Lost World – Days 9 & 10 – Rain, rain & more rain

[Photos not available yet]

Day 9: This morning the clouds rolled back in & it spilled rain all day. One team went in the morning to meet another scientist who lives in this area of Brazil and has also studied big cats here. We went to Limeira trail to collect one of the cameras left out last week. It was a miserable walk in the rain. In the afternoon, the other team arrived back – due to the rain they were unable to make it to the planned sight, so the scientist Renata came back to our base camp with them to give us a lecture on her masters and the results she had found. Then Marcelo & I drove her back to Curitiba (well, Marcelo drove & I kept him company and watched out for places to buy chocolate). Renata kindly gave us tea & a tour of her beautiful home which is built in an area of replanted secondary forest on the outskirts of Curitiba. After which we headed back to basecamp, stopping off to replenish my junkfood stores J.
Day 10: I've been lazy today – my foot was aching this morning so I didn't go out walking with the group. Instead I took down a couple of the tents in camp not being used – in preparation for packing up on Friday morning, transferred some pics to the BE computer to share with the rest of the group – and remained on laundry duty while the others were out collecting cameras from trails. It has been raining on and off today and the hut resembles the Magdalan laundries at the moment. The last 2 days were so wet, nobody's clothes have dried, and everyone got extra wet again yesterday – so Sylvia & I have been taking advantage of the short sunny intervals to dry clothes and transfer them inside when it starts to drizzle again.
One group has just arrived back from the Donkey Trail. Although they had nice weather on the trail, there was some bad news to report L: one of the project's digital camera boxes was stolen from where it was attached to a tree on the trail; worse news again is that it is the one that contains the good pics we checked earlier in the week – of the tapir, ocelot and armadillo. Very disappointing. There is some talk of a night walk tonight – not sure about that after my earlier experiences on night walks in the forest...but I am hearing this through my ipod earphones so maybe I'm hearing wrong...