Trinidad and Venezuela in (very few) pictures!

Photo uploading is REALLY slow here, so we've only been able to get the absolute highlights up onto Picasa so far. We'll have to flesh things out some other time! But, here is a visual taste of what we've been up to over the last 10 days or so:

On our first day in Trinidad, we visited the Caroni Bird Sanctuary, where we watched many specimens of the beautiful national bird, the scarlet ibis, fly home to their nests at dusk. Here is the sunset off our boat at the sanctuary:

Here you can see eggs dropping out of a leatherback turtle into the hole it dug on the beach on the east coast of Trinidad. Awesome.

And here we are cradling newborn baby leatherback turtles gently in our fingers !
We spent a day at beautiful Maracas Bay beach on Trinidad's north coast, and Andy constructed a masterful sand castle. I dubbed it "D Castle" in the local dialect. (What you can't see in this picture is my nearby failed castle, washed away by the waves, dubbed "D Ruins.")

This is the ferry boat we took from Chaguaramas, Trinidad to Guiria, Venezuela. (Not so big, is it? I took a Dramamine and slept most of the way.) Just 3.5 hours of ocean crossing and 3.5 hours of Venezuelan health, immigration, and customs hassle!

This picture is from La Piscina, a snorkeling area of beautiful coral off of Santa Fe, on Venezuela's Caribbean coast, where we stayed by the beach for two nights with a friend we made on the ferry, Andrew from Manchester. (Hello, Andrew!). Andy, using the waterproof camera, captured this interesting fish:


And here is the huge iguana we made friends with on the beach of Isla Arapo, part of Mochaima National Park, on the same boat trip:



Pabellon is the national dish of Venezuela: black beans, rice, shredded meat, and fried plantains. Yum. (Extra yummy is that the dish you see here only cost 18 bolivares, or $3.)

The spectacular Salto Angel, or Angel Falls, highest in the world. To get here, we had to fly in a five-seater plane for an hour (yipes), ride in a glorified canoe upriver for four hours, and trek an hour into the rainforest up some steep, slippery slopes. Was it worth it? Yeah, we think so.
We slept in hammocks in a camp across the river from the falls. This is a shot Andy took of the falls from near our camp just after sunrise the next morning.

On the same trip we also visited Salto Sapo, a falls you can walk behind. Here's a pic Andy took from behind the falls before it got really wet (we were totally drenched on the other end!)

And here's a shot out the window of our five-seater on the flight back to Ciudad Bolivar. Note the other small plane nearby...

That's all we have for now. We're heading out on a two day tour of the Gran Sabana area in the south of Venezuela tomorrow, to see more falls and rivers and savannah lands, and then it's off to Brazil, where we REALLY don't speak the language. Wish us luck!