This morning I was walking on the beach with my
chucho puppy. We do this every morning. Some mornings we head out too late and the sand is already too hot to walk on without sandals,
caites, and I have to dump burning sand out of my flip-flops every few steps and carry the puppy on my shoulder. Where the waves have been most recently the sand is cool, but my job is to count the places where nesting sea turtles have come up and write down the location information with a GPS and the tracks don't show anymore where the tide has washed it away. So we walk on the hot sand, at least in one direction.
This morning, like most mornings, we came across a few interesting washed-up dead things. Heading West, the long leg of the crawl count, the guts of some large animal were cooking on the sand. The puppy chased away the big beautiful black-headed vultures who were expressing interest in the guts, but was not herself impressed.
Heading back from the eastern leg of the count Luna, that is the puppy's name, stopped ahead of me to sniff at a curled-up fuzzy dead creature - a bat.
I don't remember really seeing a bat up so close before, even a dead one. In fact I think the only bats I've really gotten adequate looks at are the smaller-than-mice cave bats in the Oregon Caves and the gigantic flying foxes I saw in the botanical gardens in Sydney, Australia when I was nine.
I peeled the dead bat's wings away from its furry body and took a look at its fingers and single claw and the membrane stretched between. Its hind paws were curled up, looking like flexible rat's paws. On its nose was a little pink rhino horn. I wanted to identify the species, but apparently bats make up a huge percentage of the mammal population in Guatemala and I don't know where to start.
Jaime told me a few weeks ago that there are vampire bats here. I didn't believe him until some other people told me the same thing. I don't know where I thought vampire bats lived, but I didn't think it was Central America, I don't know why not. Jaime says that sometimes you sleep with your foot pressed against your mosquito net and in the night you wake up and it feels like there's sugar between your toes, and in the morning you see you've been bitten.
I also get peed on by bats on a pretty regular basis. Right through my net onto my face, usually right when I was about to fall asleep. Spritz. Otherwise I like to watch them flit around under the thatch and wish them luck taking out all those damn
zancudos. Mosquitoes I dislike and DEET I hate.
I came home from the crawl count and was offered papaya.
There's a new bus on the route that goes all the way to La Barra that is orange and they call it
La Papaya.
