Author: grinnell

21 January 2023 This morning we hiked in to one of the waterfalls off the tourist trail–poorly marked and known mostly to the locals.  Our guide, Lisa, knew the location and where to park the bus.  It was one of the most fun swimming experiences I’ve had in any country.  I saw smiles all around. …

21 January 2023 Stepping off of my soapbox for a moment, here are some photos from our climb, yesterday, of the rocky escarpment overlooking the Tucavaca Valley, just outside where we’re staying in Santiago de Chiquitos.  

21 January 2023 Our core beliefs and values must—at least initially—come from those we grow up around.  What religious tradition we practice, how we value the physical world and the human world, even how we view other people—with suspicion or with openness—must in a large part be changeable depending upon where and with whom a…

18 January 2023 I’m looking back now to try to fill in some holes before we head off to Chiquitanía, the eastern part of the country we meant to begin with before the Santa Cruz blockades began. One of the large events that I’ve not remarked on in this blog was our visit to Chacaltaya…

17 January 2023 Madidi National Park stretches from the Andes mountains to the Amazon basin, and is home to over 1000 species of birds; mammals from shrews to capybaras to monkeys, tapirs, and jaguars; an amazing diversity of magnificent trees and plants; and indigenous communities that have lived here for at least 300 years.  It…

The Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat and may contain the world’s largest deposit of lithium, an element critically important for the production of the lithium batteries that power everything from cell phones to Teslas.  We had a talk from the CEO of the national lithium industry from 2009 until 2019, and…

Bolivia once had two large lakes, Titicaca in the north on the border with Peru, and Poopó between Oruro and the Salar de Uyuni.  At its maximum Lake Poopó covered 390 square miles and supported thriving populations of fishes, waterfowl, plants, and other animals, and supported the fishing economy of the Uru-Chipaya people who lived…

7 January 2023 There was a time, say, after the fourth or fifth attempt to dig out the wheels and push it free, that we thought the bus was stuck for the night.  The flat mud plain stretched miles in each direction, with just some pinpoints of lights against the darker mountains that showed where…

After 36 hours of sitting in airports, on three flights (MSP to Chicago, to Sao Paolo, to Santa Cruz, Bolivia), and a chartered bus, we arrived in Santa Cruz de la Sierra to start our course on the impacts of climate change in Bolivia.  While we were traveling I learned that the demonstrations that had…

In the 1960s, an American scientist and entomologist (a person who studies insects) interested in plant-insect interactions came to Costa Rica as part of a Tropical Ecology course. From that start as a student, Dan Janzen has dedicated almost 60 years to understanding the insect diversity of the dry forests of the Guanacaste province, eventually…