Food for sustenance, a feast for the eyes and for nourishing your soul as well, we covered all of these points today as we explored the Pacaya-Samari Reserve along the Pacaya River. There are approximately 40,000 people living along what is called the buffer zone of the park. Fishing is allowed along the perimeter we traveled today and there were several boats of locals out catching fish either with gill nets, hand line, or throw nets. We admired their catch as we continued upriver.

Park Rangers were out early this morning working on a project to help out the yellow-spotted river turtle. Local people have historically eaten the eggs of these turtles and it has reached a point where the turtles need a little assistance in making sure there are still breeding pairs in the environment. We watched as a skiff with two rangers stopped along the shore, one ranger climbed the muddy bank a few feet up, dug a little into the ground and pulled out a turtle egg! What amazing sleuths to see the signs of turtle tracks amongst a myriad of mud and to key in within moments to the turtle nest. These eggs will be brought to an incubator at the ranger station, hatched out, and the baby turtles will be released back into the reserve.

For the afternoon we jumped into a lake deep in the reserve.  Our swimming partners were, well, I won’t tell you here. I’ll let one of our young explorers with us this week, Jacob Browning, age 11, tell you about the day in his own words.

“This morning we went on a skiff ride down the Pacaya River. And I saw monkeys, vultures, and some fish. One fish jumped in our skiff and hit Rudy. After that we went to the Jungle Café to eat breakfast and there was a pink river dolphin that kept coming up. It was the first time I ever had white glove service in the jungle!

Rudy talked to us about monkeys.  There is only one nocturnal monkey, the night owl monkey. We probably won’t get to see any of those. The biggest monkey is the red howler monkey. We saw two of those on our afternoon skiff ride.

This afternoon, we were going to swim with the pink dolphins in a large lake. On the way, we saw four capybaras. They looked like big guinea pigs. They were the size of a pig. One of them was a baby. These are the largest rodents in the world.

It was fun to swim in the lake. We saw a bunch of pink dolphins and they were really close!  It was really hard to get a picture of them, though. 

On the way back a fish jumped right into Zander’s lap and he almost lost his breath.”

Definitely a day that entertained our inner child, fed our curiosity, and in the beauty of this expansive reserve, fed out souls.