Jabillal, Portuguesa, Venezuela 20 – 25 June

Mesa del Portero is basically flat, has cold beer, electricity, concrete houses and a tarmac road within about 2k. In Jablillal the houses are built of mud and thatch, every angle is about 45% up or down, and the dirt road all but disappeared in a raging torrent after about 5 inches of rain on the second night. It has the most beautiful views, with mist wrapped forested mountains descending down into a vast flat plain. As the crow flies it is little more than 10 k from the capital of the province. As the jeep revs and screams it is a good few hours. Luckily we had discarded Maikell’s 4-wheel-hair-dryer by this point in favour of a 1984 jeep with a roaring v6, no windows, and the petrol consumption per day of a Central African Republic.

We didn’t have so much success here with the mammals. Although what we did catch was a little little more varied. Some opossums and a little forest caviomorph rodent. Also a smaller and less manky ‘possum called Metachirus nudicaudatus with a beautiful high clicking alarm call. Particularly amazing was a baby porcupine Coendu prehensilis, captured when it fell from its mother’s back as she fled hunters, and now kept as a pet. No needles or donkey tranqs for this one. Just a pot of hungry lab reared triatomines placed on it belly while it was fed a bit of sugar cane. These are examined in a month’s time for the presence of parasite in their gut.



Most horrifying in Jabillal was my first experience of real domestic infestation. Most of the houses we examined were teeming with bugs, mud walls streaked with the black, half digested blood of the occupants. We pulled about 60 of the things from one bedroom alone, lord knows how many of them sat hidden deep in the cracks in the walls. Perhaps unsurprisingly the locals seemed fairly ambivalent to the menace in their bed clothes. Being told you might contract heart disease in the next 25 years seems less important than whether any lunch is forthcoming in the next 24 hours.

Our lovely tobacco spitting host was Mauricio, a big friendly coffee farmer who seemed to have over 1000 jokes up his sleeve, each with a punch-line including an increasingly bizarre variation of homosexual sex. On cross-examination he seemed to actually have a fairly open minded attitude to gay people, a stark contrast to Maikell’s belief that they should all be burnt at the stake.

He sent be back with a little bag of green coffee beans my lover, which we can toast on a saturday morning and sip at delicately in Clifden Road kitchen while the birds go ‘cheep’ in the jardin.

Bum-worm tally: 10 Mammals, 100+ triatomine bugs, Rhodnius species, 4 humans samples, 1 bag green coffee beans, strange itchy rash on left buttock.