Up, up in the Andes

We have been up in the Andean Cloud Forest for two weeks now and its such a crazy beautiful place! Really in the middle of nowhere though...

For those who don´t know, we are doing five weeks of volunteer work with the Andean Bear Foundation project which consists of walking all over the mountains and tracking/trapping bears. So instead of going to the office for eight hours a day, we wander round the mountains. It's a nice change to feel physically tired at the end of the day instead of mentally tired and the scenery is amazing. We get up at about 6am and go to bed at around 8pm which is pretty different to normal life at home in New Zealand. We also eat about three times as much as we would at home. The organiser (Sarah) said that its the only time we'll be able to eat whatever we want and not put on weight, so we're taking advantage of it!

We are staying in a village called Pucara, in the Intag Mountains. We have a house dedicated to the project, with three technicians (for the radio collars) and a cook called Celia. There is also a cool Aussie couple who recently got married in Cusco with us in the house too. We have about two days off a week, which is pretty good.

So: we have set about four traps for the bears now and are waiting on those ones (they are connected to a radio collar so we can listen on the transistor radio to see if they are trapped) plus we are going camping for four days tomorrow in this other village where we are going to set more traps. They are very hopeful for us to catch some bears as it is a good time of year for it with the corn ripening!

The bears seem to be the poor cousin of the bears of the world with lots of unanswered questions and near to no funding. They are becoming more interesting to the world now though, as they are starting to attack and eat peoples cows! Beforehand scientists had thought they were vegetarian bears. This is thought to have happened because of the huge amount of land the bears need to roam around in, and the fact that that land is being eaten away by the changing land use to agriculture and horticulture. As you can imagine, the people here aren´t the biggest bear fans!