Around mid-December Matt had moved into his own house so I decided to go visit him and spend the day in Cemaco. When I arrived to his house around 9 am though I discovered that there were 4 or 5 other guys already there and several kids as well. So far it seems that Matt's house is a pretty popular place for the locals to hang out. Anyway, Matt was finishing up his breakfast and said "would you like to go iguana hunting today?" Of course I replied saying that it sounded like a lot of fun and would love to go! After a while we finally all walked across the river and into the jungle. The guys we were with started looking for the iguanas up in the trees and would advise us when they spotted them. They were way better at iguana spotting than Matt and me because it took us forever to see them even after the others discovered them.
Now once you spot the iguana things get dangerous for somebody because someone has to climb the tree in order to scare the iguana out of it. By some unspoken vote it was decided that one of the teenage kids would be the one to climb the tree, so up he went! He continued going up until he could climb no more because the limbs were too small to hold him. The people still hanging out on the far more safe ground level handed him a long piece of bamboo then to scare the iguana with. Now the iguana is a good distance up this tree, like 50-60 feet, and when the big bad scary bamboo finally terrifies the creature enough it decides that leaping would be better than dealing with that stick anymore. Amazingly iguanas seem to survive this feet unfazed and literally hit the ground running. The guys try their best to grab the iguana as it runs past them and if it escapes their circle they will chase it down. Of course once caught the iguanas are tied up and left to watch as their brethren meet the same fate or perhaps escape.
After catching a total of 5 iguanas we went back into Cemaco to prepare and cook one of them (the other 4 were distributed to other hunters). To be honest the iguana was pretty tasty. The meat mostly tastes similar to chicken as cliche as that is, but the eggs (we had a female iguana) were not my favorite. They had a weird texture to them that was somewhere between playdoh and gnocchi. Anyway, it was quite the hunt and now I can add another strange animal to my diet. I will leave off this blog with a few photos and a video!
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