Bird Watching
What is it with you people? Pictures, pictures, pictures, all you want is pictures! What, don’t you ever read any books that have just words? I know you do, so what’s wrong with a few blog postings without pictures? Give me a bit to settle in and get comfortable toting a camera around here. Thankfully, lucky for you, today I have a posting chock-full-o-pictures for you!
Yesterday I went bird watching. No, I’m not an avid ornithologist, though I can appreciate a beautiful bird as much as anyone, but I am someone to not pass up too many opportunities to get out of town and see the country. So I joined a trip organized by the Community Liaison Office (CLO) and got my first trip out of Monrovia. Destination, Lake Piso by Robertsport, along the coast well north of here.
Now some of you have insinuated that I am actually not in a developing country (not even in Liberia in some comments), I hope you start believing otherwise soon, because traveling in this country is not easy and this is the dry season, when traveling is supposed to be very easy. I guess “easy” is a relative term. For example, although Robertsport is one of 10 or so towns along the coast that actually appears on most maps, the last 43 km (yes, they use km here, that’s about 27 miles) look like this:
And if you look carefully, you see the typical riffles that mean it’s a well-worn road guaranteed to give you a very bumpy ride. In fact, I once took a 60 mile short cut using 4 different logging roads through the Cascade Mountains that gave a smoother ride than the one I had yesterday. Of course I was dumb enough to sit in the back seat and so I periodically got flung up in the air, once hitting my head on the roof, whenever we hit a particularly deep hole in the road a bit faster than we should have.
But enough of that, what does Liberia look like? Much of it looks like this:
For those of you who do not believe me, do these look like Oregon trees? Yes, I admit, this could be the deep south, or some Polynesian island, Latin America or Thailand, but it isn’t, it’s Liberia.
Our trip consisted of driving down the road a bit and then stopping and . . . well, bird watching. Sometimes we’d stop because someone would see a particular unusual bird, or other times we would stop because the real bird watchers among us knew that there were birds to be found (“The driver says these plants normally grow in wet areas, let’s stop here and see if there are any kingfishers!” She was right.). In short, our stops were usually productive. We found interesting birds at every location we stopped at. We saw a beautiful Grey Headed Kingfisher, several different types of bee eaters, had a hornbill (I’ve forgotten which type - a single long, curved hornbill, not the double-billed kind) pose for us on several different branches, more types of swallows than one could describe (as well as the accompanying Monty Python jokes [if you did not get that reference, you have not been taking the sage advice I give in this blog - go back to the posting “In the Words of Monty Python . . .” and watch the movie I said to watch, then you’ll get the reference. For now I’ll leave you in ignorance, with your curiosity hopefully peaked.]), and we even saw a crane take off, sweep across the lake and land by a near-by island.
Not being a rabid birder, I can only look at birds, even beautiful birds, for so long. I am, more or less, a photographer, so I look for interesting things to photograph and, at the least, to document for the blog. At one of the locations, when I looked over an incline, I found this interesting site:
A make-shift garden with, well . . . i guess it was meant to be a Scarecrow. And no, we didn’t find a Tin Man, and thank goodness, no Lions (or Tigers or Bears thank you). Odd thing was, we weren’t anywhere near a community, so who’s garden was it?
Other than birds (and people holding up fish for sale) there was a distinct lack of wildlife to be seen. And we definitely didn’t see any snakes, though there was one little boy, he couldn’t have been older than 9 or 10, leading two younger siblings along the road (again, no where near a community I could see). He was carrying a machete that looked longer than his arms and was wearing adult rubber boots that topped his knees. I know well enough that his job was to clear the way through trails for his little brother and sister and the boots were just in case he ran into a snake. That’s about as close as we got to one though.
After a few stops I started getting a feel for the vegetation and what might make for interesting photographs. Though it was approaching mid-day with the conditions terrible for photographing, I started experimenting to see how things would turnout. So here’s my feeble attempt at being creative:
Anyway, after a couple of hours we approached Lake Piso proper. Lots of mangrove swamps, but few places to stop and explore the swamps (besides, I only have nice shoes until my personal and household goods arrive from the states) or to birdwatch. I could see coming back to photograph mangrove roots - if it’s safe that is. Eventually, we got to an area where we could walk down to the beach. Like many lakes, it’s not particularly suited to stunning photographs, it’s just a bit too big. But, this is Lake Piso:
Yes you can see the other side, but it’s pretty far away and there’s not much of a beach. Still, like many lakes, it was cooler than inland and had a steady breeze. We drove a bit further and stopped for lunch at a private beach area the organizers of the trip knew about. Since the owner of the place is quickly becoming friends with my colleagues, he only charged us $15.00 for the whole group to use his toilets. Still, it came in under the $5.00 US per person he usually charges guests.
I decided that all hopes of great photography had gone down the drain for the day and decided to play the tourist and try to make more interesting shots for the blog. There were a couple of fishing canoes at the lunch beach and decided to take one to show you what canoes look like around here.
It was carved out of a single log. On the way back to Monrovia, as we crossed a river I saw a canoe where the carver literally left the circular log form on the front of the canoe, so it looked like a log coming down the river. Interesting look, but it must have been terribly inefficient, at least the sculpted front here look like it would cut through the water.
Towards the end of lunch, a fisherman came paddling by, so I got a shot of him as well.
Fishing is a big thing here and is a huge source of protein for many of the people near the water. Again on our way back I saw a small creek area where a bunch of kids were playing around in the water while two women were up to their necks in water sweeping a net through it. I couldn’t imagine any fish hanging around there because of the kids, but what do I know?
After lunch we decided to head to Robertsport since were so close to it anyway. Folks said not to expect much and, well, they were right. It really is a small town, smaller than most coastal towns in Oregon, and with no real tourist base. There is an UNMIL (United Nations Mission in Liberia [yes, a military mission]) base there but not much else. It reminded me of some of the old logging towns in Oregon where the local mill has closed or coastal towns on the East Coast that are a bit too far away from I-95 to really attract any travelers - not quite dead, but close enough (there go those Monty Phyton references again).
There is a big hill, Cape Mount, that rises quickly from the shore land around Robertsport. Much of it remains vegetated, so you get this hillside of jungle-looking foliage.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get down to the beach (at least where we wanted to) because UNMIL was having a training exercise yesterday. You don’t start arguing with someone carrying an AK 47, even if they do wear a blue UN helmet.
Fortunately though, from Cape Mount there are also lovely views of the ocean and coast.
And that was pretty much the end of our trip. Except of course for the hour and a half bump-fest followed by another hour plus of pleasantly smooth, if not always swift, ride back to Monrovia. Why anyone decided to hold one of the main Saturday markets along a 2-mile stretch of the main road out of and into Monrovia is beyond me. Let’s just say that the mass of stands, people, vehicles, sights and sounds (as per security instructions, windows were up, doors locked and, of course, the ac on so there were no smells) as we entered the city are something I’ll have to experience directly and blog about later. Yesterday, I just wanted it to be over and done with so I could hop in the shower and afterwards pop open a cold beer!