Thursday, June 27, 2013

Slowing Down and Speeding Up

This week has been a nice mixture of work and play. When I am not researching my topic, I feel behind but when I sit down to do it, I feel so ahead. It's strange but I'll just keep doing what I am doing. I checked by biofilms today and they haven't grown yet, so I am getting a little worried about that, but it should be okay.

We have had good luck with the power here, so each night after dinner and clean-up we have movie night and all hang out in the conference room watching movies or Game of Thrones episodes through the projector.

Last Saturday, we had a big day planned at the beach with some makeshift limoncello, Puerto Rican party tradition "sandwichitos" (sand-wee-chee-tos) and other snacks and drinks. Sandwichitos are a little strange but since they are a tradition, I had to try it. To make them, you blend up velveeta cheese, pimentos, and spam. eek! Then, smear the mixture on plain white bread and cut it up into little triangles. Shape is important here, people. They must be little triangles. So we took a couple coolers full of food and drinks to the Seven Seas Balneario and set up camp. It was a big group of us REU's, mentors, some of the lab techs and researchers too. The locals in our group knew about a place about a twenty minute walk from our beach spot through the woods next to the mangroves that brought us out onto a really nice secluded beach away from the main drag. There were huge piles of boulders that we climbed around on and big crashing waves too. It was a nice day until the rain came! It was cold rain too, so most of us filled up our cups and went and stood in the water, where it was warmer. We left eventually, but not before I tried a pincho, which is chicken, pork, beef or shrimp (take your pick) on a stick usually with some small bite of a carb to go with it. It's well marinated and delicious. The beach vendor that I bought from even had a bottle of Sriracha for the snacks! First bottle I have seen since I have been here and I miss that stuff!  Here's the vendor..


And his goods. 



Later that night, we went out to the college town of Rio Piedras and bar hopped around, I took a couple of photos, but I will be back one day to take some in the daylight. It's a city painted in street art, but not just name-tagging and stuff. There is really cool, strange, abstract, weird & awesome drawings. 

This one is just a photo of stickers at the beer bar we went to. They like local brews too!






It was a good night all in all. We got back to the station very late and stopped at this little taco stand on the way. yum.

I slept in Sunday, did a little bit of research on my project and same for monday, but Tuesday, we went on an adventure. A few of us asked for a free day from the director and our mentor and went with Roxy, a tech for one of the grad students doing research here, to Piñones to do some sea kayaking! It was so nice. Myself, Wilmarie, Emily and Roxy had a great time on two tandem kayaks, which Emily calls "divorce makers". We kayaked into, through and out of some thick mangrove swamp like areas to the open water and enjoyed some beautiful weather on the coast, while up at El Yunque, we could see storms circling the mountain. After about two hours of kayaking, we hit the beach and enjoyed some passionfruit sorbet, warm water and sunshine. I got a little roasted toasted out there, but it made for such a nice day. 

Here we are, on the kayaks and in the mangroves, in hunt of the manatees! Or just one manatee, we would be happy with one big happy manatee sight. (They do exist here)






We found no manatees, but we did find enjoyment away from the station. AND I bought some cheapy flip flops so that I would stop getting heat rash from my other shoes. This rainforest keeps me itchy, all the time. 

Wednesday, Keysa Rosas, Emilys mentor & Alonsos lab tech, was our speaker. She talked about aquatic insects and their use as bio-indicators for aquatic ecosystem health. Aquatic insects are any insect that has at least one life stage in the aquatic environment. They live from 2 weeks to 2 years generally. Keysa worked in bio-monitoring and bio-assessment before she began work in The Ramirez Lab at UPR. We learned a lot of background on orders and families of aquatic insects, and some traits of those. For example, the ephemeroptera family of mayflies has three caudal filaments coming from its abdomen while the plecoptera family of stoneflies have only 2 caudal filaments coming from their abdomen. These two families along with tricoptera, the caddisflies, are very sensitive to pollution. Measuring richness and abundance of these families in comparison to the chironomids, who are not sensitive to pollution can help a bio-assessor understand something about the health of the stream. Scientifically, this method is not acceptable as a measurement but for companies and agencies who want a "grade" on stream health, it is. Here's their equation:
(Plectopera+Ephemeroptera+Tricoptera)÷(Chironomids) = blah blah blah

Sound stupid? It is. I think it's ridiculous that governments and companies use this reading as acceptable when scientists deny it. Anyway, Keysa gave a good talk and I learned about something that I know nothing about, so that is nice.


SO, I mentioned when I started writing this (11:00a or so this morning, when it was sunny) that we were so lucky to have power and now, after heavy heavy downpouring all day, I am about to post it at 4:00p and the power has gone out. We are back on the generator, so sorry for jinxing it guys! :)


Saturday, we are beaching it again, going to Old San Juan to see the forts and having sushi for lunch. 


Rain, Rain and more Rain. 





Thursday, June 20, 2013

Research Projects (my own and others too)

Before I forget..On Wednesdays, we have talks from the grad students and some other folks about their research. This week, it was Sean Kelley from the UPR. His talk was interesting although, not quite up my alley. His work focuses on the effects of spatial subsidies on riparian web building spiders. Specifically, he looks at the partitioning of resources coming out of the stream (mayfly, caddisfly larvae etc.) that cross the boundary from the aquatic to the terrestrial and how they move through foodwebs. Spiders are his organism of interest and to try and understand how the food web works in this specific instance, he will be using tagged stable isotopes to track nutrient flow. This is still pretty confusing for me, but he has a very interesting lecture about it complete with figures from his own data. Nice job, Sean. 

So, on Wednesdays (or thursdays or later if I am late) I will be telling you guys about what I learned and who from on wednesdays. Hopefully, I will be able to give you guys good introductions to all of our mentors and other researchers here at El Verde Field Station.

Tuesday, I put out my last set of samples. There are three streams that I am working in, with 10 replicates of 5 treatments in each stream. Our streams represent an urbanization gradient, (none, moderate, and high). The treatments are chemical treatments of caffeine, diuron (an algaecide), sucrose, and sucralose plus a control, with no chemical addition. We have set the agar cups out with no chemical additions right now, so that we can cultivate some biofilms before introducing them to chemically amended environments via chemically amended agar gels. They are out now and will sit for 3 weeks to cultivate biofilms. After we switch them out at 3 weeks, we will let them grow for about another week at which point we will take them out, measure metabolism (consisting of primary productivity and respiration) biomass and chlorophyll-a content. We are expecting to find that when comparing the controls of the urbanization gradient, that biofilm function is suppressed as urbanization increases. For the caffeine treatment, we expect it to lower biofilm functional response measurement relative to the controls (Rosi-Marshall et al. 2013). For sucralose, we expect the same diminished effect on functional response. For sucrose, since it is a disaccharide thats easily degraded by microbes, we expect it to increase biofilms function and biomass. For diuron, it's a bit tricky. Diuron is an algaecide that inhibits primary production- aka it stops algae and cyanobacteria from doing their job (fixing carbon with sunlight energy via photosynthesis) while fungi and bacteria are still chewing away and respiring. So we expect a community shift from mixed heterotrophs (decomposers bacteria and fungi) and autotrophs (primary producing algae and cyanobacteria) to a primarily heterotrophic community where primary production stops and respiration continues.

What that means for me is that the next three weeks will be pretty slow in terms of field work. But there is always work to be done. At the end of the summer, I have to submit a final manuscript of my project including and abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, works cited + figures, tables and legends. In addition, I will create a poster, a succinct version of my project to present at a symposium at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. In the meantime, I will try to perfect my introduction and the parts of the poster that can be addressed.



That leaves a lot of time to well... stay busy. The past two days, I have noticed how much I am sitting around, reading or on the computer so today, I decided that no more of that, If I am not working, I shouldn't be sitting around. So, I cleaned off the moldy yoga mat, so with that drying in the drying room, maybe tomorrow I can do some stretching and practice my push up.... that does not exist yet.

I have these few weeks and while we, as an REU group, go do fun things on the weekends, the rest of the week is saved for field work. So I am thinking that maybe next week, I will go do some exploring (if Sofia and Alonso are okay with it) with one of the field techs here at El Verde. Her name is Roxy-she's super cool and turns out that Natalia, the PhD student she is working for will be at a conference next week in Costa Rica for The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. Roxy said we should go explore the island and hopefully, I can go with maybe do some ocean kayaking or other fun touristy things.

But about that conference, and the poster I will have at the end of this summer... Next year, the conference is going to be in Australia. I told Worm that since he has always wanted to go to Australia, I would apply for next years conference with an abstract from the research that I am focusing on this summer. If I get accepted, we are going on vacation to Australia!!!!!  How cool would that be?! I'm sort of daydreaming about this but I am going to try to make it a reality. Until now, I have only presented a poster at UT's Undergrad Research Exhibition. Having a presentation or poster talk from a national meeting looks great and is pretty necessary on a CV for grad school, which is distant but definitely a part of my future.

Exciting stuff, wish there was more I could tell you about!

Sooner or later, we will be going on a night hike. Everybody has been asking the REU's "have you been into the forest at night? It's something you must do before you leave, because it is totally different from what you experience during the day in terms of fauna." No joke, probably 5 people have asked and told me this.


Bye Guys :)

Sunday, June 16, 2013

The Botanical Gardens!!

I have been pretty busy the last few days, but today is a lounge day and I am fully enjoying it. So here is what has been going on the past few days..

Thursday, I set up part 1/3 of my experiment. I am using 3 streams, representing an urbanization gradient. The stream next to El Verde field station represents the lowest level of urbanization. Here are my agar cups, with substrates inside them (exposed to the stream through a hole cut in the top), in the stream. Since I did this on thursday, the biofilms are hopefully already colonizing them :)

So, thursday was a little stressful because Friday morning were our proposal presentations. 15  minutes speeches plus 5 minutes Q&A. Longest one I have ever done, with the shortest notice. It went well, needless to say we were all glad to be through with it. So Friday was all fun after the proposals were through. We went into town and had celebratory lunch at Cilantros Mexican grill, where one man, took care of every aspect of our meal, taking our order, making our drinks, cooking our food and ringing us up. It was a great lunch. From there, we went out for ice cream and then headed back to the station. Everyone was super tired from going to bed late and waking up early. We had a barbeque planned for that night so a few of us took a nap to get ready. Here's where I slept, the hammock finally went up.

So we had our barbeque, it was delicious and so much fun. All of us REU's, Pedro, and about 8 other PhD students, masters students, research assistants and field technicians. It made for a nice party. Everybody contributed something, we had bourbon chicken, pork&vegetable skewers, potato salad, fruit salad, cookies, garlic bread, HOMEMADE cranberry sauce, beer, and strange anice/coconut shots. It was an enjoyable barbeque in celebration of us finishing our proposals presentations and documents. We stayed up late, someone started to play the guitar, and then the salsa came on and we learned to salsa dance, unsuccessfully.

The next morning, was a day for more field work. I woke up and had to get busy making more agar cups for my experiment. PJ took us to Rio Pieras, and leaving El Verde, we came across a tree in the road that would not let us pass. (Thats where the picture from "meet my REU buddies is from") Well, we called Hilda, the wonder-woman of El Verde and she came down there to check it out. She was going to send for Tony, who does tech work/handy work around the station when this man pulls up in a truck. Hilda said "the only way you's are gonna get outta here without Tony is if this guy has a machete, because sometimes they use them to split these big logs up." Turns out he did! Here he is, saving the day.

Can you believe it?

Once this ordeal was over, I met up with Sofia in Rio Piedras (where the UPR RP is located) to do some work  at the botanical gardens. It is the only green space in the city and wow- is it nice! However, the streams there seem to be the rat hole catch all for everything trashy. It's disgusting, really. You can see for your self, sort of.. but the smell really says it all. Needless to say, this is the high urbanization stream. We wore gloves along with our boots.



After finishing up in the nasty stream, Sofia took me for a walk around the botanical gardens. They are truly beautiful. She showed me so much and gosh. The biodiversity there is insane!! A lot of these plants are exotics brought in from elsewhere for learning purposes but are not invasive in any way. Heres what I saw:
Two different types of Mango tree, the one on the left is a small green variety, the one on the right is a large red variety. 

Mangifera Indica, Mango Tree native to india. See those fruits!? mmmHMM!

We walked along the path and saw so much cool stuff!

We walked along the path and saw so much, it was great. Sofia told me that this was her favorite palce to go in the city, because then it doesn't feel like a city at all. It feels like a quiet park with trails everywhere. She took me down some old trails that did not look like trails at all, to some ponds and beautiful separate gardens from the main circle. There was a medicinal herb garden where we smelt the mature Eucalyptus leaves, the younger ones to not have as great of a scent:

Here, Sofia showed me this fruit, its about as big as a basket ball, I have no idea what it is but she said it was an acquired taste. Would you like one of these to fall on your head?


It smelled very sweet though. 

Here are some of the structures within the gardens. 

This one was next to the medicinal gardens, very picturesque

This was an old Orchid house. It has since been converted and only half the orchids remain. Sofia said the man who used to care for the orchids was a great caretaker of them. 


Window of the orchid house, all the light inside was natural and came from these green barred windows and doors
This is the National flower of Puerto Rico, it looks like a hibiscus but it grows on a large tree.

Here is Sofia with the Monkey's Ear, Genus Enterolobium spp.

This is why it's called Monkey's Ear! Because it looks like a monkeys ear!

These are fern reproductive structures, on a modified leaf, called a fertile frond. The yellow dots are called sporangia. They turn from green to brown when they are "ready".

Here, they are a little darker than in the previous picture. 

This is the Flamboyan Tree, which has beautiful root systems, as you can see! (Later is a photo of the flowering stage-a must see!)

They community garden has it's wall of tools, how cute is that?

Here is another section within the Urban garden, a community garden. See those banana trees in recycled tires? Tropical and adorable. 

Pollination in action! The bee seems to take on the color of the flower.

Here is a banana tree that is not in the urban garden, but free standing in a riparian (next to a river/stream) area. What do you see in the shadows?

Some of the trees in the Botanical Gardens are just massive and beautiful to say the least. 

A security guard found us roaming the grounds and took us on an informational walk, which was nice. He did not speak english but Sofia translated all that he had to offer for me. His& her knowledge of the place together was immense! Here, she is pointing out the soursop tree, called guanábana in spanish.

Here she is again, with the Guanabana, soursop fruit. It produces a sweet white juice that the native like to mix with breakfast meals............or rum. 

Here is the Guava tree! It's so leggy and small, I was surprised. 

And here, is the flowering Flamboyan tree. So beautiful, I see where it gets its' name. 


The botanical gardens were great. My facebook will have a a more broad selection of photos soon. maybe tomorrow but these were my personal picks for the blog. It was a great time. Again, I could not have asked for a better mentor. Sofia is great and I look forward to working with her this summer. Hopefully, tomorrow I will be setting up the last part of our experiment in the mid range urbanization spot, outside of San Juan toward the middle of the island. Before I go, I will be at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras and that whole day should produce some nice photos of the campus. Look forward to it! We are having movie night tonight on the projector because we have power! We are watching a spelunking movie called The Descent. Should be scary. 

Happy Fathers Day to You Dad, I Love You!! 


(And all the other dads out there)

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Meet my REU Buddies!

Since I have been here, I have met some really cool people, REU's among other people. I mentioned that there are not just REU's here, I will try to do a mini bio on those I know well enough to do a mini bio on in the coming weeks. For now, meet the other REU students and our TA, Pedro "PJ"

From the left, Ismael, Amanda, Kirsten, Emily, Elena, Me, Keysa(Emily's mentor) and Wilmarie

Emily Gelzer (g sound, not j sound, as I thought) is from Durango, Colorado. She describes Durango as a small town in the Southwest portion of Colorado. Her school, Ft. Lewis College, is a small one, but she speaks highly of it as well. Her and her friends spend their time outside of class on rafting trips on the Animas (meaning lost souls) and Arkansas rivers. I told her she was a river hippie, but she calls it a river rat. She is even on a waiting list to raft the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon! Here at el Verde, Emily will be studying how leaf litter exclusion can effect macroinvertebrate assemblages and their break down of leaf litter.

Emilys mentor is Keysa Rosas an upcoming masters student at Georgia Southern University. She will be studying secondary production of stream insects.

Kirsten Verster is from Miami, Florida. She attends the University of Florida at Gainesville and has already been through 2 REU programs, plus this one! One was at her school, in the butterfly lab and the second was working on wasps at the University of Michigan. At school, she works in two labs. First, is in the Miller lab, where she works with cactus bugs. The second is in the museum with Keith Willmott working on neotropical butterfly taxonomy. She is a free spirit who really knows how to cook. Kirsten loves spiders and wasps. Needless to say, her work will focus on web building spiders this summer. Specifically, she is curious about how typical orb style spider web angle and placement change as you leave the immediate riparian zone.

Her mentor is Sean Kelly, a PhD student at UPR who looks at the relationships between emerging aquatic insects and web building spiders.

Elena Venable is from the west coast, Santa Cruz, CA. Although she attends Brown University in Providence, RI, she really associates with her hometown and wants to move back there someday. She plays soccer and runs track. She is an applied math-biology major and already has an internship with NOAA set up next summer! Elena and I initially got to talking because I noticed her water bottle has a KAZU 90.3 NPR label on it. Good to see the support for public radio in unexpected places. Here, her work focus on the Puerto Rican clame to fame, the Coqui frog, specifically, the grass coqui, E. Brittoni (See earlier blog for a link to a video of this squeally little frog).

Her mentor is Adriana Hererra-Montes, who is from columbia originally. She is a PhD candidate at the UPR Rio Piedras and her dissertation focuses on Puerto Rican herpetofauna assemblages. Woah.

Amanda Henderson is from Chicago and she attends DePaul University. Back home in Chicago, Heneghan's Lab, where she works with soil mites, specifically Oppiella Nova. Check her out, in action, here on Heneghan's blog. Amanda is the noctural one of the group, where she stays up until 1-2 AM sometimes (given we have power) to be productive. She says "I am not productive before 11PM" with a whole lot of sass. We really love the sass, that for sure. Here, at El Verde, she will be continuing her research on mites, but with a new focus, the Brevipalpus spp, a false spider mite found in the tropics.

Her mentor is Elvia Meléndez-Ackerman, a professor at the UPR Rio Piedras and she is a busy body, check her out!

Wilmarie del Colon is a student of the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. In the past, she was involved in a student chapter of CESAM where she went to Costa Rica for a national meeting  to talk about problems affecting coral and other marine organisms. Her undergraduate thesis is on the difference in biofilms across urban streams, one natural and one channelized. Channelized, meaning that the stream is perfectly straight and an unnatural stream structure.  Having Wilmarie (Wiwi) here is so great because she has so much knowledge about the people, history, and culture of Puerto Rico. Her project at El Verde focuses on a population of flower, P. Angustifolia, that is sometimes subject to nectar robbing. Nectar robbers literally create a hole at the base of the flowers corolla tube and get the nectar without offering pollination services for the flower. (The hole is visible, I will try to get a photo of it soon!)

Her mentor is Jose Fumero, a botanist at Metropolitan University.

Ismael Orengo, the only male in the program is from Puerto Rico also. Trujillo Alto is his hometown. He attends Metropolitan University in Coupey, Puerto Rico. He has been spending his summers in Vermont working on projects on stream macroinvertibrates for the past two years. We have really come to love Ismael. He is so great to have around. Ismael learned english as a second language. He is a story teller for sure, and his storytelling is great. He is very animated and always excited. His project here at El Verde focuses on the effect of acidification on freshwater macroinvertibrates.

His mentor is Pablo Gutierrez and he is a PhD student at UPR Rio Piedras, focusing on limnology.

Our TA, Pedro aka PJ is pretty cool too. He has been a mentor for REU students in the past but this year, he is back as our TA aka, he takes us to the grocery store, field sites, wherever we need/want to go and out on the weekends. (Yes, a permanent DD. We are within the law!) He is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia at Athens (yeah, he knows Terrapin Brewery!), whose dissertation focus on the effect of dams on ecosystem processes such as decomposition, nutrient cycling and metabolism. PJ is a cool TA. He is going to make us sangria, real sangria sooner or later and made us bourbon chicken at our celebratory BBQ for completing our proposals.




Rainy Wednesday :)

Buenos Días!

I think I have touched on this but here at El Verde, power lines to the station are tied to TREES, needless to say the power goes out quite often. The first week, we ran off the generator but two days ago, the power company actually came and fixed it! We have been able to stay up past 9, which either way, it's alright Well, I woke up this morning to a heavy heavy storm and heard the generator running. It was nice while it lasted, modern commodity of 24 hour power. Hello, modern commodity of 14 hour power. First world problems?

I finished my proposal, Sofia is editing it now and I am starting on my powerpoint presentation. I give a 15 minute speech to introduce my project to everyone here at the station. Not just REU students, but other researchers, and staff too. It is going to be good. I am excited about my topic and have no problem understanding the importance of it, which makes it easy to justify and also, explain to other people.

I made the agar gel yesterday that will go into the cups I am placing in the stream. The agar will slowly leech out the nutrients it is amended with. So anyway, I was making it on a hot plate-stirrer which is really cool. You put this magnet in the bottom of a flask and set it on the hot plate-stirrer and turn it on and the magnet spins and variable speeds. It stirs your solution automatically, which is nice. So it's a hot plate too, ya? Well, I turned it up and stepped away for like two minutes to read an email and I hear sizzling and look back and there is agar everywhere, boiling over my flask. I grabbed my oven mitts, (thanks to Hilda who had brought them in earlier, worried about my safety) and put the flask into the sink. Well, for those of you who don't know, at high temperatures, agar is liquid, but below ~127F or 50C, it turns to solid. The desk and the floor and my oven mitts and lab coat are not hot enough so once it spilled everywhere, my liquid mess turned into a gel mess. (go, me) Agar, when cooled is like the consistency of hard jello. So I peeled it up and had to start over, because what would have been the perfect amount for my cups, boiled out onto the floor. Good stuff.

Today, we are going to the grocery store and boy am I excited!!! We plan on grilling out friday, after our presentations and having a little party up in at the station. I am making Brats and fruit salad, and between the REU's we will also have a normal salad, potato salad, 7 layer dip, cookies and vegetarian options. I might make myself some sauerkraut because it goes well with bratwurst.. Not many people like sauerkraut, so we shall see. Ususally, Worm makes it with a bottle of Sweetwater 420 and simmers it for a half hour to an hour until the liquid is mostly gone and that gives it a nice flavor. We are sans Sweetwater here in Puerto Rico, so I haven't decided yet, what I will actually do. Maybe use the local beer, Medalla? (Pronounced meh-dajha or meh-dahya, depending on who is speaking) Hank, if you are reading, this is no Yuengling, you wouldn't like it. Domestic-light drinkers, you might. It's not too bad :) We went out last weekend and I ordered two of them, one for Emily and I, and I wondered why the bartender looked at me like some idiot when I asked for Modela..

good times, being a tourist and all. If I knew spanish, they might take me seriously.


Anyway, I have some streams to go mucking through. Good day :)

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Weekend fun!

We got away from the field station friday night and hit the town.  It was great, I had a stuffed avocado w/ fried green plantain and fried sweet plantain for dinner. The sweet was definitely way better! Mom and dad were right, food here is on the bland side..  Luckily they have garlic/cilantro/salsa that I poured over everything. It added lots of flavor.

Afterward, we perused the town, and we found a great little beer bar!




Melting Faces.

I thought Punto was a curse word....

Street Art, is as good as the street food. 

Reminds me of Barleys and Sunspot

Beer Bar! Bartender is wearing a "The Shins" t shirt. Freakin sweet!

Then, saturday, we toured the touristy side of El Yunque National forest. I have SO many pictures from there and It takes a long time to upload them to here, so for more photos, the facebook is good. facebook.com/brandyp 

Anyway, we hiked up to a tower and got some great views of the island. Also, we were able to see where at the top of the mountain, the composition of the forest changes to Elfin, or dwarf forest. Growth is stunted and there are less Tabonuco and Cecropia trees and many many palms.  Then, we hiked back down drove halfway down the mountain and stopped at La mina Falls. We hiked down and saw some beautiful scenery. As always. People were barbecuing and oh it smelled so great. Afterward, when my camera finally died, we went down to Luquillo and got to eat some street food, I had a shrimp filled fried taco thing that was bananna shaped dough filled with spiced shrimp. With the hot sauce, oh boy, was it good. Emily bought those and so I bought us two beers. I'll try to take more pictures of food. We got to swim in the ocean, which had no waves at the time. It was strange. There was a flow crossing the beach that was freshwater coming down from the mountains. It was cool and unsalty, yes I tasted it because I have an unhealthy lack of fear of germs. Maybe Peru in december will change that. 

Anyway, Enjoy the photos :)


At the La Mina waterfall, with the rest of the tourists in PR




Tower at mt. Britton


Then came the rain..

Reminds me of tomb rader
See the chicken? He was at the waterfall, don't know how or why

Love you guys!