No Bread from David

Hi Travellers,

Today we thought we would take a little trip into Santa Fé to do some Internet and check out the town. After another sumptuous breakfast, Kevin offered us a lift down the muddy clay road to our car. The road had dried out some to the point where it was no longer treacherous to walk down the hill but we thought it was still bad enough that the Toyota would not be able to make it.

Kevin had assured us that it was safe to leave the car back at the intersection where the dirt road started. He said that people left vehicles there all the time due to the condition of the road and that there was never a problem. It’s nice to know that this is a safe area.

We drove down the hill to the bridge, around two kilometers from where we had parked. This area is hilly cattle country and you will see lots of cattle in the fields along the side of the road. You will usually see Cattle Egrets (buff-backed heron) hanging around the cattle as they feed on some of the bugs the cattle attract and the cattle tolerate them because there are less bugs when they are around.

The Santa Fé town site is hilly, somewhat reminiscent of the hills in New Westminster. You have to be careful the nose of the car does not scrape the pavement when you reach the bottom of one hill and the start of the next. It is a poorer area although the houses are, for the most part, kept painted and clean. It is not uncommon to see people on horseback here.

We headed to the Information Center where we found a small building containing computers lining the walls. An empty table was in the center of the room so we sat down and dug out our computers. Of the dozen or so computers available, about five or six were being used. Once I was connected, I found 115 emails waiting to be loaded. The connection was very slow so I investigated and found that although the wireless connection was the most current technology the place was connected to the Internet by satellite which means not very good performance for anything more than email and basic Web surfing. There are no land lines here either so you cannot get a telephone and the DSL technology that accompanies it. Everyone here uses cell phones.

The process I use to produce this blog is to write the text offline using Windows Live Writer. Once I get a connection, I upload the text to the blog and then I have to upload all the pictures, which takes more time. So, in Santa Fé, I could upload the text but I could not wait long enough for all the pictures to load. Both text and pictures need to be assembled using a live connection. So we elected to stay incommunicado until we get to our next destination in Gorgona at the beach, tomorrow where we will have a solid Internet connection in our suite. Bet you thought Andrea was in jail!

We stopped at a little hostel that had a restaurant attached, thinking we would order lunch. The menu came, delivered by a young man from the Netherlands. It had the customary Spanish and English descriptions that we are now used to. We ordered sandwiches and after consulting with his cook he returned to apologize that they had no bread due to the blockade of the Pan-American Highway west of here nearer David (pronounce Da Veed). We thought that this must be pretty special bread to be coming all that way, especially when we went into the grocery store on the corner and found the bread shelf full. Anyways, we had a drink and left to return to our resort.

We elected to walk from the junction of the paved and mud roads. The clay had dried pretty well but the ruts were still a problem. Here are a couple of shots of that short road. The last one is of the rutted hill that kept us from driving the last 25 M to the resort.

Back at the resort, I visited one of the feeders again for the last time and got a few more Motmot images for you. The duck , today’s feature image, decided to sit on this fence post which is also quite close to the feeder. I guess he was wondering what he was missing.