Tonight, after several unavoidable postponements, we were finally able to do the night walk in Kubah National Park that we and our naturalist/guide friend Lucian had been planning for a little while.

It's many, many years since we spent time in a forest at night... I'd forgotten the extraordinarily varied soundscape. We arrived at dusk, just in time to hear the trumpet-playing cicadas (they're only around for a short while).


As the darkness deepens, and you head up the hill, a multi-layered symphony surrounds you on either side. The shugga-shugga-shugga of the percussion, the soft booop-booop of the flutes, and those amazing bell-like sounds that reminded me of a finely-tempered bamboo wind instrument. And this is all courtesy of a vast orchestra of crickets, katydids, and frogs...

So, what did we see? Well, lots.

But to be honest, Nigel and I would have seen pretty much nothing if left to our own devices. The only frog I spontaneously spotted was the one that leapt onto the frog pond boardwalk right in front of me... But Lucian has the sharpest of eyes. He says it's just practice, but I'm not sure I agree. I think it's inbuilt. Sometimes I struggled to see something even when it had been pointed out to me.

We saw bats, fireflies, and snakes, but we have no pictures of any of those.

We saw a katydid, a rather gorgeous lizard, a beetle, a stick insect, and some pitcher plants:






We saw several kinds of spider:







And -- piece de resistance -- we saw about 11 different species of frog:
















We thought this was wonderful, but you have to bear in mind that there are more than 60 species of frog at Kubah, so we've got lots of spotting still to do...