Bumworm post - Mesa Del Potrero, Portuguesa, Venezuela 15-19 June

Well well. Not sure that the land of bum worms lends itself to frequent blog updates unless you have a very long aerial and a friend who works in the telecommunications industry. I have spent the last few weeks in Portuguesa province where cowboys still roam deserted motorways on horseback and the bum worms grow big and long. First stop Mesa Del Potrero, which means ‘Table of the stable boy’. No sweaty jodhpurs here, though, they ride bareback and use them like motorbikes.

Arrived on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Maikell’s shiny camionetta with its air conditioning, cruise control and automatic eyebrow curlers. Immediately became clear that walking everywhere was likely to be sole means of transport because my dirty boots and occasionally dusty bottom were not in keeping with his vision of a pristine interior. A blessed relief really - anything to avoid blasting electro cumbia. As you can see in the piccy, there are far cooler ways getting around. Off we rambled to the house of Eduardo (the guy in the stripey top) and his lovely wife, where we peppered the surrounding woods with cage traps dripping with sardine and pineapple juice. The following day brought a rich harvest of forest rats and hissing ‘possums. These poor little brutes had to wait until thursday because the horse tranquiliser we had bought owing to the lack of ketamine seemed to be ineffective at elephant stunning doses. Same goes from Maikell, who managed to stick himself with a good half ml of the stuff by accident, clumsy bastard.

The ketamine finally arrived by the gallon and for the following days we pursued the local wild life, anesthetising and blooding anything that moved. Evenings were greatly assisted by the local presence of an indigenous intoxicant called ‘cerveza fria’. Also by Jose ‘Bracho’ Bracho and Leomar ‘Leo’ Hernandez, functionaries of the loc

al epidemiology unit who could strum a llanero tune like gooduns on the in-house guitar. Bracho is pictured flexing his enormous muscles after an unsuccessful hunt for bugs in armadillo burrows. What you can’t see is that he has busted up hi

s leg after jumping of a 10 foot ledge to avoid a snake (pictured) which turned out to be a harmless python. Amusingly there was a venomous snake involved but all you could see was its tail poking out of the larger snake’s mouth. Nature red in tooth and slither.

Bum-worm tally: 20 mammals, 40+ triatomine bugs of various species, and 20 seropositive humans sampled.