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The Maya temple of Tazumal in El Salvador This is the fourth set of pre-Columbian ruins I have ever seen; it is the second best of the four.  On its own right, it is fairly impressive.  The structures were all built by hand over thousands of years.  The local authorities took it upon themselves to pour concrete over many of the vertical and horizontal surfaces to help preserve the structure and make it safer.  Unfortunately, when they did that, they made the site no longer a candidate for UNESCO's list.  Even without that, it is still worth visiting. The great issue for us was the time it took to get there.  We left the port where the cruise ship was moored at in a bus that drove for over 90 minutes, approaching 2 hours.  The roads varied from a four lane highway to narrow roads with buildings less than two feet away from the bus, at speed, no less.  How people don't die there regularly is unknown to me. Excavations of the site began in 1940....

  Kathryn on our cruise through the Panama Canal I discovered long ago, before I was married, that love is a choice. The problem with the word love is that it is used to denote perhaps the most cherished aspect of our existence. Without spending time discussing all the various meanings of the word, let me address the ones I am referring to today.   You'll notice the plural of the term.  Love of a friend.  Love of a family member.  Love of an intimate partner.  Promised love.  The love of life when together. If you base love on emotion, the feeling ebbs and flows like the tides flowing into the Bay of Funday.  "I only love you when you look pretty."  "I only love you when I get my way."  "I only love you when my needs are met."  This is not love.  It is selfishness.  It is love of self, not of another. Rather, love should be a continuous beacon, like a lighthouse that throws its beam into its surroundings whether it be...

  Three species of boobies found in the waters off Middle America. I have seen boobies before, the bird kind, I will defer my answer on any other variety.  Some, the masked booby, are pelagic in nature, meaning that they spend a great deal of time out at sea and are rarely seen from the shore.  Others, like the brown and blue-footed boobies, show up closer to land. I have photographed all three species in the last few days aboard our ship (Nieuw Amsterdam - Holland America).  The brown booby is far more common, while there has been a moderate showing by the blue footed kind.  I have only seen one masked booby.  As they are highly pelagic in nature, I suspect this is normal while travelling close to shore. All booby species and their closely related cousins, the gannets, are marine fish eaters and are not found associated with fresh water.  They often accompany ships and fast-moving boats as fish are seen to move away from the hull; the birds dive for t...

Golden-fronted woodpecker as photographed in El Salvador. It's rare to see a woodpecker taking such a keen interest in flowers.  And yet, here I was, in El Salvador, visiting an ancient Mayan temple, when an unfamiliar bird made its appearance. The first thing I noticed was its striped back - distinctly black with thin broken white stripes on the background.  The next thing that hit me was the shape of the beak and head.  You get familiar with bird types, and this one definitely was a woodpecker.  The wierd thing was that it seemed to be feeding on flowers. Not the actual blooms themselves, but perhaps nectar, or associated insects.  Some birds, like sapsuckers, will drill small holes in trees to take the leaking sap and any insects that get caught up in it.  I suspect it was similar with this bird; the nectar would help with dehydration, the sugars with energy, and the bugs with protein. It flitted from bloom to bloom, always arriving on top and disappeari...

Hippopotamus photographed at drive through zoo in Guatamala You can imagine my frustration when faced with the perils of shooting with a long lens inside a bus with tinted windows.  Add to that the fact that my literally cool lens was just brought out into a damp, warm environment causing elements to fog up.  On top of all that, now imagine the bus is moving along a pothole-strewn dirt road.  And getting out of the bus wasn't recommended.  The lions have been known to cause problems. The only solution was to shoot with a high ISO, a fast shutter speed, and hope the reflection, dirt, and other impairments didn't render my images useless.  Such was my predicament yesterday when shooting at the drive-through zoo in Guatemala. Pressing "play" on my camera allowed me to witness the resulting carnage.  Foggy, low-contrast, highly noisy images were the result.  The good news was that the fogged lens situation was gradually improving while the rest of the issu...

Blue-footed boobies photographed near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Once you've done snickering, there is something amazing to learn about this stately bird.  The blue colour of their feet actually has an evolutionary basis.  The feet aren't always the same colour.  There is a correlation between the shade of blue and breeding success.  The darker blue the feet are, the higher the probability that the chicks will be healthy.   The excursion we were on took us by boat along the coast south of Puerto Vallarta.  While we were cruising at a fairly quick pace, fish-eating birds started to show up around us.  There may have been a dozen or so at one point.  Fish would zip out of the way of the swiftly moving boat, only to be caught by a diving booby.  There were actually two species: the blue-footed variety and another called the brown booby (more snickering).  Both were eager to catch all the fish they could get. I photographed the one on the...