Meerkats

After llamas, my second favourite animal is the meerkat. These are seriously cut animals that live in the Kalahari desert. Meerkats are very sociable and very intelligent. I am posting something about Meerkats in honour of my niece Mira. Mira is a very special young lady and, like her mother, is an incredible artist. Like meerkats, Mira is very intelligent, curious and sociable. She is also quite slender (meerkat shaped, but with lovely long hair). Mira, like meerkats, also likes insects. Unlike meerkats. however, they don't feature in her daily diet. I hope she enjoys some meerkat photos.


Below is Luis, the meerkat.


As Mira is an artist. I thought I would also include an image of some meerkat art. These are wire sculpture meerkats.

Maybe one day she will make some femo meerkats for her aunt.

Finally, as Mira likes insects. Here is something that I killed while staying in a mud hut in the Bolivian Andes. By day, everything was fine. By night, once it as dark out side and we only had candle light inside, these things oozed out of the spaces between the mud bricks. Just so you can see how large this is, I took this photo with the toe of my boot in view. I wear a size 36 European. Apparently, these are harmless. Less harmless was the scorpion I also killed. Sorry there are no photos of this. Within seconds of seeing it, I splatted it with the closest large flat object to hand (the business end of my boyfriend's boot).


After the scorpion, even he wasn't keen to spend the night inside. We set up our tent outside on the front porch of this house. It is amazing how just a millimetre think piece of fabric makes you feel so much better. We fell asleep instantly. Our landlord for the night, who has leased us the house for the princely sum of 50 cents, thought we were crazy when she spotted our tent in the morning.
As you can see. The pigs were very curious about the ten. One even fell asleep against it. They clearly considered that it might be something worth eating. They snuffed the outside. What you can't see in the photo are all the pig snout prints on the door. These photos were taken during a trek called The Camion del Oro (the Gold Road). More about this tomorrow.