Josh and I went horseback riding today…and the guides said it would be ‘though the jungles, mangroves, and out to the beach’. I don’t recall going through anything that jumped out as being a “jungle”, which made me come back to the hotel and look up the definition of a jungle. In my mind I picture thick vegetation and more rain forest-y type habitats. But according to Wikipedia, a jungle is “a dense forest in a hot climate”. Its also explained as such:

The word jungle originates from a Sanskrit word jangala, meaning “desert”. In many languages of the Indian subcontinent, including Indian English, it is generally used to refer to any wild, untended or uncultivated land, including forest, scrub, or desert landscapes.

A ‘desert’ is something I definitely felt on the ride. So that being the case, I definitely went through a hot climatic zone through some scrub forest. Once at the beach some people actually went swimming with their horses…not me though, gotta protect the camera.

Here are some selected photos from the day.

A tropical mockingbird

Some unidentified species of Ibis, the picture kind of sucks but give a girl some credit, I was trying to wrangle my horse with one hand while taking the photo with the other hand.

A close-up of a butterfly’s head.

I didn’t purposely put up a blurry photo of Japanese decor, there is a dragonfly in the right hand side of the photo.

Here is the same species of buprestid that I took a picture of the first day…this time in natural light.

A longhorn beetle

And finally, a leaf beetle (Chrysomelidae)…and as an added perk, it is demonstrating ‘reflex bleeding’ in its leg joints. The leaf beetle family uses this behavior as a defense mechanism.

Oh, and apparently the hotel staff do not have enough to do in a day because look at what they made us out of towels when they came to clean the room yesterday. Not gonna lie, it was kind of creepy.

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