The mud theme continued as we hiked a few miles in search of the barbet.It's a jungle out thereLooking out over the edge of the earth, just over a mile high.Closer to the edgeAnd... success!We saw about 5 or 6 Scarlet-banded BarbetsThis is one of themMy photo opportunity wasn't entirely satisfactory,
but from Wikimedia here is a painting that shows more clearly what we were looking at.Viewing a Scarlet-banded Barbet (photo by Merrill Lynch)
We had originally planned to stay a second night and return early Sunday morning.
However, Sunday was a national election day.
Voting is mandatory, and as best we could understand,
some residents of Plataforma still vote in other districts,
so the trucks were needed to transport voters on Sunday and
we had to start our return trip to Bellavista at 8:45PM on Saturday night.
The driver had already completed one round trip that day; we're not sure whether three trips a day was routine.
You can see that I had a great deal of trouble keeping the camera pointed into the headlight beam,
but trust me that it was harder than it looks.
There are actually a few places in this video where you can see the road.
Not too long after I took this, we reached the point where the driver could unlock the hubs.
And not too long after that, the driveshaft broke. In the middle of the night. In the middle of nowhere.
Fortunately they probably have a lot of experience with that repair, and in only 45 minutes we
were on our way again.
The trip down the mountain was much faster that the trip up had been, but still it was a quarter
after 3AM when we finally reached a hotel in Bellavista.
