Peru 4 - Thanks to

Several organisations have helped me with my trip to Peru, through monetary or equipment support, so I'd just like to thank them.

Firstly, I am very grateful to Mrs Lindsay Radermacher, who left a bequest to my school, St. Paul's, to be awarded to people on suitable projects and I was lucky enough to be a recipient of a grant to help fund my trip.

The Jeremy Willson Charitable Trust have also given me a very generous grant. The trust's purpose is to allow Jeremy, a geologist who tragically died of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease in 2006, aged just 30, to continue to benefit people's lives. During his life he worked as a geologist for Shell, travelling to such countries as Nigeria, Pakistan and mountainous regions of Europe. He also spent time living in Indonesia, the Netherlands and the USA, and travelled to Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia to undertake geological research expeditions. In addition to this he carried out independent field studies of the El Queva complex in the Andes in Northwest Argentina. With his twin brother he travelled through Costa Rica and Nicaragua in Central America, as well as Thailand. The trust now enables Jeremy to benefit people's lives through grants to people on projects involving Jeremy's passions: geology, adventure, the environment and athletics.

Thanks must go to Swarovski Optik who have loaned me a pair of their EL 8x32 binoculars. They are a joy to look through, and have proved invaluable for spotting birds in the darkness of the rainforest. Their small size and lightweightness makes them very easy to carry with a large camera over my shoulder. They've practically never left my side, but it's going to be hard to give them back afterwards though!

Wimberley have also given me one of their flash brackets which as been very useful for telephoto work as it means you do not get the "steel eye" effect which otherwise occurs when the flash is attached directly to the camera. It's a must-have piece of equipment for long lens photography with a flash.

Of course I couldn't do a post without some pictures, so here's a Saddleback Tamarin I photographed along one of the more open trails last week while out looking for Peruvian Spider Monkeys.