Latest updates: report from the Merce festival in Barcelona in 2007 and of course more photographs.

Coming soon: report from a trip to Southern Africa incorporating South Africa, Zambia and Botswana.

What’s this site about?

Mostly travel and wildlife, but with bikes and pub quizzes thrown in. We’ll be adding trip reports from our holidays along with lots of photos of the birds and wildlife we found.

We’ll also be talking about other fun things that we’ve done, like Barcelona’s brilliant Merce festival and loads more.

Who/what are avengerpenguins?

Avengerpenguins are Chris and Julie. We’re a pub quiz team and we compete in a few quizzes in the Shrewsbury and West Midlands area of England. We put any cash that we win towards funding our holidays – and we have as many of those as we can afford. You’re most likely to find us in The Beacon, Shrewsbury on a Sunday night, where we are The Artful Penguins, having joined forces with Neil & Steve from the Artful Stodgers. But we can pop up anywhere from time to time and have even won a pub quiz in Amsterdam.

Honorary avengerpenguins.

Charlie - technical support - specialises in bikes and reptile questions.
Steve - former Artful Stodger - specialises in films and medical issues.
Neil - a sadly missed former Artful Stodger.
Tony - former Artful Stodger - specialises in Paul MacCartney
Alex - Chris’s eldest son - specialises in rowing and rugby.
James - Chris’s youngest son - good at maths. Doesn’t bother to specialise as he is concentrating on world domination when he gets bigger!
and we’d better not forget Motto Jones, quizmaster at The  Beacon, with his own unique style. A one-off.

Rights
 
All of the reports and photographs on this site belong to avengerpenguins. Please feel free to reproduce anything that you might need for personal or educational reasons, with acknowledgements where appropriate. We can e-mail you a full resolution copy of any photographs that will be better quality than those on the site. In the unlikely event that anyone want to use any of the site contents for commercial purposes, please contact us for details.
 
Commerce
 
 We might be dotcom but this is not a commercial site and we’re not selling anything. We do have to pay for the upkeep of the site so if you find something you like and, for example are inspired to take a trip somewhere, a purchase via one of our links will earn us a few pence that we’ll put towards web hosting costs etc. Most of the links are relevant and we use them ourselves.

So if you think you might find something on here that may interest you, come back soon. Here are a couple of photos to give you an idea of what’s to come.

This Green Vervet monkey seems to live outside a group (they are normally social) and has decided that it is on the staff at Marakissa River Lodge on the Allahein River near the border with Senegal, in the Gambia. We had seen it several times during our couple of hours at the lodge, where we stopped for lunch and to pass the hottest part of the afternoon. It did a patrol of the lodge and then disappeared into the riverside vegetation. We got this photograph on the way out in the late afternoon. The puppy was relaxing in the shade but the monkey wanted to play and teased it mercilessly until it joined in.

This shot was taken in broad daylight in Barcelonetta just across the marina from the harbour end of Las Ramblas. Although the rest of Barcelona was in the middle of the Merce festival, Barcelonetta was getting ready for it's own mini-celebration. The light passing through the red bunting gave everything a rather unusual pinkish tinge.