there was the tamarind, a monkey I previously had never seen, and was surprised when i finally saw it. It looks nothing like a traditional monkey, not using its tail but has really strong arms and legs. It is tiny and the adult tamarinds remind me of lions. The baby one looked exactly like the worm in Labyrinth (¨Ello¨¨did you say hello¨, ¨No I said ello but that´s close enough¨). I´ll post a picture of the baby when I get a chance on this post and you can make your own mind up.
Anyway, the experience was interesting and mostly enjoyable. I do realise now that my passion with this sort of thing lies more with a sanctuary that is a little further on in the process (i.e fully up and running and having animals). It´s the animal part that was so incredible with the last one, and although I did enjoy my time at the sanctuary (and it will be great once it gets going), my experience was less to do with the animals than I had originally anticipated.
Of course, I spent my 29th birthday there. It was a pretty quiet affair although one of the women made me a cake (well two actually) so that was nice. I missed being around my friends of course, but getting to the internet today to read all my birthday messages put a smile on my face.
