The Purple Penguin

We are heading for the wilds of The Netherlands. After work yesterday headed home and finished packing, watering the plants, general tidying, then got the train to Liverpool Street Station to start the journey. We took the night ferry from Harwich to Hook van Holland. Very nice with a cabin – we had a cabin for 5 people! It was nice to sleep on the way though didn’t sleep much for some reason. Got to Hook and found out we’d have to change trains in Rotterdam. I’m sure we used to get a direct train from Hook to Amsterdam, but it’s been so many years since I’ve done this trip I can’t really remember.

We decided to stop in Rotterdam to have a look around and some breakfast. Ended up having a late breakfast, early lunch after about an hour of walking. Either Rotterdam doesn’t have much in the way of tourist stuff or we managed to completely miss it all! But the waterfront is lovely and we had a very nice lunch. It started pouring it down with rain while we were eating so we dragged out lunch as long as possible. Still got soaked heading back to the train.

Train to Amsterdam then a very long walk to the hotel. Quite a nice hotel, Dikker & Thijs Fenice. We’re off to meet a friend for dinner later. Then tomorrow get the car and head off into the Netherlands.

I have a small open source program i use I take statics from a web site. Recently the web site change witch cause the program not to work.

The change was simple ware as you use to have 32 picture on a page they have change it to 16. So the change to the program would be simple as well look for the 32 and change to 16. On the web site many people use the program aand the bullition boards were full of help program not working. This realy showed up the two side of open source software, every one had access to the code but only a few people knew what to do with it. So I set up the dev environment for qt4 and made the change and recompiled the program, wich in its new form worked. How ever this was only good for linux. So althoue i distibute the linux binary no one the windows and mac users still had no program. Hence the trying to set up the cross compile witch i still have not managed to do.

So my conclusion from all this Open source is a good idea, but only if you know what to do with it. Late some had recompiled the windows binary (but no one the mac yet).
So as well as open source there need to be teaching. So like the old, give a person a fish they feed them selfs for a day give a teach a person to fish they feed them selves for life. Open source must teach people to compile the code on all platforms, other wise the idea starts to fade.

So I finally got round to updating the wordpress so now 2.6.1 :), change the New York pictues page to just pictures.

Currently it is showing Trinidad Asa Wright pictures. Lots of birds and rain forst.

Added a new plugin, google eath again, with ablity to get gps data from photos. Play time 🙂

Well, Joe has to go back into town to get photos! Today is shopping day (joy) so off to the market. We cut through the shopping centre, came out to the market area and saw a giant inflatable chicken. And by giant I do mean giant – towered over the library. There is apparently some sort of fair/carnival going on. And it includes a giant inflatable bouncy chicken.

We skipped the walk around Port of Spain in favour of sitting in the bar having a drink or three and watching the people coming in for the special events. Lots of dressed up people attending dinners and dances. Then just went to bed – we were very tired.

Up in the morning, packed, ate breakfast, then got a taxi to the airport. Flight to Barbados in a little tiny cute plane. That flight was fine – free seating so Joe and I grabbed the front as we had a quick change in Barbados. Turns out we had to go through immigration, then get our bags, then go check in again. Got to Barbados, got off the plane quickly, and saw the immigration queue which was miles long. I looked at the bloke pointing the way and said ‘but we have a connection to make in 2 hours!’ He then pointed to the empty lane marked ‘transfers 3 hours or less’ – hooray! Though the people in the long queue were muttering when we went straight to an officer.

Then it was wait around for the bags, but someone was smiling at us because ours were off first. Then the mad dash through customs and the entire bloody airport to the Virgin check in desks. I’m amazed at the number of people who check in late – but then I’m usually stupidly early for airport check in!

We had time to grab a quick bite to eat before just joining the queue to get on the plane – so not much time at all. The flight was pretty miserable and long but we are now home. Tired and doing laundry and off to work tomorrow.

We had to leave Asa Wright so I am now blogging from the Hilton in Port of Spain. Scenery is not nearly as impressive.

On the way to see turtles we saw several birds and even got a good look and photo of a hawk. Interesting drive to the beach. On the way back to the centre from the beach we got to see loads of frogs in the road. Large and small and even a bright green frog! So lots of birds, turtles and frogs.

So slept in this morning, missed breakfast to sleep! Got up and got showered and packed and then to sit on the veranda for a last look over the rainforest. Our ride to Port of Spain was an hour late due to an accident on the road (the road is a little twisty mountain road, in many places just one car width wide) but as we didn’t have anything planned it wasn’t such a bad thing. We had a nice drive into Port of Spain but it is much hotter here than it was in the mountains. Joe is now on the terrace upstairs getting photos of the city. We’ll probably skip the whole walking around Port of Spain thing though.

While on the beach I got a photo of Joe:

Last day at Asa Wright and we are sitting on the veranda again watching the rain and birds. Last night was fun.

After a restful afternoon, napping and taking it easy, we were collected and driven down to Matura. We parked and walked along the beach a bit while dinner was being set up. Ate then did another walk along the beach to see if we had really seen a turtle coming in. It was a turtle shaped log. We then sat in the shelter and waited for Nature Seekers to turn up. And turn up they did, in droves. A truck load of volunteers. After they were sorted into teams and sent out we were given a brief talk. Toward the end of this talk another tour group turned up – unfortunately we were stuck with them. Unfortunately because most of them had no idea why they were out on this tour! One young lad just kept whining “what is happening now? How long will this take? Are we going back yet?” while his girlfriend climbed all over him. But I hope they learned a bit about turtles.

We headed back to the beach and our guide talked about what would be happening – in the middle of this a volunteer turned up next to Kathleen and handed her a baby leatherback turtle that had just hatched. There were hatchlings all over the beach. We then walked for quite a while and got very wet climbing over palm tree trunks until we got to a female that was digging and preparing to lay her eggs. (This is where whiny bloke started up.) We watched her dig, then when she started laying the volunteers moved in to tag her, then the tourists could start taking photos. Up the beach a bit further was another female and you could tell when she started laying by all the flashes around! Once she started filling in the hole all the lights were turned off and we watched her finish and move off into the surf. On the hike back we saw three more coming in, but didn’t stop to watch them.

So back to the centre very late (gone midnight) and wet and sandy but very happy!

Did I mention we are in a rain forest? During rainy season? The thing I didn’t put in the blog yesterday was that it rained. Poured yesterday. Thunder and heavy rain. We walked between rain storms. So I was expecting lots of rain still today. Instead we woke up to sunshine.

After breakfast, at 8.30, we had our walk down to see frogs! Lots and lots of little brown and black frogs, very cute. All along the stream bed and Joe tried to get a few photos. Oh, we also went into this ravine where there were birds nesting. Oilbirds which were nice. Joe stayed in the cave for ages getting photos (check the panoramio site) while I went out to find more frogs. (Actually I did watch the oilbirds – they are quite nifty. There were two at the back flying about and squabbling so quite interesting. And the photos are very nice indeed.)

A horde has descended. We did have there centre more or less to ourselves. Another couple turned up last night and it was just us. We’ve been quietly sitting and chatting and generally birding; they also came to the oilbird cave with us. But when we got back the entire veranda was packed with a tour group that are here for a few days. I think we hit it just right though – we had the small group of about 9, then the place to ourselves and tomorrow morning we leave.

This afternoon we head out to see if any leatherback turtles come ashore at Matura beach. I’m looking forward to that! Frogs, lizards and turtles in one day!

Today was a quiet day – just hung out at the centre. Up at our usual time (6am) and off to the veranda to see what was on the feeders and have a coffee before breakfast. Then back to the veranda for more wildlife pestering (Joe has been harassing them to get their photos). At 9 we joined the group that was here for a visit of the coffee processing room. The Centre grow the coffee that is served here – so grow, harvest, dry, roast, grind, and make. The processing room is a small room where they have a gas burner and a large pan that they roast the beans in. One person operation and interesting to get to see.

We mainly hung out on the veranda today looking at things. We did take a short walk after lunch. We can hear the bellbirds all the time so we headed out to look for them along Bellbird trail. Found out later you can’t see bellbirds on that trail and we didn’t. We did see white bearded manakins and that was all. However, over the past few days we have seen: Carib grackle, purple honeycreeper, blue-crowned mot mot, channel billed toucan, palm tanager, white-tail trogon, scarlet ibis, egret (little, great, snowy), golden-olive woodpecker, barred & great antshrike, piratic flycatcher, golden-headed manakin, tropical mockingbird, thrush (?), yellow oriole, blue-grey tanager, silver-beaked tanager, green honeycreeper, red-legged honeycreeper, violaceous euphonia, turquoise tanager, among others that I can’t remember. We have also seen lizards, toads, boas, caimans, agouti, among others that I can’t remember!

Tomorrow we are off to the oilbird caves to see oilbirds. Maybe we’ll also go along the Discovery trail and see some bellbirds! Then tomorrow afternoon/night we’re off to see if we can spot a leatherback turtle come in to lay her eggs.

Joe has been taking hummingbird photos all day. Poor hummingbirds. Though they do seem to be coming up and posing for him!