Today we had breakfast at 7.15 and left a little later for the park, at 8.00am, as there was not a mad rush to find lemurs due to the excellent day yesterday. Our goal today was the other bamboo lemur the eastern grey bamboo lemur ( seen on lemur island at Vakona lodge - but not totally wild) and a nocturnal sportive lemur - hopefully out of a tree hole warming and dozing.
What was great about today was the weather - blue sky and sun - so we really did get to see the forest in a different light. The trails today were more up and down which made for a very good exercise. The early walk include a stick insect that looked just like a stick, an enormous, almost adult, snail, a younger version of the same snail and crab spider which did look like a crab. We also passed an ancient memorial site with stones to remember people from the local tribe - they don't practice exhumation - the bodies were not buried at the site they were placed in a local cave - but Stephen explained the ritual for the placing of the memorial stone which included a zebu sacrifice and ceremony presided over by the tribal king or queen.
We then heard that the spotters had found an eastern sportive lemur and we headed there slowly as it wouldn't be going anywhere fast. When we got to the spot we had to go down a steep narrow path the spotters had made -at the bottom it was only us and we had a good view. On the way back up we stood aside for groups to go down - I am not sure quite how the 20 or so who passed us would have fitted in the small spot we were in with any comfort - but hey ho! Back on the main track groups were just walking away from a new sighting of the golden bamboo lemur. We followed our guide up and down through the undergrowth as we followed the lemurs as they moved through the vegetation on the side of the hill. Doing this we got a good views of the male marking his territory followed by the female who seemed to go run over the area with his scent . We continued to follow them, eventually they stopped and I got some great pictures of the female eating bamboo. It was a fitting end to our time in the park; it had been founded to preserve the golden bamboo lemur and unlike yesterday when we only had glimpses of them,today we had some really good insights into their lives and extraordinarily good views of part of their daily life.(today's picture is of the golden bamboo lemur).
We left the park via a viewpoint of the rainforest - Njavi took a photo of us with our guide, spotter and a young girl,who joined us for the day to learn from Stephen; her grandad had been the king of the tribe before he died - the king is now his brother in law. We said she must be a princess - that made her smile!
I took photos of a blue tailed gecko,an interesting beetle and a large caterpillar before we made our way out of the park.
As we exited we did a survey for a young Japanese research student about our experience - and albeit enticed to buy from the women's stall we reminded the lady that we had already bought a tshirt for John, on which they had embroidered all the lemurs of the area, on our way down - she acknowledged 'oh yes' smiled broadly and resumed what she was doing.
Back at the lodge we said our goodbyes to our local guides - as well as tips I gave my old rohan light jumper to the spotter- they don't have much and I am sure he could use it; far better I leave it here than return it to the UK and put it in a charity box who already benefit from us.
The order of the day was a shower,followed by lunch then a relaxing afternoon as we have no other activities until we leave early tomorrow for our next park.