This morning was fairly cool in terms of the temperature, but extremely cool in terms of the activities. The first activity that my team participated in was Mammal Monitoring. We started off with learning about all of the different mammals that live in The Panthera, we put our long rain boots on, sharpened our machetes and went straight into the rain forest. We walked through an Aquajal for 3 km looking for peccaries since we could hear that they were in the area. Once we spotted them and figured that they were coming in our direction we started climbing trees in case they became protective of their babies and attacked. They did not end up attacking us but it was fun watching them from the trees since the view was much better. After that we walked back to the dorms, played some card games and ate some lunch.
Later on we had a survival skills lesson in which we have learned that the most important things for survival in the jungle are: water, fire, shelter and food. In addition to that nobody should enter the jungle without a lighter, knife and a machete; real life is much different than the movies and it is not as easy as it looks like to make fire by rollingsticks against each other. The easiest way to get water in our jungle was chewing the core of the water cane tree at all times of the year or bamboo during winter. We have used dry palm tree leaves to start the fire and created the shelter out of sticks and big green palm tree leaves. Then we had some natural snacks which included a great source of fat and protein – termites as well as the core of the palm tree, which tasted like nuts. Burning termite nest kept the mosquitos and other insects away from us, to make sure that we were safe and sound! When we got back to the dorms, we had some dinner and enjoyed watching the beautiful sunset.
-AgaJachimska
EGL Family Abroad 