Travel recaps: Tumbes

Apologies for the delays in getting our photo recaps up. We are back at school and there have been some internet issues (I started this post on Friday but then it wouldn't let me load photos, etc). Things seemed to be resolved so we will take advantage as long as we can!

Also, we are doing more celebrating this week as we found out on Friday that JP was accepted to U of A-Tucson med school as well!  This is another great option so we are very thankful to be in the enviable position of getting to choose a med school. So yay!

Back to recaps: In Tumbes, the main attraction we visited was the Mangrove Reserve at Puerto Pizarro. We found a company in town to take us, and set off on Saturday morning with our guide and drove out to the reserve.  We got in this little boat and set off to explore the reserves:

It was very pretty and there was a nice breeze on the water, in spite of the heat. We rode through areas where the mangroves left narrow pathways for us to travel:

Our first stop was the crocodile sanctuary, where there is a project to help restore the natural population of crocodiles to the area. We are not sure where they are going to put the crocodiles after they have regrown the population, but it was interesting to see the varying sizes of crocodiles:

Pictured here are smaller crocodiles--maybe 1 to 2 years, and then the adult crocodiles. I don't know if you have a sense of the scale, but the little ones are maybe 2 feet long and the big ones are easily 10-12 feet long, I think!

From there, we sailed over to the Isla de Aves (Island of the Birds). Here was the view as we approached:

(You can click on the picture to see the enlarged version, as always). We were able to get right up close to the trees on the boat and saw lots of birds hanging out like this:

We even saw a nest with baby birds, which made our guide super excited--she was pointing it out and making the driver stop until she was sure I had gotten a picture. It was sort of funny at the time, but nice to see her genuinely excited, especially compared with some of the less-than-inspiring tour guides we encountered later in the trip. Here are the baby birds:

From there, we continued around the islands and stopped at a lunch place, where we got to enjoy some great ceviche!  Ceviche is basically raw fish chopped up and combined with onions and vegetables and marinated in lemon juice, except Peru has lemons that are stronger and smaller than those in the states, so according to JP the ceviche you find outside of Peru is not as good as what you can get here.  We were both happy with it:

Nice view from our table, no?

After lunch, we went back to the pier on the boat, then were driven back to Tumbes.  We then wandered around the town a little and got stared at, before we returned to our budget hostel to sit under the fan and try to cool off!  Tumbes is not a big tourist destination, so people seemed surprised to see us and just stared pretty openly, which thankfully doesn't happen in our day-to-day life here in Peru.  As a result, the hostels can leave something to be desired. Our room was fine, but small and with a shower that only had cold water (it was hot, so we didn't mind) and a toilet with no seat.  But it was cheap, and we made it work!