Beach Day

On Tuesdays and Fridays we take Gato to the beach instead of on his usual trail in the jungle. For Gato, these are the best days of the week. As soon as he smells our sunscreen and realises that it is beach day he perks up and sprints down the trail to the beach dragging us behind. We spend the day swimming in the river and exploring all of the small islands. Every now and then we find some quicksand and sink up to our knees or a plantation full of avocados to walk through. This Tuesday was very sunny and despite our hats and repeated applications of sunscreen both Cally and I got sunburns. My sun burn is especially impressive because it is on my legs between the bottom of my shorts and the top of my gum boots.
The afternoons on the beach aren´t quite as fun as the mornings. We have to have Gato off the beach by 3 30 or he will come face to face with Balu, our Bear cub. Gato does not want to leave the beach and takes his time making his way towards the trail home. Once he is on the trail he will sit and refuse to move. On Tuesday, he sat in the middle of the trail and moved no more than 30 m in 2.5 hours. We tried to coerce him to move with every technique we could think of: We sang, made loud noises, asked nicely, hid from him, pulled on the rope, threw water on him. Gato would simply growl and make a big show of lying down even more. He reminds me of me as a child when my parents would try and get me to go hiking! Eventually, we got him to move by keeping constant pressure on the rope and making it uncomfortable for him to sit. This is the worst part of my job and it hurts me deep inside to force him to move when he obviously does not want to. We have to be down at the cafe by 6 pm in the evening or it starts getting dark and they will send a search party to find us. On Tuesday, we finally managed to get Gato in his cage at 6pm but the person we had asked to bring up his supper had forgotten so we had to wait and didn´t get down to the cafe until nearly 6 30. Getting Gato his supper is one of the major dramas of our days. We normally carry the meat up with us when we go to his cage in the morning but we have been having problems with monkey robberies. This morning, Booty, the infamous monkey of the park, stole 3 big steaks of meat from us and we had to have an escort to Gato´s cage. I have to say, I am much more afraid of the capuchin monkeys than I am of the Pumas. The capuchin monkeys are small, fast, vicious and intellegent. They also tend not to respect females. There is a section of the park where they keep the most difficult monkeys (the one´s that are becoming wild for release) and only men are allowed there!