Springtime at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Part 2

Peru, Part 2

Here's Part 1.

Here are some more photos from Santa Clara, the beautiful community (with no running water or electricity!) where I stayed in Lucy's little hut for several days...

Lucy's neighbor making patarashka, which was life-changingly good (like, I eat fish all the time now, and didn't before!). 

From the email I sent home after leaving Santa Clara (unedited and kind of embarrassing in its straight-to-the-point indication of my travel priorities, i.e., animals and food):

I saw an anteater!!!! A big green parrot who is the neighbor's pet (she always antagonizes lucy, enters her hut and poos on her things!!), sparkly green butterflies, banana trees with their fleshy hanging flowers, vultures and hawks, a puppy, gorgeous black birds with big red beaks, enormous spiders. Also, I ate some marvelously weird things. A waxy red cashew fruit, boiled nuts called "pan de arbol," MANY varieties of bananas--so fun to experience the full spectrum of banana possibilities--and best of all, Lucy's indigenous neighbor cooked us this fish, wrapped in a banana leaf and cooked over a primitive grill on the ground, and it was beyond good.

Lucy's wonderful mother and brother visited right before me, and we overlapped for a few days.

Lucy's "baño seco" toilet <3

Evidence of Lucy outside her hut :)

One afternoon, Lucy and I held a watercolor workshop for the local kids.

Such a beautiful painting...and I received it as a gift!

sea creatures

a coelacanth in a plastic prism

"The discovery of a species still living, when they were believed to have gone extinct 66 million years previously, makes the coelacanth the best-known example of a Lazarus taxon, an evolutionary line that seems to have disappeared from the fossil record only to reappear much later."

"they are more closely related to lungfish, reptiles and mammals than to the common ray-finned fishes."

source

St Peter's Fish, Israel, 2011