Don't wake the wife

Michelle and I slept soundly in our forest eco-lodge. Michelle is not an early riser and I am a huge supporter of a breakfast buffet, so I wandered over so as not to miss it. The serving staff enquired after my wife and the soundtrack was the Bangles and Bryan Adams, which made me want to bellow out.

A day of lounging, chatting and over-consuming. Michelle is a brilliant tonic to work pressures. The waiting staff were wrong about her and I, but anyone would be lucky if she deigned to be their spouse.

Next to the eco-lodge Liberia's first wildlife rescue facility is in its infancy. A former zookeeper at Whipsnade, Luke, is holding the fort as manager, and gave us a tour of the animals they've taken in. It's a tricky balance as a gung-ho foreigner roving around Monrovia confiscating illegally traded wildlife. He's addressing illegal activities and acting for the rule of law, yet could quickly be making enemies. I advised him, as much as possible, to hide behind the Liberian Forestry Development Authority, who seem to want to uphold wildlife laws and already trail along to some of the confiscations. Their official voice is needed to help people understand. At one Thai restaurant along the Monrovia beachfront, a duiker (forest antelope species) was kept for years. When it was rescued the owner was like: 'Wot? We're looking after it. It's being fed well ain't it.'

'Yeah but you're feeding it cheese pizza and it would naturally eat leaves. Look how fat it is.'

This pangolin was confiscated from some lads selling it on the roadside. Pangolins have the dubious distinction of being the world's most illegally traded mammal. There is a rampant desire for them in Asian traditional medicine, and a vast intercontinental trade. They're seen so commonly in markets and their scales are uncovered in illegal shipments in such huge quantities, that they can't have suffered population crashes everywhere. But the trade cannot carry on at this level for much longer. It would be a disaster if pangolins were lost, and it would probably mean explosions of ants and termites, which they prey upon. They look helpless and harmless, like the scaly African and Asian equivalent of sloths.

Aside from pangolins and duikers the rescue centre is currently home to mangabeys, a palm civet, an African crowned eagle and a palm nut vulture. A European woman working in Liberia was amongst the undergrowth, a volunteer helping to construct areas for new holding pens. This transported me back to days gone by of scratching around in patches of the Bolivian jungle, clearing tropical vegetation to construct foundations for a veterinary clinic. With only a pair of gardening gloves and very few implements that I can remember, it was pretty brutal work.