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My wife, Maxine Fechter, and I thought this would be a dream nature trip.  Wrong kind of dream.  The often fascinating content or the travel was heavily compromised by the seemingly endless bus rides over unpaved and barely treated terrain + my difficulty at enduring heat and hiking and bugs that others (and most were in my age range) seemed to take in stride.  Our tour company director, Josh, had assured us that his older parents had no trouble with the same trip and we would not find it arduous.

No doubt my physical discomfort contributed to the crankiness that pervades the experiences I describe.  Some context might be useful to readers: 

• We took this trip seven months before I learned I had prostate cancer.
• I was immersed in reading about environmental history across time and around the world.
• I grew up on a chicken farm where working in the coops in summer heat or winter cold felt intolerable. 
• I had been taking antidepressants for ten years and because of the amount of obsessing that I was still doing, and which gets worse under stress, at the time of the trip I  was in the midst of being diagnosed for minor bipolarity as well as (or instead of) depression. (Ultimately this diagnosis was rejected.)

NOTE: Within the diary, I include statements from the literature supplied by the tour company.  That content is always in italics.  Below are the introductory comments within that literature.