The Some Birds
The title is in honor of my good friends and the great times visiting them, and even helping them with a work event. The tequila and movie-going were fantastic, but I also had a good time working at the city park where they were assigned and trying to wrangle group after group of teenagers to […]
A new perspective
After visiting the place many times over roughly a year and a half and climbing there for nearly as long, the one thing that was missing from my Bernal experience was actually climbing up the whole damn thing. Well check that off my list in a most pleasant way. We picked one of the classic […]
Marvelous Mexican Mountains – Malinche
If only that title was also a palindrome, that would be like infinity in word-nerd points. However, even without a perfect nerd score, it was wonderful to get back to the mountains with a little light mountaineering and an intense hiking day. We started a little after 9am and made it to the top in […]
Pinal de Amoles and one Puente de Dios
It was really hard to narrow down the 200-odd pictures I took last weekend down to the just-under 40 that I am showing below. The RÃo Escanela near Pinal de Amoles in the Sierra Gorda de Querétaro turns out to be just as beautiful as the soon-to-be off-limits Huasteca region in San Luis PotosÃ. I […]
Day of the Dead 2012 – Marigolds and Altars
Walking around town this year, I think that the Day of the Dead altars are still beautiful and well-crafted, but they seem smaller or less elaborate. To separate this year’s photos from last year’s, I’m more focused on the marigolds. These are the traditional flowers use to honor the dead and are used on the […]
2 days of flowers and work
I mean work and flowers. Definitely in that order. To work on the super-secret, super-awesome soccer ball project, I got to tag along on the practicum visit of a couple of trainees in the natural resource management program. The visit was to the Bosque La Primavera in Guadalajara, and it was definitely worth a second […]
85,000 birds in the sky – the River of Raptors
Or, more specifically, 85,591 including: 33,376 Turkey vultures 7 Swallow-tailed kites 1 Mississippi Kite 8 Norther Harriers 29 Sharp-shinned hawks 39 Cooper’s hawks 2 Gray hawks 5109 Broad-winged hawks 41,864 Swainson’s hawks 16 American kestrels 5 Peregrine falcons 5135 Unknown raptors Details here. See: All of this was in just one day observing the RÃo […]
Yucatan Peninsula – Day 7 – Cenotes
Woulda, shoulda, coulda. Along with everything else, the Yucatan peninsula is also known for its cenotes, or sort of sinkhole caves, resulting from the limestone geology. There are too many to visit, but we had a hard time picking even one to visit. We were driving by them in the middle of our trip and […]
Yucatan Peninsula – Day 6 – Isla Holbox
We were done early after our birding tour in Rio Lagartos, and so we headed for our second relaxing day on the beach on Isla Holbox. It is a quick ferry ride from Chiquila to the island, and then we walked down the sand streets to the beach and found a hotel. This was our […]
Yucatan Peninsula – Day 5 – Rio Lagartos
Birds, birds, birds. Rio Lagartos is another town at the end of the road, but this time on a lagoon. The area is known for birdwatching, and it is another protected Mexican biosphere reserve. Along with Celestun, this is one of the places to find large flamingo colonies. We didn’t see the thousands of flamingos […]
Yucatan Peninsula – Day 4 – Chichen Itza
Since I don’t really count Tulum, this was day 2 with Mayan ruins. I wasn’t expecting much from Chichen Itza, even with its wonder-of-the-world status, but I was pleasantly surprised. It was interesting – not that we took a tour. So, you will have to excuse the lack of information in the picture captions, because […]
Yucatan Peninsula – Day 3 – Cobá
After really relaxing into the vacation in Punta Allen, we headed inland for the Mayan ruins portion of the vacation. Our first stop was Cobá, where the site has not been cleared of jungle around the ruins and you can climb to the top of the tallest pyramid (in the whole Yucatan). The town of […]