This blog post is in honor of my new friend Rafaella. Rafaella is a young lady from Lima and I met her at the parrot lick in Peru. To get to the parrot lick we hiked from the lodge 10 minutes to the river and took a 20 minute boat ride upstream and hiked another 45 minutes to see all the birds in the poster John is pointing to.
What we saw was this. What's that you can't see all the birds? That's because there were no birds. We waited and waited for the birds to arrive.
Rafaella (who I didn't get a picture of while in Peru) was waiting patiently with her mom hoping to see birds. Needing to do something after I took pictures of the blank wall and this curleyq on the plant,
I showed Rafaella the on camera picture I took of the macaws the day before
and I offered for Rafaella to look through the binoculars and she spotted a lone parrot in a tree. Nothing terribly exciting for our time at the salt like with the non-existent parrots.
To communicate with Rafaella I did the caveman grunts and pointed to things because I know zero spanish and since I had only heard her mom speak english I assumed Rafaella didn't speak english. Imagine my surprise an hour later when I learned she spoke english and spoke it VERY WELL.
From that point forward I spoke to her in english and asked her questions and learned she's about the same age as my neighbor and niece. I got my first penpal when I was 10 years old and thought the three of them could also be penpals and got Rafaella's address in Peru.
I wrote Rafaella when I got back to Arizona and today I received her reply. I suppose I should rename the title of this post to 'The parrots that weren't there but my new friend was.'
2 comments:
Nice story and always great to make a new friend like that. Your post reminds me why I don't like it when people keep birds in cages. I know lots of people that have parrots for pets and they get very angry with me when I say I believe they should be flying free.
Aw! How exciting for both of you. I love stories like this.
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