Coming back from Narnia

My last couple of nights in Quito, Ecuador, were eventful... getting back to what they call “civilisation” was borderline traumatic. Seeing everyone in make-up and normal clothes all but disturbed me; why do people suddenly have personality transplants just because we are away from the jungle? I’m the same there as I always am, but some people are obviously a bit more Jeckyl and Hyde than I am... there were people getting stupidly drunk (thus proving that the unnecessarily condescending rules on alcohol at Yachana were in fact justified, as some idiotic teenagers are incapable of knowing when to stop – twats), other people were busy snorting coke and nearly getting arrested (Central America is not a nice place to be imprisoned, I imagine). And we were sat there in a bar, with drunken men hollering a football song at a widescreen match, loud rap music blaring from the place next door, tourists shouting in English at bar staff, and I was looking at the menu over overpriced junk food, holding my head in my hands, wishing myself away from the place. If a black hole could have gulped me up and away from that place, that would have been wonderful. Thankfully, we exited left and went to a sushi restaurant, and the night got better (although (call me racist, why not) it was weird to see Japanese people speaking Spanish). Still, all the worst things about that night continue to be all the worst things about “civilisation”.

I have often said that going abroad is like going to Narnia: you feel you have spent a lifetime away, but when you return, it is as if no time has passed. And once you are back into the mundanity of everyday life, your time away seems to condense as though it didn’t really last that long after all; in fact, it was almost as if it never happened – like it was a dream or something you imagined. It seems a world away.

* * *

I have been back in England for 8 days now, and I am readjusting to life in the slow lane. You probably don’t care about the minutia of my life... I know I didn’t much care for the minutia of other people’s lives while I was away in the exciting world of the jungle. People’s status updates on Facebook were things like “... is feeling a bit rough” or “... is having a cappuccino with marshmallows” and I remember thinking who gives a shit? It’s pointless, it means nothing, it is of no consequence whatsoever, so don’t tell me about it; I don’t care. People’s lives are dreadfully boring if that is the most interesting thing that is happening to them.

And now I am in that very same situation myself, so I won’t bore you details of what i've done since i got back.


Things in England are WEIRD. Television is pointless: it’s just people pretending, for the most part. People saying things that aren’t true... what is the point of that? Why would anyone want to watch that? And the news – well, it’s just more of the same as always. Murders; cold weather; I don’t think anyone would notice if they just replayed last year’s news again this year. TV is something I did not miss one little bit while I was away, but in spite of that, and in spite of what I've just said about the shitty futility of it, I have watched it every day since my return. Why? Boredom. There is nothing to DO here. Seriously, what do people DO all day? I can’t understand it any more... what did I used to do? What do other people DO with their time? Life in England seems dull. But in my time away, I was with 25 people all the time, and had activities to do each day, and indeed most evenings. Given the choice, I’d far rather spend my evenings like I used to, playing cards with friends (Yanif is way better than Shithead ever was, even though I don’t get to say “skippy-skip!”), lying in a hammock and reading, or just sitting around and talking and having fun (designated or otherwise). But it seems that that is not happening here. I have friends, sure, but I don’t get to see them every day like I did in the jungle, and it consequently feels lonely here.

I find that I've forgotten a lot of what I used to do, and my life before my trip (I guess that's the Narnia Factor); so, I’m being really absent-minded. For example, I noticed a new Tesco Metro had opened up, and I thought how that would be convenient for me... then a minute or so later I realised it wasn’t that convenient, because I don’t live on the road I was thinking I lived on any more; I moved house 2 years ago! ... And things in my house aren’t where I’d expect to find them. I thought Rich might have taken my back door keys, till he reminded me that they are where I always kept them, next to the sugar – I’d forgotten where I kept them. I've done the same with several other things. And I was in Tesco (the one NEAR to where i live!), looking at the hotpots and shepherds pies, then I realised they had meat in them and I needed to go to the vegetarian section! Jesus, it’s like I've got special needs or something! I need a Care Worker to come and help me in every aspect of my life. I was only away for six months, but it’s like I've forgotten how to function in this world.

I feel like I just don’t understand UK life any more. I feel lost. Nothing makes sense. It’s like coming out of prison or something. When your life has been so controlled, and so different, and with a totally different group of people, where food was provided, and it was hard work, but rewarding, and now all of a sudden, I’m on my own, cooking for one, no work to do (yet), so no reward, and everything feels a bit pointless. And some things have changed that I didn’t want to change... I suppose you can’t walk out of your life, then walk back into it six months later and act as if everything’s the same, can you? I think I wanted to have my cake and eat it; to leave and have an adventure, and then come back to my life as if nothing has happened, but evidently that is not to be.

Need I point out that the weather here in England is very cold? It’s fucking freezing: the coldest I can ever remember being, and I don’t think it’s just because I've come back from the equator... it’s about -5’C during the day time here at the moment, and about -10’C at night. That’s not just cold, that’s painfully, unspeakably cold. I’m sleeping in fleecy pyjamas, body-warmer, dressing gown, in a sleeping bag, under a 15 tog duvet, in a room with heating on. Hell, I have even worn a woollen hat two nights! I just can’t seem to get warm. I much preferred sleeping in 25’C, without a shadow of a doubt.

Just to lower the tone, I thought I’d let you know that when I got back to England, putting toilet paper in the toilet seemed weird at first (it’s been anathema, taboo, and borderline criminal for six months, the sewage systems in Central America being unable to cope with it) but I am now used to putting toilet paper in the toilet again. Phew! Neighbours might have thought I was weird if I was in the garden burning shitty toilet paper in Nottingham, England.

However, in its defence, England is beautiful. The hills are sweeping, the trees barren, and the skies the palest of grey, but with everything dusted under frosty white, even the ugliest council estate can look like a Christmas card scene, and the countryside is incredibly beautiful. And while your eyes are watering from the cold, you can almost believe that you are crying at the beauty of it all! In that sense, England is like inside the wardrobe of Narnia, and I am Lucy amazed by the elegance of the snow on every little twig of every tree. You don't get that in the rainforest.

So...
My time away was amazing... I have had marine turtles laying eggs into my hand; I have seen monkeys swinging through the trees; I have seen deadly venomous snakes; I have seen (and heard) the most beautiful birds – parrots, toucans, and a whole host of others... and it was wonderful. The people I met and the things I did went together to make a more wonderful experience than most people can ever hope to experience, and it’s still going on out there, with other people, while I am here typing this in my living room, with the TV droning on in the background, advertising stuff I don’t need in between programmes I don’t care about. It’s good spending time with family and friends, but beyond that, I don’t know whether I really want to be here. We shall see. :-/

Top Tens

TOP 10 FAVOURITE MOMENTS
1. The Fun Day at the school in Puerto Rico, where we threw wellies, had a tug of war, a multi legged race, water balloons, and a slip 'n' slide - Brilliant!
2. Seeing the parrots at the clay lick in Yasuni - it was incredible
3. Seeing the monkeys at Hector's island
4. Going to Baños and abseiling down the waterfalls with Cat, Kristen and Phil
5. The Superheroes night, and doing stupid challenges and forfeits!
6. Going to the waterhole with Max, Phil and Grant, and having running races and falling over in the sand
7. Seeing the rainbow boa under the staff cabin
8. The Cultural Exchange day, where Cristain's community came over and did a dance for us and i cooked up a banquest for 35 people
9. Going to the waterfall with Max, Bells and Jas and getting covered in clay
10. When Olly said there was a snake in the stream, and me and Max rfeaked out and ran out!



TOP 10 FAVOURITE ANIMALS I'VE SEEN
1. Orange-cheeked parrots
2. Other parrots
3. Rainbow boa
4. Toucans / araçaris
5. Other snakes, including the anaconda (even though it was dead)
6. Woolly monkeys
7. Saki monkeys
8. Agoutis
9. Blunt-headed treesnakes
10. Frogs (various)



TOP 10 FAVOURITE BIRD CALLS (yes I am that sad!)
1. Green oropendola (R2D2 on speed)
2. Russet-backed oropendola (trill-plop)
3. Great potoo (serial killer roar)
4. Bright-rumped attila (orgasm bird)
5. White-throated toucan (incessant yapping that reminded me of my dog barney)
6. Yellow-rumped cacique (R2D2 being conversational)
7. Southern nightingale-wren (mournful scales)
8. Plumbeous pigeon ("suck my balls")
9. Screaming piha (wolf whistler of the tropics)
10. Undulated tinamou (a bit boring but we heard it every day!)



TOP 10 THINGS I LOVED AND WILL MISS
1. Having good friends to hang out with all the time and never feeling lonely
2. Going on trips to places like Hector's and Yasuni
3. Seeing cool animals like parrots, monkeys and snakes
4. Designated Fun Time
5. Doing sound scientific research
6. Playing Yanif / Yaneesh / Ganeshe / Ganic / Garlic...
7. Spanglishing
8. Hammock time
9. Point counts
10. Mist netting - a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush


TOP 10 THINGS I HATED AND WON'T MISS
1. Getting bitten by sand flies, bullet ants, other ants, wasps, sweat bees, proboscis flies, ticks, and mosquitoes; feeling itchy from bites
2. Feeling patronised, e.g. being told every day to be careful on the road and watch out for cars!
3. Annoying people being annoying, e.g. singing Disney Songs
4. Walking really fast and feeling knackered
5. Freezing cold showers
6. Porridge being the only breakfast option
7. Eating beans twice a day, every day
8. Having rat(s) living in our room, and I saw it crawling along my bed while I was in it
9. Falling over on crazy terrain
10. Sweating madly on surveys so I had permanent drips from my eyelashes, nose and chin



TOP 10 THINGS I'M NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO ABOUT ENGLAND
1. Being alone - I haven`t been alone in 6 months
2. Cold weather - I hear it's below 25'C there - brrrrrrrr!!!
3. Christmas shopping in towns heaving with people
4. Being away from nature, animals, and beautiful jungle
5. Going back to work and having to do the things other than teaching like writing reports, parents evenings, admin, progress tutoring, marking... I better not give too much of a list because I'll be back there soon!
6. Forgetting all the stuff I've learnt, like Spanish, survey techniques, and being able to identify loads of species of animal
7. Annoying, ignorant people, like chavs
8. Traffic, rush hour, grim concrete cities where forest was hacked down and paved over a long, long time ago
9. People commenting that I don´t have a tan, as if that is the most important thing in the world, and the only reason to leave England
10. Boredom, and staring at crap TV programmes because there is nothing else to do



TOP 10 THINGS I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO ABOUT ENGLAND
1. Seeing family and friends, especially my nephews Lewis and Joseph, who are too young for me to have been able to keep in touch with
2. Seeing Barney - hope he remembers me and doesn´t bite me!
3. Re-telling everyone stories I´ve already emailed them about, and re-showing them photos they've already seen on Facebook!
4. Eating Cadbury's chocolate, veggie burgers, and junk food
5. Christmas with my family
6. Electricity, including lights!
7. Having warm showers
8. Not having rats living in my bedroom
9. The Great British countryside, with beautiful snowy hills
10. Being able to drink alcohol whenever I want, go out whenever I want, to wherever I want, with whoever I want, whyever I want. (Whyever whould be a word!)


So there you go!

Nearing the end

Well i am now in Tena, and have thus left the jungle for good, and I am feeling rather sad. I have had a brilliant time here and will really miss it, when I´m sat at home on my own in my house, or when I´m stuck in a traffic jam in a concrete city, or when I´m fretting about writing reports and meeting deadlines and whether people will pass their exams.... it seems a world away, but it will all be real soon enough.

In this last week, there haven´t been any surveys; we just went on walks and had fun, chilled out, and tidied up the camp.

One thing that was really good was the Fun Day (ok, a Fun 2 Hours) which me, Lucy, Tim and Steve (and Jas) organised for the kids at the school we teach at in Puerto Rico (no, not the country, it´s a nearby village!) We organised and planned the games, then nearly all of the volunteers (12 of us) and 3 staff went down to the school, and we had a couple of hours of brilliant fun. we divided into 4 teams, each team having different coloured headbands made of coloured plastic flagging tape, and each team had 3 volunteers and about 5 kids (aged 4 to 10 ish) in it ... then for the events. the first event was the tug of war, when the entire team took hold of the rope and tried to pull it past the welly marker. it was great fun, and all the teams played against each other; my team came third but we dished out high fives nonetheless :D. Then was the welly throwing; we threw a welly, then the next team member had to pick it up from where it lay, and throw it, till everyone had had a go. We had the mischieviously overzealous Sebastian on our team though, and he grabbed it and threw it about 3 times when he wasn´t supposed to, so the scoring was probably way off! never mind. Then we made a big circle and threw water balloons between ourselves at ever-increasing distances till they´d all popped - that was fun! The multi-legged race was next where the entire team tied their legs to one another in a line, and then attempted to race another team to the finish line... we were thwarted by mud and had people falling all over the place, which was really funny. The last thing was the most fun (but not a competition) where we got a load of plastic sheeting about 6 metres long, covered in in shampoo and water, and then took turns running up to it, throwing ourselves onto our fronts, and skidding the entire distance along it - the kids loved it (and so did we!) and only about 3 of them wanted to play football instead - you know you´re onto a winner when they choose it over football! it was really good, and finished up in a big pile-up of everyone - adults and kids - throwing ourselves down it and rolling around! it was great fun, and a brilliant way to finish our time here. Unfortunately for the kids (and the teachers!) they had to carry on with normal lessons in the afternoon, despite their school uniform being drenched and soapy, and them being hyper! So the kids loved Fun Day, but the teachers maybe did not!

Other fun stuff we did this week was to go on a stream walk, where we waded in up to our waists, and kiwi Lucy was on top form, spotting snake after snake, and frog after frog... cool! we saw one that was little but venomous, and two others that were non-venomous, and while Maxine and I were in the water up to our knee level, Olly went "Snake!" and we said where, and he pointed in the water at our wellies, and we saw it there and freaked out and ran for the land in a 3-second mad panic, which was really funny. Olly said it´s a bad idea to splash around like that as they are attracted to the splashing, but sod that, a snake in the same water that i´m in is the stuff of nightmares for me (and Max!) and we panicked and ran for it - ha ha!

I also went on a walk down to the Waterfall (cascada) with Jas, Bells and Max, and we covered ourselves in clay,and they pretended to be cave people. The following day, I went to the waterhole, with Max, Phil and Grant. The waterfall is small, with cool water that is crystal clear, and it´s really beautiful. The waterhole is much bigger (it flows into the Rio Napo itself) and the water is warmer, but filthy brown in colour (from silt), and you can feel all the gooey muddy sandy silt underfoot. The four of us had running races, running along in the shallows, where the ground is so uneven that you fall over all the time... we also floated / walked / swam over to where it flows into the Napo, and you could feel the water get colder and the current get stronger. It´s really beutiful there, with massive trees and forest vines hanging down into the water, and caciques and oropendolas making noises you didn´t think it was possible for birds to make, and a few parrots flying overhead maybe - not close enough so you can see what species, but their noisy squawking and inelegant flight gives them away. It was a really good time, and something I´ll remember about the beauty of the place.

What else? umm... we spent ages tidying up and cleaning the camp. That was not fun though. Nor was packing. I've ditched as much stuff as i can - crappy Primark Tshirts i bought for this purpose, disposable clothes that are battered from six months of wear, or things that are useful in the jungle but probabaly not elsewhere... but a few of the interns wanted more stuff, as they are staying on for anoher 3 months - Nicki took a Tshirt and some socks; Ella took some bug spray, the staff took some string, hand sanitiser gel, and plant ties, and Phil (yes, he is a guy!) took my luminous pink crocs... no wonder people think he's gay sometimes!

Well that's about it for now. I am in Tena at the moment, which is a city between Camp and Quito. Tomorrow morning we get the bus to Quito. The journey takes five hours, but would probably take over six if you could convince the bus drivers to drive safely along mountainous switchbacks and potholed roads, but no, that is not going to happen. If you are asleep you are not so scared, but you miss all the beautiful misty mountains and rainforest scenery, which is gorgeous, and will be a lasting memory of the beauty of the country. I then have a spare day, during which a few of us are going to Ottovalo to go shopping (it's nice, they say) and then the day after that, I fly back to England. It´s all over now, and i won´t be back in the jungle again for a long time, and I´ll miss it, as i miss Costa Rica.

But the Christmas beckons, and it´ll be good to see family and friends again. I haven´t missed England or work at all. And I haven´t missed family, friends or Barney nearly as much as I thought I would, probably beacuse I've always been with friends. Except in Mexico, when I did feel quite lonely at times, and I missed them more then. But it's been good to keep in touch as often as I've managed to, and so hopefully others haven´t missed me too much either. In some ways it seems a very long time ago since i was in England, yet I'm sure once I'm back it'll feel like I never left, and all this was a strange dream, or like it didn´t really happen, or like it went by in a flash.

Love to you all.... I may write again from Quito, but if not, I´ll write another entry when I get back to England!

Yasuni

I{m in Coca again, back from Yasuni national park, which has been great. the highlight of the trip to yasuni is one of the main highlights of my trip to Ecuador. we went to some clay licks, and we sat and waited in a bird hide, and after half an hour of patience, and hearing parrots in the skies overhead, the parrots began to descend to the clay lick, in fluttering rainbows of red and blue and yellow and green, dozens of them swarming the clay, and drinking in the nutrients, noisily squawking to each other, just ten metres or so away from us. it was increadible. most of the parrots are predominantly green when not in flight, although they may have blue heads or orange cheeks, but when they fly, their underwings reveal a beautiful array of colours, and if you can catch a photo of them in flight, their wings blur up and down like curved symmetraical rainbows as tehy fly towards you. it was utterly stunning and we all stayed quiet and watched them in awe. it was something i´ll remember for the rest of my life as an amazing wildlife moment.

we also went on watlks throug hthe forest, and frequently heard parrots overhead. our guide - Hector, who owns the island we visited 5 weeks ago - would poipnt out the parrots as they flew overhead "dusky headed parrots!" "scarlet macaws!" "yellow-winged parakeets!" but many of them were just dark silhouettes against the bright sky, so cannot compare in beauty to when we saw them at the clay licks. they are noisy, squawky birds who announce their presence frequently, and there are dozens of species in the Park.

Hecots also took us on forest walks where he expaoined differnt uses for the trees, folk tales, and got us doing things like weaving baskets out of leaves, and climbing trees with a vine rope around your feet. we also tore through the forest as we saw saki monkeys and another type of monkey in the trees overhead. the weatehr was cool (25´C) and a bit drizzly, but that can be preferable to the scorching heat of the day. i´m going to be mightily cold upon my return to england - brrr!

also on the walk, hector found a tree which contained grubs resembling a shrivelled penis - 3 inches long and nearly an inch wide, skin coloured, with a little black head, and they wriggle about from side to side in the most disgusting way. it´s a common jungle food, and you can see them in markets , skewered and wriggling about on barbecues which is enough to turn your stomach. imagine eating them raw... we didn´t have to imagine though, as he offered them out and several people (not me - i´m veggie, remember!!) took up the challenge. they bite you, so you have to crush their head before shoving the whole thing into yout mouth. puke-inducing stuff!! it{s pretty gross and maybe cruel to eat them like this, but it´s proabbly not as cruel as grilling them alive, although i imagine they taste better cooked.

what else? we went on a wander through the swamps near our camp, and i got a few great photos of frogs, and a snake which was apparently venomous, plus there was another big black snake which went under Mark´s tent at about 10pm, and everyone had to poke about nearby, trying to get it to come out so that he could go to bed in safetey. it was over a metre long, but that one, apparently, was not venomous.

we were sleeping in jungle hammocks, which are like hammocks with mozzie neta attached, and as we were setting them up and tying them to trees, Hecotr said we could set them up in the comedor (thatched hut) if we wanted. i weighed up the prospects of being jungle woman, versus the certainty of being dry during the wet season, and plumped for the latter. i was glad of this, because it pissed it down with rain, nad a load of people´s hammocks filled with water, and they migrated to the comedor floor during the night, so that when i woke up in the morning, the comedor looked like a refugee camp, with bags and bodies all over the floor. i was pleasantly dry and had slept well. prudence triumphs over jungliness!

the next day, we went to an "jungle interpretation centre" though quite why it needs interpreting rather than just understanding and appreciating, i never did find out. we found out about Quechua everyday life, and about some of the threateneed species that live underwater. we are on hte banks for the Napo river, a massive tributary half a mile wide, which feeds into the Amazon, but it´s easy to forget about fish, mammals and reptiles in the water that are threatened, vulnerable and endangered.

we also found out about how the evil oil companies are moving ever more into the heart of the area, drilling for oil, and felling forests, building roads, and displacing local communities in the process. it seems so wrong. but i want to power my car, and buy petrol at a reasonable price, and i want to be able to fly around the world and see othroug countires, and we have discussed whether we would be willing to give up petrol and electricity if it meant saving the Amazon, or whether we´d sacrifice the Amazon if it meant beaing able to power the world, and it´s a very difficult questions (you thgink about it). at least we can recognise that we are slightly hypocritical, beause we want the best of both worlds. i don{t know what the solution is. no one wants the rainforest to be cut down, but to do without the power we´ve come to expect and rely on doesn{t seem a tenable option either. it´s a tricky one, and it´s not goint to go away any time soon - it seems easy enough to think that maybe the decision is in the hands of world leaders ,or oil companies, but we are the ones demanding the oil, so maybe it´s in our hands too... but i´m not willing to give up my car... ugh! it gives me (and now you) a great deal to think about.

We are heading back to our usual camp now, where we will clean everything up, g oon a few walks for fun, and then we are heading for Quito (via Tena), then England. eek! it seems like a very long time ago that i was in England, but it will, in mayn ways, be good to be home, although i will miss this place and this life loads.

Murders and injuries

it´s been a couple of weeks since i´ve been online, and everything here is still going great. it´s the rainy season now, and it rains nearly every day, but it´s still about 28•C so still a nice temperature. life on the reserve is continuing as normal: we go out on surveys to look at the effect of the road - doing point counts (listening to bird calls), mist netting (catching birds), pitfalls (catching amphibs and reptiles), butterflies, and mammals.... it´s all good, and i´ve explained what the surveys entail.

new people have arrived (well, they´re not new any more) and some of the previous people have left. i miss some of the people who have left, but i can´t do anything about that. travelling round and having great experiences is inevitably followed by sadness of being separated from people who, in all likelihoood, i will never see again. i my family and friends in england, of course, but it seems more poignant when you are in the place where the person used to be, but now without that person. i guess that´s how the people in England feel without me. but i know i will see all of them again so that´s good :D i am looking forward to seeing everyone again, to seeing how much my nephews have grown, and how much my sister has shrunk! and to eating fruit, cadburys, veggie burgers, and NOT BEANS!!!

this weekend we are off to Yasuni National Park, which is one pf the most bilogically diverse regions in the world. they say we should see parrots and all knids of exciting stuff there - cool. i think we´ll be stopping here (Coca) on the way home, so hopefully i´ll be in touch again then. then the next time after that i´ll be online will be when i´m in quito and en route home :S

my typing is a bit crap at the moment because i have injured one of my fingers - of all the crazy, dangerous things we do out here, from trekking over ridiculously muddy terrain, weidling machetes and chopping pathways, carrying heavy bags, being surrounded by dangerous animals, i went and cut a slice off my finger when chopping vegetables! ouch! i was also bitten on my hand by a bullet ant, which was really painful at the time, and even thoug h it is 5 days later now, i can still feel it. I also found my second tick of this trip, which hurts as well, but at least i didn´t have to extract it while in the departure lounge of an airport, like i did with th other one! we also continue to get mobbed by biting ants, mozzies (although not that much, maybe one a day?) and sweat bees. these - as the name suggests - are attracted to your swaet, and that is something which i have in abundance, so at times you spend your whole time waving your açrms around your head and spazzing out for lenthy periods to try and get rid of them. bug spray seems to attract more insects, although they don´t land on you, they just buzz round you ALL THE TIME. i definietly will not be sad to see the back of them.

exciting things that have ahappened in the past 3 weeks are that we saw a rainbow boa in camp - they are probably hte most beautiful snake i´ve ever seen, and are orangey purple, with big black circles, one of the girls saw it at about 9.30pm, when most of us are going to bed, and she yelled "SNAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!" (aas is the done thing) but a load of people thought she was trying to commit a murder (more on that in a minute) so didn´t go, but i went and took my camera and was the only one who managed to get a good photo of it before it went off into the undergrowth. so that was really cool.

so, murders... we have been playing a game of camp cluedo, where everyone fishes into a bag and pulls out a name, a place, and a weapon. they then have to ´kill´that person in the said way and place, and when you kill someone, then you take the person who they were going to kill, and it kweeps going till there´s only one person left. if you get yourself, you have to swap with someone else. mine was that i had to kill Ella in the library with a badminton racquet. lucky for me, ella is my best friend here, so when i suggested we go to look at some lizard photos in the library which we had to learn, it looked pretty innocent. then when çwe got there i said i´d forgotten my pen, so went out, cançme back with the badminton racquet, and said "Ella, i´m sorry - i do want to revise, but i also want to kill you!!" and then ´hit´her with the badminton racquet, and she was dead - ha ha ha!. i then had to take her missions which was to kill Jas at the smoking pit with a toilet roll. unfgortunately, Jas doesn´t smoke so it wouldn´t be easy to get her there. but alas, i was killed by steve on the bridge with the rubber rat before i´d had chance to kill jas. it´s a lo tof fun, and some people have used tactics such as shouting ´snake´to lure their intended victim into asn unlikely place!!

what else? we have organised ´´fun´on saturdqay nights, and we had one wherer we all dressed up as superheroes - a lot of underwear over trousers was worn. i wasn´t sure what to be, but i was making myself a mask out of duck tape, and thought i could put leters onto my tshirt in duck tape, and then other people wanted to use myduck tape, so i decided to be Duck Tape Girl - righting the world´s wrongs throug hthe clever use of duck tape! it was a fun night ,and we all had stupid challenges we had to do, like fising sweets out of a tub of flour using only yourm mouth, or standing on one foot for a long as possible, or eating a spoonful of butterfly bait (2 week old bananas!) i´m sure the pis will make it up onto facebook soon. i can´t rememebr what my challenge was, but we had more challenged the next week, wehn i had to puit a condom over my head and blow it up! i chose this instead of eating a tree tomato, which are truly disgusting vegetables. it´s all vey silly but grat fun. something i really haven´t missed about england is TV. i don´t miss it at all. in our frwee time, we read, write journals, play cards, and just hang out and chat, and i think i will miss that when i´m in enalgand on my own in my lounge in silence.

something else that was fun, was when one of the lads who was a student at our partner college (they go there to study ecotourism, and our money funds their education, and they stay with us to learn englinsh), one of the lads who´d stayed with us came back with a load of friends from his villege, and they came out on a walk, then in the evening we cooked up a mega feast - i was on camp duty that day, and with 5 peaople´s help, we cooked up a banquet of seven different dishes to feed 36 people. then they performed a tradiational shaman ritual, and a quechua dance, before we all went up to the camp fire, and they told us some traditional folk takes from the Quechua tradition. they then went out to sleep in jungle hammocks, and the following morning we all Spanglished - ie, we helped each other learn the language and culture of each other. i expliend to them about how in winter, we build snowmen and go sledging and have snowball fights ,as most of them have never seen snow. they thought it sounded like a lot of fun. and now i´ve been on facebook and seen some of your snow photos, i kind of miss it a bit... hopefully there´ll be some left when i get home. so that was a really good couple of days....

when i knew i was coming out on this trip, i really didn´t care about meeting the locals, not the chidlren, not the students at the college, and not the people living in the huts near to our reserve. but all of those things have been some of the major hirhglights of the trip, and i feel bad now that i had no interest in them before. it´s been great to have the ecuadorian students over, and they became some of my bestfriends. and the kids we teach, they are cheeky and playful, but it´s so reawarding to teach them and play with them, even though you make a total arse of yourself and act like a children´s TV presenter. i never thought i would stand at the front of a classroom wearing a coloured poncho and doing a dance, while singing "verde green, verde gree, azul blue, azul blue,..." with other volunteers doing the same thing. it was either a very low point in my life, or a high one.... at any rate it was memorable! and meeting the communites has pçbeen great. the people of ecuador are hospitable and freindly and they are the main reason i would woant to come back - and beaaxcuse the country is amazingly bearutiful. i need to try and find some things that are bad, so i want to leave...

ok, as we were on the way to the internet cafe, we saw a guy running down the street with a white dog under his arm, then we realised it had no head, and he ran into a butcher´s shop. upon reflection, and the piecuign togerther of information, we now believe that it was an agouti, not a dog, as it´s feet were longer and thinner than a dog. still, it was a horrible moment! and i saw fried guinea pigs in Baños, which was pretty gross. i have a photo. what else? umm... the streets are a bit dirty.

ok i´m running out of things to say now so i will sign off. hopefully i´ll be in touch again in 2-3 days, after Yasuni.

love yáll - happy christmas!

Tena Lady

I am currently in Tena, jungle city between Quito and our reserve at Yachana. We are here because the five-weekers are going back to Quito tomorrow *sniff* so we´ll be saying goodbye to Laura, Sasha, Sherry, Rikard and Jamie, and Hells. The rest of us are here for at least another five weeks, and some people are here for six months in total.

The past few days have been really uneventful so I'm struggling to know what to write about. The projects (mammals, butterflies etc.) are really only running for 3 weeks at a time, because in the first week of phase, we are all training, and in the last week of phase, we are cleaning up after the trip to Hector's Island, and getting ready for the new five-weekers.

Anyway, my sister asked me why so many of the projects are centred around the effects of the road and why it matters, so I'll explain. Until 2006, the reserve was just normal, fairly untouched rainforest, then they built a dirty great road through the middle of it. there's not much traffic (one vehicle per half hour?) but it's important to know whether it is affecting the animals, because if it is, then our research here might help to stop other roads being built through the middle of untouched rainforest. if our research shows that animal populations are suffering, then it's important to try to stop other roads being built elsewhere and decimating more animal populations. On the other hand, if the road is having no effect on animal populations, then if another remote community want a road and animal rights people are saying no, it'll damage the environment, then our research will be able to show that in fact, having a road doesn't really affect the animals, so if the community wants the road they should be able to have it. It's early days yet, but the evidence so far seems to suggest that the road IS having a negative effect on the mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and butterflies. This is a bad thing in itself for our animal populations, but also a bad thing becasue the chances are that more communities will want more roads built to connect them with the outside world.

The people of the communities around Yachana (our camp) seem phenomenally poor, living in one-room wooden huts on stilts, with a few chickens, the odd malnourished dog or two, and grubby children with bad teeth left to scratch around in the dirt while their parents are out working the land. the women have around 5 to 10 children, and carry their babies around strapped to their bodies with a sheet or piece of material, the babies being attached to a nipple or sleeping most of the time. But the kids really are delightful.... when i was doing TEFL and teaching them, they were crazy and wanted to run around all the time, and the boys loved shouting out answers, but didn't want to do any writing, and would do things like hide their pen and paper, and then when you give them another pen, they miraculously produce their original pen from under the table, then a minute later, revert back to saying "No hay pen!" and shrugging... the little menaces. the girls, on the other hand, didn't do much shouting out, but would say the answers quietly, and wrote what we wrote on the board perfectly and neatly and were miles ahead of the boys. That's the kids at Puerto Rico, which is our nearest village (like, 10 huts), about half an hour's walk away from our camp. We're also now teaching at Salazaar, which is an hour away, and when you get there, you see what poverty the kids are actually born into. Their clothes are absolutely filthy and full of holes, and lots of them had black teeth or suchlike, and they didn't seem to have any toys at all... but they are lovely and playful and would happily play frisbee, skipping etc. with us. we did some educational games like throwing a ball and saying "my name is Karen" and then throwing it to another GVI volunteer who would reply "My name is Ella", then throw it to another vcolunteer, and by the time we'd all thrown it to each other, the kids had picked up on it, so we throw it to a kid, and they´d say "my name is Anna" and throw it to their friend, who does the same... and you can teach them in this way without having to explain things to them. our instinct to copy one another is an amazing tool! we also taught them the names of some animals, by showing pictures and repeating the word, and then the kids did the same, and we did animal charades, and they were really good at shouting out the words.... i didn't want to have anything to do with the children, i didn't really want to teach them, and i didn't want to have to play with them, but now i'm really glad i did. it makes you realise that kids are kids the world over and it makes you hope that they can grow up wealthier than their parents... having said that, they seem pretty happy and unburdened with the materialism of the Western world. They are happy to just play football and skipping with some strangers like us.

Our other contact with the local communities is with the students who come over from Yachana, the partner college. Three lads (Galo, Cristian and David) came over to stay for a month, and they did what we did, and we had Spanglish in the evenings when there was a langauge exchange to help both parties improve their grasp of each other's language. For some people, that was their only contact with them, but I sat with the guys and Spanglished (if that can be a verb?!) every night, which was really good fun and I miss the guys now they're gone. It certainly gave me an incentive to learn more Spanish, but i'm already anticipating it being a shame that I'll forget most of my Spanish (not to mention all the bird calls and latin names of frogs!) when i get back to England. but hopefully stuff like that will always have been worthwhile, and no knowledge is wasted. The guys were hardworking and a good laugh and i'm not sure how similar their backgrounds are to the poor kids we've taught in the TEFL thing.

There has been a bit of a feeling of cabin fever around camp, with people wanting to escape and feeling hemmed in, but i don't really mind that too much. I'm happy to have a 'home' and do the same things several times. We don't really see the same volume of animals I saw in Costa Rica, but it's a totally different environment so maybe it's unfair to compare the two. however, we hear birds all the time - the yellow rumped caciques and russet-backed oropendolas are ever-present, and have amazing calls, which sound like R2D2 (star wars robot) or other weird out-of-this-world sounds which you would never think a bird could produce. it's really cool. i love the feeling of being in the wilderness, and things like bats flying around near the toilets - one flew into my chest the other day - i thought bats were supposed to have excellent echoloaction skills, but if my experience was anything to go by, the phrase "as blind as a bat" seems more appropriate. stupid things.

something fun we've done recently was sat camp - this is where you stay out in the jungle in hammocks (that zip up around you). it does feel a bit like being in a coffin, and i thought i'd struggle to sleep like that, but it was actually really comfy and i slept well. in the morning we got up at about 4.30 i think, and went off to do mist netting, and we caught 7 birds i think. the birds are then measured and everything. it's a nice way to get up close to birds, and i don't think they are too stressed out. at any rate, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Tonight we are going to have our first pizza in 5 weeks, and it's like the last supper, as it's the last time we'll all be together with the 5-weekers, so we say goodbye to them today. then loads of us are off to Baños, which should be fun for a couple of days, then back to camp for the next 5 weeks of rice and beans. Honestly, i have eaten enough beans to last me a lifetime! Please, family and friends, when I'm home, DO NOT COOK ME ANY BEANS!!!!! however, fried banana in sugar is definitely something i want to export back to the UK.

Hector´s Island

I am back in Coca, the same place i wrote from a couple of days ago, as we are returning to base camp from Hector´s Island ("Sumak Allpa" - google it!), which has been really cool.

Hector is a 40-something Ecuadorian who made money by various ways and means, but has spent a lot of his life living in the jungle with tribes, tour guiding, and doing goodness knows what else - he was full of fascinating stories but i imagine we only scratched the surface! He bought an island in the middle of the Napo river (tributary of the Amazon) which is hugely wide (about a kilometre(?) where his island is), and his island is 150 hectares. he bought it to have as a monkey sanctuary, although he has made it clear that it´s not a sanctuary as sanctuaries generally put the animals in cages and rehabilitate them and they are still mostly tame, but the only `cage´ his monkeys have is the island itself, and they can (and do) swim to other islands or the riverbanks if they want to. Monkeys are at risk of deforestation, killing for bush meat, or being caught for the pet trade. he gets hold of them and brings them to his island and sets them free, and there are currently six species of monkey there, along with whatever other wildlife happens to be there - birds, snakes, frogs, and a million billion sand flies, which land on you all the time and bite you, and you look like you have chicken pox. i had over 100 bites on one forearm - crazy shit!

monkeys we saw while we were there include, tamarins, saki monkeys, capuchins, and marmosets (i think). it´s really cool, as we haven´t seen any monkeys yet in Ecuador, even though they are all around us, i´m sure. they are beautiful and it´s great that they can live a natural life without the risk of being killed (well, except by boa constrictors or birds of prey). We went on a walk round the island which was blissfully flat after weeks of hiking up and down and up and down all the time! Hector was full of interesting stories about how the native people make clothes out of this tree, and they eat the sap of that one to cure stomach problems, and they eat this one for its hallucinogenic effects or when they want to get an answer to a question they can´t decide in normal life. he lives on the island with his wife, kids, and a teacher, plus 2 GVI volunteers who follow the monkeys, and he also educates about 20 other local children who can´t get to school elsewhere because they are so remote.

our purpose there was partly for our own enjoyment, and partly to ´do a minger´ as they say. god knows why it´s called that, but it always makes me laugh. i told Galo, one of the Ecuadorian lads, that in England a minger is a slang term for an ugly person which he thought was funny and every time someone mentioned mingers we had a laugh about it. so on Hector´s island, we were there to plant some mahogany trees which can be harvested in 50 years time or so. it´s a shame to plant trees in the rainforest so they can be chopped down, but doing what´s best for the community isn´t always the same as doing what´s best for the environment. most families are really poor and have their own farms to run, and that´s why they are chopping down their own bit of rainforest, so organised money from anywhere will actually help preserve the forest in the long run, as opposed to selling it to oil companies who fell the trees and dig for oil, which they are doing all over, and for a poor family with 8 kids to be offered good money for their farm by an oil company, it´s no wonder they accept. but hopefully education and money can all work together to preserve the communities and the rainforest.

there was a massive storm the night before last, and everyone was sleeping in tents and hammocks, and every single person except me and Sasha, who were in a tent together, plus the 3 members of GVI staff who were in hammocks, got drenched. people moved to under any of the buildings - the classroom, the port, the dining room - so that we looked like a bunch of refugees sleeping in a makeshift shelter. also during the night, Hector´s water tower collapsed, and in the morning, we had an impromptu minger, and we all worked together to dismantle the remains of the tower, removing the nails, and all the pieces of wood, and some people pulled out nails, others carried wood, others sorted it into what was salvageable and what wasn´t, some used stones to hit the nails out (we only had 2 hammers and a crowbar between 25 of us) and others used the tools to prize the wood apart. i got absolutely filthy and looked like an Ecuadorian street urchin, all muddy and grubby on my shorts, sleeves and belly of my tshirt. it was like when there´s a natural disaster in a third word country and everyone pitches in to find survivors, with not a great deal of organisaiton, but things get done and everyone has a part to play. indeed, we found one survivor in the carnage - a 50cm tree snake, god knows how it had survived! it took us all about 3 hours, but we got it done and it was good to feel like we´d helped him out. i guess he and our GVI volunteers will have to rebuild it at some point.

he´s not without water though, being on an island, and it´s lovely to swim near to the island. however, we didn´t have showers, and it{s weird washing in the river (which is fast flowing so that if you don´t hold on, you´ll get swept away. if you´re a good swimmer, you can swim faster than the current, but it´s hard work.) so river washes aren´t really my thing, and you don´t feel clean when you get out, trudge through the mud, and within minutes are dirty and covered in sand flies again. maybe the freezing showers at base camp aren´t so bad after all!

all in all it was a great weekend, even if there was a slight natural disaster, but the place is so serene and beautiful i could happily live my life there, i think. but it is nice to get back to civilisation with its icecreams, chocolate and cybercafes.... and poorly treated animals and the smell of sewage and rotting food.

we are near the end of the first five week phase now, and i´ll be online again soon, as we are going to Baños via Tena - where we will hopefully go mountain biking, and go in the natural baños which give the place its name, while the five-weekers go back to Quito and then home. Then the next people to go home after that will include me!!! Eeek!!

So only six weeks left here for me, and it feels like i´m near the end. I´m not really missing much about England, and I have to say I´m not loking forward to going back there. But here is a list of things I am missing to a greater or lesser extent, then this might make me change my mind a bit:
- Family and friends (obviusly)
- Barney
- Not being sweaty
- Warm showers
- Cadbury´s chocolate
- Fruit other than bananas - the Ecuadorians eat about 5 to 10 bananas a day, and i probably eat 2 or 3 a day. they´re ok but i miss plums, nectarines, strawberries, grapes, and even the humble apple (we do have these occasionally though)

OK, that´s all i can think of for the moment. Hopefully when the time comes i will be happy to go back to England. Feel free to suggest some other things I might be missing. :D

Pitfalls, point counts and crazy terrain

Well i've been in Ecuador for 3 weeks now, and like CR, it feels like aaaaages! So much has happened i don't quite know where to begin with it all!

The Ecuador project is along similar lines to CR, there are 18 volunteers and we live in a camp in the middle of nowhere. We are in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, and the landscape is really hilly and with loads of little streams here, there and everywhere. When it rains it gets really muddy, and we spend our lives in trousers and wellies, skidding down hillsides on our bums! the camp consists of wooden buildings on stilts, there's the kitchen and comedor (dining room) which is where we spend most of our time when on camp, then there are the volunteer dorms - there are 5 guys and 13 girls, and i am in a dorm with 4 other girls, but all the dorms are in the same hut, so you can hear everything right down to farts and snoring from the other dorms! There is another building where the staff live, and there is a small library (room with a table and a few dozen books) plus another hut for the Ecuadorians who stay on the reserve with us. Of course, there are also showers (freezing cold ones!) and toilets, which are over 100 paces away from my bedroom, and 35 of those paces are actual steps. like i said, it's so hilly here that we are permanently going up and down steps and hills... my leg muscles are like Arnold Schwarzenegger's now!

The other volunteers are mostly from England (Ella, Hayley, Laura, Sherry, Nicky, Hells, Sasha, Jane, Jamie, and Phil are all English) then there's Rikard from Sweden, Bells and Mark from Ireland, Kristen and Catherine from America, and Tim from Australia. We are a mixture of people here for 6 months, 10 weeks, and 5 weeks. Plus there are the staff: Andy, Olly, and Caroline from England, Jaz from Australia, Jenn from Canada, and Mel from America. Added to that are 4 Ecuadroians who are staying on the camp at the moment (new students come every month) and they are Isaac (the teacher) plus David, Cristian and Galo - they are students at the technical college we are partnered with and they come onto our camp to help them learn English.
I tend to hang around mostly with Ella, Hayley and Laura, or the Ecuadorian lads, as my Spanish is coming on in leaps and bounds. I am now able to say most things i want to say. it may have poor grammar, and make use of words like "this thing" but i can say most things i want to... however, i don't always understand the response, but hey, they are supposed to be learning English anyway!

There is no such thing as a normal day, and there are so many different activities it's easy to lose track! but i'll try describing some of the things i've done. until 2006, the reserve was just a normal, natural piece of rainforest, with animals living there, small communities (ie, 5 wooden huts) scattered about nearby, and walking tracks were used to get from A to B. but in 2006, the government built a road thorugh the middle of the reserve, and now a lot of the projects we are doing are to assess the effect which the road has on animal populations and behaviour. Here are some of the things we've been doing:

Butterflies:
To see how the road affects butterfly prevalence, butterfly traps are set up on the road, and then 100m, 200m, 300m, 400m, and 500m away from the road, and the catches are compared. this is done in 4 different sites, and each time with a trap at ground level, and a trap in the canopy (12m ish). A butterfly trap is a brown plastic tray a foot in diameter, with some manky mushed up banana in it, and above that, a cylinder of mozzie net about a metre in height. the butterflies are drawn in by the yummy overripe sickly smelling bananas, and then when they want to leave they fly upwards and are thus trapped! we come along every day and empty the traps. you genereally find 0 or 1 butterfly per trap. the butterfly is then ID'd to species level, and marked on its wings so that recaptures can be studied if possible, and then the butterfly is realeased. I've only done this project once so far, and it's easy enough to do the traps, but the terrain is shockingly bad - see below

Mammals:
They are going to begin a project checking the prevalence of mammals at various intervals up to 1km from the road, and these tracks need to be cut into the forest, so at the moment, going mammaling entails going into untouched jungle, and cutting tracks into it. it seems kind of weird, as when i knew i was coming to the Amazon, i never for a moment thought i'd be cutting it down! we use machetes and we only cut a small trail, and it is actually really good fun. we only cut down small plants that are in the way, and the forest fights back, as any track which is left for a couple of weeks, it's really hard to find where it was! again, the terrain is crazy and ridiculously difficult, see below. Once the tracks are up and running, they'll use sand pads to look for prints.

Pitfalls:
They are monitoring which types of habitats (primary, untouched; secondary, farmed with coconuts or coffee plants; or riparian, near the river) frogs and lizards prefer. there are 4 buckets set into the ground, with plasitic sheeting held vertically between them, and when a frog or lizard comes upon it, it can't get over the plastic, so tries to go around, and in doing so, falls into a bucket. we check these every day; the animals are ID'd to species level, measured and weighed, then released. it's normal to find 2 or 3 in a morning.

Point counts:
They are seeing the effect of the road on bird populations at various distances from the road, and so this project involves going to various points, one on the road, then 100m, 200m, 300m, 400m and 500m from the raod, and sitting for 10 minutes and listening for bird calls, and writing down all the bird calls we hear. Yay!! this is one of my favourite activities as i know loads of bird calls (but we are learning more all the time) and it's fun and peaceful to sit and listen to the sounds of the rainforest. you can generally hear about 10 or more species calling at any one point. again, hte terrain is crazily difficult between each point though. see below.

Mist netting:
I can't quite remember the reason for the mist netting experiment - whether it is to monitor the effects of the road, or something else. anyway, it involves setting up mist nets to catch birds in flight. a mist net is a really fine mesh which you really can't see and can accidentally walk into it if you're not looking! the nets are opened, and are then checked every half hour, and any birds are removed, and then ID'd to species level, measured, weighed, and then released. in a morning (say 5 hours) we might catch between 2 and 15 birds.

it's a lot of fun seeing animals up close like we do here, but some people (me included at times) have been concerned that the processes are unnecessarily cruel. i don't think any of the projects are that cruel though. it's probabaly not a fun experience for the animals, but they are processed (ID'd, weighed and measured and released) in a couple of minutes, or about 10 minutes fro the birds. it didn't sit well with me initially, but now i am confident that the animals are not harmed in any way, and the second they are released, i'm sure they aren't stressed out any more, and forget about it pretty quick

The terrain:
as mentiioned above, the terrain here is crazily difficult to get around. whether on a newly cut track, or an old faithful, the floor is muddy, with wet leaves and dead sticks all over the place, which makes it really skiddy and slippy eveen on the flat, but the land is never flat, and you go up for say 40 paces, then down a hill for 40, then along a stream for a minute, then climb up another bank, then down the next one... and if the mud weren't difficult enough on its own, there are loose rocks, roots sticking out of the ground, vines that are like nature's tripwires, all working together to make you fall over and skid down hills on your arse or knees. You're not supposed to grab onto trees or roots in case they have spiders or thorns or they are loose, but you can't help it, and if they are loose or rotten or whatever, you slide down the bank. the gradient is often above 45 degrees, and somtimes it's almost vertical! it can be a lot of fun to scramble around in this way, but you can also get lots of bruises and you are always covered in mud.

the weather here is around 30'C in the daytime, but ridiculously humid. the humidity reading is usually aroung 98%, but sometimes it's been 100%... i would have thought that that meants we were actually IN water, but maybe not. suffice it to say that it's bloody humid. if i put on a dry tshirt and go out on a walk, within half an hour the sweat patches are bigger than the dry patches, and i can cover the whole thing in sweat within 2.5 hours. yes, the whole tshirt soaked with sweat. that is my record, but i think i could beat it. my legs ache from all the going up and down - it's like going up and down stairs for a few hours a day! i am definitely getting fitter but i am also getting knackered! it's really hard work but i am enjoying it.

as for the animals, well, i haven't seen a great deal really. i've heard loads of birds calling, but only seen a few actually in the trees - the vast majortiy of the birds i've seen have been in the mist netting traps, and the same with lizards and frogs. i've only seen one or two animals just being wild... but i've seen 2 or 3 snakes though, but still that doesn't seem that many considering how long i've been here.

We are on a privately owned reserve, which is what a lot of the amazon rainforest actually is (i assumed it was a national park) but no, it{s owned by a charity/company. this company (Yachana) has our reserve, where GVI do their stuff, plus there is an ecotourist lodge, and there is a school / technical college partner, where indigineous kids from poor families can get a propeor education, learn about the importance of their rainforest, and get trained in a trade such as ecotourism, and then get jobs which will help protect the rainforest. this is becasue local families own land, which is part of the amazon rainforest, and becasue they own it, they often use the land for farming, felling trees and destroying habitat in hte process, so it makes sense to teach the children of these families taht their land - their rainforest - is worth more to the planet (and them) in its natural state, than if it is farmed. that knowledge, and training the children for another trade other tahn farming, is probably the best way to save the rainforest.

so a big part of the project is to work in conjunction iwth the school, where 3 or 4 students a month come over to our bit of the reserve to learn english and do waht we do, and we also visit local schools and teach them english. i did this last week, and it was hard work but good fun. the kids were aged between 6 and 8, and me and anotehr girl, Jane, who loathes and despises children and really did not want to teach them, had to teach them classroom objects and prepositions - the book is on the table. this was pretty daunting, as they all speak Spanish or Quichua as their first language, and don't know much english, and we had to go in for an hour, maintain control, and get them to learn stuff. like all kids, they were boistrous, had really short atention spans, and wanted to play the running around games rather than writing sentences! but they loved high fives, and we played loads of games with them. we have also gone to another small community on starudays to introduce the kids - who are left by themselves all day, ranging in age from babies to 10 years ish - to teach them a bit of english to build bridges with the communities and keep then out of trouble for a bit. it's quite scary to teach children who know literally no english - this was their first lesson, and we taught them to say hello, how are you, i'm fine, whathn's your name, my name is, plus 6 animals they'll see around them. but it's good to discover the international language of things like skipping, football, frisbee, tickling, chasing, drawing in the sand, piggy backs, and they LOVED people's digital cameras, and would take them off you and they took over 300 photos on Tim's camera, i think!

So overall it's good so far. i do have a few gripes, but they are outweighed by the fun of it all. We are on our way to Hector's Island today, and have stopped in a town called Coca before we get the canoe over to his island, where there are monkeys, and all kinds of cool animals which we will see.

Some of my favourite moments so far:
- Catherine eating a whole bowl of chilli sauce for a dare/bet
- Spanglishing with the Ecuadorians all the time, and talking to Galo about chocolate and Jiu Jitsu
- Going on Sat Camp, where we slept out in jungle hammocks and ate baked potatoes
- seeing birds and other animals up close
- me biting people, and having Ella, Laura nd Hayley call me "the evil one"
- wathicng the same dreadful "hi, my name is your name, i'm an emergency first responder, may i help you?" videos i've already seen in CR!
- macheteing new paths and scrambling up muddy hillsides
- the night walk where we ended up wading in water up to our necks, with our backpacks held over our heads!
- the game nights, like when we had to make things out of 10 random objects, and i did a pass the parcel with forfeits!
- teaching the kids and having fun with them
- Ella going crazy and doiung running commentaires on card games
- knowing loads of bird calls
- lying in "my" yellow hammock all the time in the comedor
- hanging out with fun people :o)

Getting to Ecuador

Well, not one person has sent me a concerned email... I received one message on Facebookfrom my sister asking me if I was OK. This either means that no one kinows about the trouble that happened in Ecuador on 30th September while i was trying to fly there, or no one cares. I'll try to assume it's the former.

So, here´s the story in detail: On 30 September, I was in Cancun, Mexico, and was about to fly to Quito, Ecuador. I needed to change planes in Panama City (in Panama!) but didn´t foresee any problems.

I got up in the morning at 4.30am, and was sharing a taxi to the airport with an Irish couple, who were also flying to Quito, but they were changing in Miami (yes that is completely in the worng dircection, but hey!). So, the taxi was due to come at 5am, but at quarter past, we were still waiting, and phoned the taxi company. they said they were on their way - funny that, taxis are always on their way when you call them, aren´t they!?) by 20 past it still hadn´t come, so we decided to get a taxi from the taxi booth, then our pre-booked taxi turned up so we got in it and told him to hurry up. At some point during the journey, the Irish guy asked me what airline i was flying with, and i told him Copa, and I thought nothing more of it. When we arrived at the airport, we said goodbye to each otehr, and i looked around for the Copa airlines stand... it wasn´t there. i asked a member of staff and they said that Copa is in Terminal 2, but this was Terminal 3.Then i realised what had happened. the taxi driver had asked the couple what airline they were with, and they´d said american, and they probably thought he was just asking out of interest, so just asked me out of interest, and then never told the taxi driver i was with Copa. Bugger. so i was now running late too and had to get a shuttle bus to terminal 3. but it was ok, i booked in, and waited for the flight.

In Panama City, as i got off the plane, when i got to the gate where we were boarding for Quito, they said there was a slight delay. Within half an hour later, they said Quito was in chaos, the police and military were trying to kill the President because he´d cut their pay, so 100,000 police and military had barricaded the airport and no flights were going in to or out of Quito, and we'd probably be best just to go back to our own country, because we probably can't get into Quito for days and days. Lots of people were concerned, obviously, but the airport staff suggested flying to Lima instead. A couple i´d been talking to who were travelling around South America decided to do that, as did many others.

I was ringing GVI and asking them what was goign on, if i should wait in Panama, go somewhere else, or what. they didn´t have any more information than i did, and events were unfolding as we waited, so i kept phoning them back in an hour... then another hour. They suggested flying home to England as well, but as far as I was concerned, taht was not an option: in England I have no job till January, and would be cutting short a trip i´ve been plannign for a year, so I didn´t really see goign to England as a viable option. I phoned Stephan, who was in charge of the project I´d juswt been on in Costa Rica, but they were full up and hadn´t heard about waht was happening in Ecuador anyway.

At length, after a few phone calls, they said there was some space on a project in Guatemala, and the thing in Ecuador was unlikely to just blow over, as the President had said no way would he back down. Military and Police versus the Government is not a recipe for happy holidays, so i needed to have a good think about what my options were. It was a nightmare trying to find out any information in the airport, i was just surrounded by fifty angry people yelling in Spanish at the airport staff, who were yelling back in spanish, gesturing "it´s not my fault" kind of gestures, and everyone was asking questions and they were answering them, but it was all in spanish and i had not a clue what was going on. That was really stressful, as i was even more in the dark than everyone else was, and everyone just mobbed the staff and yelled at them. it was crazy.

i asked someone in the airport where i could fly to instead of Quito, and she said i could fly anywhere really... as long as i paid for it. i asked if the people who´d flown to Lima had done so for free, and she said no, and i asked if they were crossing the border over land in a bus or something (not knowing where Lima was) and she said no, they were just staying in Lima.

the couple who had decided to go to Lima instead said they´d heard that our bags weren´t in a secure location, so the three of us went down to get them. we walked throug himmigration, bold as you like and unchallenged. no one looked at documents or anthiyng. then in baggage reclaim, there were bags in a big pile which anyone could have picked up at any time, and we picked up our bags, and then went BACK through immigration THE WRONG WAY, and a guy said to me "hey! you can´t come back through here!" and i didn´t want him to force me to get out of the airport through customs, so i replied something vague like "Oh it´s ok, that guy upstairs said we should" and kept walking. no one came after us or bothered to challenge us after that!

i tried to find out some more information from airport staff, but that just invovled a lot of shouting between customers and staff, in spanish, everyone getting angry and having a go (needlessly) at the airport staff, who were probably as much in the dark as we were. Well, not as much as me, becasue everyone was yelling in spanish and asking questions in spanish and getting ansswers in spanish and i couldn´t understand any of it. it was not fun.

At length, when i finally managed to get someone to talk to me, i said to them that i would fly to Guatemala now, instead of Quito, and the guy from the airport said it proabably wasn´t such a good idea for me to fly to Guatemala, as i had no ticket out of there, so they might not let me in. he also said that it was his personal opinion that the thing in Quito would blow over quickly (even though the news was saying people were going crazy, looting, robbing, murdering, and the police were rioting and it could take days or weeks to sort out) but the airport guy said he thoguht it might be a quick thing, and the airport were going to put up stranded travellers in a hotel, and give them free food. so i thought i may as well wait and see what heppened.

A Slovakian girl who spoke good english was then sat nearby and she said if they opened the airport, was i actually going to fly into quito as she was looking at the news online and it said there were robberies, murders, muggings, looting etc. becasue there were no police, and Ecuador would be in turmoil, so did i really want to go there... based on that info, probabaly not... but then she spoke to her boyfriend in Quito who said that actually nothing seemed that bad, and people try to kill the president all the time and it´s pretty normal stuff. he said the streets were nowhere near as crazy as the news made out. so we decided we´d stay in the hotel together and reassess in the morning.

unless i haven´t stressed this enough, there was a lot of waiting around in between all these dribs and drabs of information. i was waiting at the airport for 14 hours in total. they split us up into groups and said we would go to the hotel. in my group were 2 guys from Netherlands, and 2 from Ecuador who were trying to get home. the Ecuadorian guys said stuff like this always happens and don´t be alarmed, it would be fine.

in the five star hotel, I had "dinner" of boiled vegetables (the only veggie food they had!) and strawberry smoothie, before sharing a hotel room with the Slovakian girl i´d known for an hour, with all my luggage (hers was stuck in Amsterdam) and she said i could stay with her boyfriend in Quito if GVI couln´dt pick me up - if indeed we managed to get there. Of course thoughy, i don´t know if she´s genuinely nice or a drugs mule. But i thought i may as well trust her as she was the only person I knew and she had let me use her laptop and things.

I woke up the next morning and got the taxi to the airport with the Dutch and Ecuadorians, and one of the guys from Ecuador checked the news and Quito was now open, and it seemed to be business as usual. In the queue i used his phone to phone GVI to ask what i should do now, and they said they didn´t know. again i threw caution to the wind and went on the advice of the Ecudorians, and just go to Quito.

This i did, and told GVI i was coming to Quito, and everythign went swimmingly after that. I landed in Quito, and they was met at the airport by two staff members called Jen and Karina... i can´t tell you how happy i was to see taht GVI logo as i was coming out into the lounge - it was such a relief to know i´d made it and i was safe. we went to the hostel then, wehere everyone else was staying, and that kind of brings me up to now.

There are now 19 of us at the hostel: i think about 12 made it before the trouble started, i was stuck in Panama, 3 were diverted to Lima, one is still in Lima, and anotheri is stuck in America and America says itñ´s not safe to leave the co9untry still. but seriously, everything here seems totally normal and safe. we are going out in groups, but that makes good sense anyway. it´s as if nothing ever happened!

* * *

So we are now waiting here for the one person who is stuck in Lima - they arrive tonighht - and then tomorrow we are off to the jungle - yeah baby!!

the volunteers... my new pals... there are 4 guys and 15 girls; one from Australia, two from Ireland, two from America, one Swedish, and the rest are English. we are in Quito which although it is on the equator, it´s 3000 metres above sea level and it´s freezing (about 20´C!) so i slept last night in trousers and two long sleeve tops - brrr!

we have been told that the drive to camp will take 2 days, and i think we will get one or two more chances in the next day or so to go online, then we will be completely out of communication range, so consider yourself duly warned: I WILL NOT BE IN TOUCH!!!

It looks and seems like the project should be as good fun as the one in CR, with lots of bird calls to learn (yay!), and to identify loads of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates by sight... I can´t wait for it all to begin. we will be 2 days behind schedule but considering what happened in Quito airport, that seems like nothing.

when we arrive at camp, we have to carry all our belongings up 268 steps... my bags are ridiculously heavy ,and i spent $18 thismorning on snacks which should keep me goign for the next 5 weeks. i couldn´t find ANY chocolate, never mind cadbury´s so i am goign to have to properly go cold turkey!!

Hopefully there will be no more hiccups and the fun and learning can begin in earnest! :D

Playa del Benidorm

Well I´m now in Playa del Carmen, Mexico´s answer to Benidorm / Ibiza ... A grotesque, touristy, plastic, partygoer´s overpriced metropolis, heaving with ignorant tourists and people I already hate just because they have chosen to come here. Thank god I only decided to come here for one day! Taht´s what i´v posted as my facebook status anyway. i got here this afternoon, it was pissing it down with rain, and i geve the address of the hostel i´d booked to the taxi driver and he said he didn´t know it, but i had written down the street it was on, and he took me there, and i asked a few restaurants on that street where it was and they said i was definitely where the address said (on 8th Calle between 5 and 10), but the hostel wasn´t there. this was in the piss pouring rain... and no one seemed to have heard of the place. oh dear. anyway i wandered about a bit, in short shorts, waterproof hiking boots, the waterproof jacket i bought off Kyle, with a backpack on and a non-waterproof case pulling behind me through the one inch puddles... thankfully i´d had the wherewithall to put everything in drybags, carrier bags etc. within the bag, so hopefully eyerything would stay dry ish. anway i found the hostel and it was indeed where the directions said it was, i guess the people who work on the street had just never noticed it, even though it was about 20 metres away. Fools!!

after i´d got into the hostel and into my room, i went out to wander around and look at the place, as the rain was easing off so it seemed like a reasonable time to have a quick look around, and within about five minutes, i was wishing i´d not come here. what do i see around me everyehwere but nightclubs and bars, and tourist giftshops selling neaon plastic shite which is the most grotesque of man´s inventions, trashy ornaments in day glow colours, and tshirts with ´humourous´ captions which may seem funny on holiday but when you get home you realise they are shite and not funny at all (truth is they never were). My god get me out of this place... why the f--k did i think it was a good idea to come here? well, because it has a beach (nice to relax on for a day, i thought) and it has Cozumel, the second biggest coral reef in the world. and i was thinking of doing some snorkelling, but it turns out all the reefs are out at sea and you have to take a glass bottomed boat which is very cheap, they do me good deal, special price just for me, book now, their company the best, other companys scam you, they make you pay extra when you get to cozumel, but they honest company with good price, special deal, very cheap, just book now... AARRGGHH!!

Anyway, the rain was worsening, and the streets were now full about 4 incehs of water, and my waterproof boots are full of water (from it going down the ankle) and i am drenched, and rather lost. i thought it would be easy enough to find my way back, i´d just stay parallel to the beach, but i didn´t realise the beach kind of curved round. not to worry, the streets are thankfully numbered and on a grid so as long as you can count, you can find your way home. Jus tglad i didn´t have to rely on asking people where my hostel wasñ i made a mental note of some more prominent nearby landmarks (Burger King) in case i did indeed need to ask. but i didn´t, and i managed to get back to my room, drenched, with girls using the bathroom for aaaages to do their makeup before they go out. Why am i here?

But i did want to go snorkelling ,so i was kind of forced to do the rounds and pick up the leaflets, but it did get tiresome, everyone saying that other companies have hidden charges but theirs doesn´t... do i really want to go snorkelling that badly..? i just thought i might come to a beachy place to have some quiet time and chill for a day before i go to ecuador, but what a fool am i, thinking that it would be quiet here. there are clubs and bars blaring out bad karaoke and club anthems, and i´m in a hostel of partygoers who have 2 day hangovers. Don´t get me wrong, i´ve had some great nights which preceded 2 day hangovers, but that´s just not what i want at the moment. i feel like i´m at university in freshers week or something. people are smoking in the kitchen and playing annoying dance music as i write this. i fear the quiet chillout time will not be forthcoming. ah well, if i will decide to go to places without really finding out what they´re like first, then i´m the master of my own misery. i just made that up but it sounds like it could be a famous quote.

anyway, i had a good day yesterday. Yeasterday i went to Uxmal, a Mayan ruin not far from Merida. the bus ride was a little longer than i expected, but it was definitely worth it. it was as extensive as Chichen Itza was, but much less touristy (only 5 or 10 other people in view at any one moment), serenely beautiful and extremely well preserved. the place is a thousand years old, and the carved stones making up the brisk structures were well carved into beautiful mosaic-like patterns. there was a great rectangular courtyard with little rooms coming off it, which echoed nicely, and you could just stand there and imagine what it would have been like a thousand years ago. they rather think the stones would have been painted, but i thought it was lovely jus tas it was. there was a central pyramid, the same size as the one i went up in Coba (in the poouring rain) but you couldn´t go up this one... but there was another one nearby which you could go up, 52 steps about a foot high, i thought it would seem hard but i did it in one go... maybe i´m fitter from all that walking in CR, but that was on the flat... anyway the view was beaturful and had a quiet stillness about it, there weren´t any annoying tourguides or tourists shouting - it was great. fat iguanas lazed about on rocks, or scampered across the grass if you got too close, but they looked like big fat lazy things - lovely though.

so that was yesterday, and today i am in a neon fibreglass town of partying twentysomethings and retired fat people. i´m looking forward to leaving already. tomorrow, i may well g oto cozumel, though i fear it may be worse than here, but you can rent mopeds there and so i might do that. or i might have to catch up on sleep if i´m kept up all night by loud music and people singing and smoking outside my room.

Ecuador soon!! Yay!

¡Snake! ¡Tocar este!

Well my 2 weeks at the reserve in Mexico has now come to an end. It´s been a nice 2 weeks but if i´m honest, not as much fun as it was in Costa Rica, as i had more friends around me then, and the days were busier. Still, it was good in Mexico and i´m glad i went. Mum says i´ve not said much about the work i did there, so i will do this now:

The average day invovled going out in the morning for a walk, to go and change the memory sticks and/or batteries in some of the camera places. this would involve walking through the jungle, but on trails, but the trails were often overgrown so that even though there was a noticeable trail on the ground, the vegetation at waist or head height was a bit crazy, though the guys usually had machetes with them and hacked away at any vegetation that got too much in the way. It would have been great if we´d seen some animals like the big cats while out on walkies, but the chances of that were slim, as the forst is so dense, and the guys only see about one jaguar a year, a few more pumas and ocelots but still it´s quite rare. i saw a tayra and an oscillated turkey but they are the only large animals i´ve seen on walks. i´ve seen small lizards like anoles and geckos, a frog, some fish, and quite a lot of small birds. after lunch, we´d perhaps go for a walk looking for tracks, like footprints or faeces, but i think we only did this a couple of times. it seemed to rain on quite a few afternoons so we stayed indoors if that happened. we would look at the memory sticks on the computers to see what animals had been captured on there, and i thus have some great photos taken by cameras set by me; several jaguar shots, pumas, ocelot, armadillo, deer, peccaries (wild pigs), and lots of oscillated turkeys, who seem curious about the camera noises / flashes, and spend a lot of time looking around and hanging round near the cameras, looking into the lens etc.

so those are the animals that i´ve seen on walks and on the photos, but i have also seen lots of animals in my cabin (which is above the kitchen, and has a bathroom too, so it´s like a whole house). i´ve had a bat flying round, tarantulas in the toilet and kitchen, a rat on the balcony, mice/rats in the bedroom, frogs in the toilets, cockroaches, geckos, plus lots of insects. however, the most exciting find happened yesterday and invovled a snake. i have a video which i will upload to facebook at some point for those interested.

picture the scene... it´s my last day on the reserve, and i´m packing my bags, so i have everything everywhere. then i hear a squeaking noise, as i often do at night, looked up, and saw a snake and a mouse in the thatching / rafters of my roof. the mouse looks pretty dead. i take a few photos for the sake of interest, but then nothing much seems to be going on, and the snake is keeping itself to itself, so i decide i´ll leave it be. and i thus go back to my packing. ...then, i hear / see the mouse fall down, and scuttle into all my junk on the floor. yeah, it was still alive, and now i look up to see the snake kind of hanging down and into my room. it´s a pale green colour underneath, and a green mottled pattern on top, about an inch in diameter, and i can´t tell how long it is but i see it´s possibly a metre (it later turned out to be over 1.5m). so now the snake is hanging down into my room, and i´ve got a semi-live(?) mouse which it presumably wants, hiding in my stuff! HELP!! i was alone in the cabin, and kind of panicked now, so i grab my camera, put on my wellies (nearest shoes to hand) and go running off to get men. the nearest cabin to mine is where the workers are, and i think they may have been having an afternoon nap, but i just ran up to the house and shouted "Louis! Jonas! Hay una problem! Ayudo! Hay una grande... um... snake... en mi casa! No me gustan!" evidently the word snake is not internationally understood so i showed him the photo and Jonas was like "Ahora? aqui?" and i was like "SI! Ahora! En mi casa. No me gustan!" and they said something to each other and i ran back to my cabin to keep an eye on it, becasue what i REALLY would not want was for me to get back there but for it not to be there, and i know it`s somewhere but don´t know where. anyway, it was still up in the rafters, and Jonas and Louis came in and i shouted down to them "Es aqui! Es aqui!" and they came upstairs. i pointed it out, and Jonas said to me "no se nada" in a reassuring tone so i wasn´t that worried any more but still i wanted them to get rid of it. so i picked up my little video camera and recorded it. Jonas climbed up the wall and started poking around in the thatching at the snake, and when it poked its head out and was hanging down into the room, he hit it. it looked a bit nasty but the snake was ok, but it fell out of the roof and landed onto the mosquito net on my bed. this alone freaked me out a bit and i was there having a fight-or-flight response as the snake is there on my bed... i think it got itself off the bed then, as Jonas got down from the wall, and Louis then went in and tried to pin it down with a stick, which he managed. i in my semi-panicked state, half laughing but half scared (though the video sounds like i´m crying, but i wasn´t!) was trying to say in spanish "get it!" or "take it"; the word take is "tomar", but i kind of forgot, and instead was saying "tocar este" which means "touch this", which obviously makes no sense! anyway, the snake was pinned and then Jonas went to pick it up and it grabbed onto my shoe which again freaked me. snakes are fine in the forest, but when they are in my possessions, i don´t like that at all. the snake wrapped itself around Jonas´s wrist, but the two of them managed to half get it into a binbag... they then took it downstairs. i followed, still recording and saying useless spanish phrases like "tienes en maleta" ("have in bag") . then downstairs, just as we thought it was about to go into the binbag, it jumps out and starts sidewinding across the floor in that creepy snaky way that snakes do. i´m alternating between English and Spanish, like "Shitshitshitshitshit!! Tienes!! Grab it! En la maleta!" and Louis pinned it again with the stick, and Jonas got it into the binbag and tied it up. i then asked him "Este es venomosa?" (which i´d learnt off Danya when we got Rick to eat a non-poisonous flower in front of the rafting guys for a dare!) and Jonas shrugged and smiled, but added "no se nada... no se nada" so i felt better, even though the video sounds like i´m crying, i´m kind of half laughing but half freaked out.

anyway, they took the snake 50m or so away from my cabin and released it, and said later that it was fine. i sat down for a minute and calmed down. i´ve had lots of snake encounters in costa rica, but in the forest, and that´s where snakes belong, and they´re fine there, but i don´t want to interact with them and i don´t want them in my living space - ugh!

Meanwhile, i still had a mouse to go and find in amongst my stuff. i went up, not quite sure whether i wanted the mouse to be dead or alive - again, i don´t want it scuttling round my stuff. but i found it, and it was alive although rather scared i think. i put it in the yoghurt pot the guys had left there for me to catch tarantulas in, and the mouse just sat in it looking scared and curled up and not trying to get out. i took it outside, a few metres from the cabin, and tipped it out onto the floor, but it just sat there looking scared. i could see it was alive, but it wasn´t running off for cover, so i thought a gentle prod might make it run to safety under some leaves or something. it ran a little bit, but still sat out in the open, though it was close to things it could hide under. so i just left it there. i came back 20 minutes later and it was gone, though i´m not sure whether it had recovered and escaped to freedom, or if it had just sat there and consequently got eaten, or if it was injured by the snake, and had gone somewhere to die. i´ll hope it´s the former. anyway, i wasn´t really in the mood for packing after that, so just tossed it all into carried bags and left it till later!!

Juan (project leader) came in later and asked why i was scared of the snake, adding "it doesn´t do anything, it won´t harm you". well (a) i didn´t know if it´s dangerous or not, and (b) even if it wasn´t harmful, i don´t want it snaking round through my bags looking for a mouse to eat! So there you go, just another day in the life of Karen Lancaster, or Crocodile Lancaster, as Helen suggested i should be called... i´m thinking of Snakeskin Lancaster though. travelling round the tourist sights - not to mention the daily grind back in england - may seem a little dull by comparison!!

I am now in Merida, a Colonial city near to the ruins of Uxmal, and some caves full of stalactites and stalagmites, which i will see in due course. however, i think i may use tomorrow as a chillout day, as i´ve had 7 hours of travelling today, and i am in desperate need of doing laundry. i haven´t done any since i was in costa rica (i rinsed a few things in the sink with some shampoo, but they still smelt.) I can no longer use the terms ´clean´ and ´dirty´ to describe my clothes; they are now only ´wearable´(smells and looks grubby) or ´únwearable´ (stinks to high heaven and looks grubby). Yeah, exotic stuff.

Ecuador in a week though, and i´m hoping that that experience will be as good as Costa Rica was. Mexico has been fun but i´d like a bit more company, and busier days. I may regret saying that, but there you go i´ve said it now!!

¿Me gustan las ruinas? ¡Si! ¿Me gustan la lluvioso? ¡No!

Well, another update from sunny(¿?¡!) Mexico:

The weather last night and the night before was unbearably hot - the first time since I´ve left Inglaterra that i´ve really thought it was just too hot for me to sleep. it was about 35´C - ugh! in the end i ran my sheet under the cold tap and slept with a wet sheet on me! it was all i could do to cool down, as putting the fan on (you don´t get air con for 100pesos (5 quid) a night) was like putting a hair dryer on. Anyway, i survived (and slept!)

Yesterday I went to Chichen Itza - a Mayan ruin from about 1000 AD ish. The weather was gloriously hot and sunny - over 30´C, which is nice during the day time) and the place was pretty incredible. grey granite rocks built into perfect geometric pyramids 25metres tall, as well as multiple dwellings and other buildings from the same period. One notable remaining structure was an I-shaped ballcourt, where the object of the game was for teams to hit a 5-kilo (or 5 pound?) ball through a stone hoop 10 metres off the ground, using only the shoulders, elbows, knees and hips. The losign team were put to death - but don{t be too shocked, it was an "honourable" way to die, apparently! The place was beautiful, and filled with market vendors giving ridiculous discounts on amazing items - eg $1 US for a 12 inch mayan mask carving. but there were so many of them that you just got complacent and were like "no gracias" no matter what they said. i ended up not buying any carvings, but now wish i had! i did buy something, but have to think of luggage and the item filling up my bags for the next 10 weeks, i guess :(

today my plan was to go to Coba, and then Tulum - two other Mayan ruins. So, i got the bus to Coba, and the guy stops the bus seemingly in the middle of nowhere and shouts "¡Coba!" and so i got out, but could see no ruins, no signs, and basically nothing distinguishing this road from any other road in Mexico. I asked some randomers on the road (the only people who were there, i might add) if there were some ruins, and they pointed me in a direction, so off i toddled.

got to a car park, asked a few more people, and found a tiny entrance which was less well signposted than the toilets were! Got ticket, went in, and it starts to rain. 600-quid camera in drybag, crappy binliner poncho on, and i wandered round some rocks piled up on one another, with no info plaques or anything. Stood under a hut for a while to try and stay drier.... wandered round the small and info-less ruins and got wet... Hmm... Big long walk to get to the next set of (presumably small and info-less) ruins, i decided i might just head straight for Tulum, which, according to the font size on the photocopied map i have (all i´ve got!) Tulum would be bigger. i asked about the buses though, and it seemed that the next bus to Tulum wasn´t till 1.30, it being 11.30 when i asked. Ho hum, i may as well hang round Coba (still raining a bit, i´m soaked from the waist down, not sure if my camera is dry, but don´t wanna check and risk letting more water into the bag. CBA walking all the way round the place, so paid 30 pesos (1.50) for a bike, and cycled it. still raining a bit. saw some other slightly bigger and more impressive but still info-less buildings. but then, the piéce de resistance - a massive 42 metre-high structure which the great unwashed can traipse up - woo! So i parked up the bike, and the heavens opened as it lashed it down with rain onto me, my one-pound poncho, and 600-pound camera, as i ascended the 1000-year-old monument with one small rope at ankle height (WTF?¡) and a torrent of water gusign down, and signs saying "climb at your own peril" and picture of someone falling off the top! at the top, i was rewarded for my efforts with a beautiful view of the surrounding area - dense forest in the piss-pouring rain! I´m writing in a complainy-tone, but it was good really, in spite of the weather. No me gustan la lluvioso.

when i finally got the bus, after being told to walk into town (in the pouring rain) because the bus didn't come to the car park, then i got the bus at 2pm, and it drove down to the car park i´d just come from (grr!) and by the time it got to tulum it was gone 3pm and still raining, and the bus i was on was going to cancun, so i just paid more money and went straight to cancun. Cancun was dry ish, and i bought some foodie supplies (fruit and chocolate mainly) and then headed back to the office where i´m spending the night... and spending time uploading Jalova videos to Facebook. :D

More adventures next week!

PS - my big camera survived dry as a bone in the drybag, so thanks to Herman or RAchel - whoever it was who left it in our room when they went. The little camera and video cameras were fine too, in ziplock food bags. :D

¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva los insectos!

I´m currently in a hostel with free internet, so this is a long entry, filled with stories of critters in the living quarters, and unpleasant insect encounters. readers of a nervous disposition are advised to consult a physician before reading. it starts off ok but gets grosser and grosser towords the end. enjoy.

Well i have had one week in Mexico now, and it is a BIG change from Jalova (where i was in CR). Here´s why: Jalova was 20 volunteers, plus 7 staff, who all spoke excellent english, most being native speakers. El Eden, here in Mexico, has just one volunteer (me) and 4 staff, only one of whom speaks any English!! So I´m having a lot of "me time". When I left England (where i live alone), knowing i was going to spend all those weeks living in each others pockets with 25 people, i thought i might get sick of it, but I never did (thanks to people like Marcus, Kyle, Sarah, Sam, (1st 5 weeks) and Danya, Rick, Marshall, Casey, Emma, Alice, and Julia (second 5 weeks)). Now i´m moslty on my own, i miss all that company. Still, my spanish is improving (it´s still diabolical, and i have conversations like "Tengo todos del agua aqui" and point to my wellies (which were full of water, as the beautifully crafted spanish sentence tells!) and then the guy i´m saying it to laughs, and replies a load of stuff i don{t understand, and i smile and nod back - ha ha!

The people i work with are all mexican middle-aged men, who live on site. There is Juan - project leader who speaks very good english, and he is like a Mexican version of my dad (although not as brown as my dad!) ie, he is stocky, middle-aged and looks like my dad, right down to the bulging scar on his forehead, no doubt from disregarding safety procedures (like my dad!) There is also Pedro who rarely speaks, Louis who speaks fast (probably normally!) and Jonas, who is a bit crazy and whoops with excitement at things like rain storms, attacks vegetation with his machete in any spare moment, and he talks to me sometimes and i can get the gist of what he´s saying, which i like!

the weather here is hotter than CR - i always thought it was supposed to be hotter near the equator, but i guess that´s where my knowledge of the weather ends. it´s a fairly consistent 32´C in the day, and it drops to about 27´C or even 25´C (brrr!!) at night. i´m not kidding, the other day when it rained, i put on my fleece jacket (complete with Barney hair) for the first time, and wore trousers all day, feeling rather chilly, and it was 25´C. Shit, i am gonna DIE when i come back to England in December!!

the camp is in the middle of a forest, and the nearest town is 50km away. there are a few wooden cabins, which are pretty big - the main cabin is about 15 metres by 15 metres, and downstaris is a kitchen and dining room, with a TV which gets a dreadful snowy reception, and upstairs there are 4 beds (one is mine) and 2 showers (cold) and 2 toilets (flushing, but dirty paper still goes in the bin, which stays there for about 4 days - nice!) and above that is a watch tower, which is only about 2 mtres squared. they use it to look out for forest fires, and i use it to look out for birds, and there´s more of a breeze up there. so far i´ve seen hawks (roadside, i believe) plus great kiskadees, flycatchers, a flock of swallows, great egret, snowy egret, little blue heron (juvenile), yukatan jays, and a few other birds i cannot identify. you can see for miles from there, and the view iw pretty muych identical ion every direction: completely flat land, covered in deciduous forest. it´s pretty dense forest, but seems quite desolate to look out and that´s all you see, but i like it, and i quite like to know that there´s no one else for miles around. well, except for some people with a bulldozer who came and started bulldozing the forest without permission, and did that for about 2 days before anyone noticed, and the police came down and arrested them, and now Juan has their bulldozer. that was a couple of weeks ago though.

We spend the days going to cameras, where we change the batteries and check the memory cards to see if there have been any photos of animals on them. so far since i{ve been there, we´ve got photos of jaguars, ocelots, pumas, deer, agouti (big rodent thing), tayra (kind of black foxy thing), and ocelated turkeys. theat´s really cool, as they are really good photos too!! i´ve not seen any big cats myself yet, but saw an ocelot (medium cat) tail disappear into the bushes, and i´ve seen a tayra (also saw one of them in CR). we also go on surveys looking for feild signs (shit and footprints!) of the animals, mainly the carnivores. it´s been pretty dry though, but we have seen jag prints and puma prints, as well as fox and raccoon poo!

one day, we went on a walk through the forest, and up to a cenote (lake) and an alligator came swimming over to us as we stood on the bank. Remembering Jon´s freaked out reaction when Herman went standing near a crocodile and throwing stones into the water in Jalova, I backed away from the water´s edge, while Juan picked up a stick and started slapping the water´s surface in front of the alligator, who then came out of the water onto the bank, and he was going to me "she´s tame, she´s a pet, she´s called Benita". and then he got some string and tied a bit of wood to the end, and dangled it above her head, and she was sat up and snapping at the string, like a cat might paw at a bit of wool you dangle for it. i was taking photos, and then he said did i want a photo of me and her, so i was like, OK, and she went back into the water, and i crouched by the water´s edge, and she came about a foot away from me. I was going "oh shit!" and he was goign "she´s tame, it´s fine, sh´wont go for you" but i kept looking at her mouth which was as long as my forearm, and thinking, Barney is tame, but he still bites sometimes, so my expression is half smile half grimace!

what else? well, i was watching Spiderman 2 (dubbed in Spanish, but i know the story so i virtually forgot they were´saying a word i could understand!) with Jonas and Louis, and I went up to the toilet, and there was a massive (the size of a man´s hand) tarantula on the back of the door. it was black all over, and its body was about 2 inches in diameter, and its leg span was about 6 inches, and it was really hairy, the hairs being about half an inch long, black hairs all over, but bright orange hairs on its abdomen, quite beautiful really. so after about 5 seconds when i´d got over my mini heart attack, i went and got my camera and got some great photos of it. then went downstairs (ith the camera, to show the guys) and i was like "Jonas, hay una tarantula grande en el baños" and they lkooked at the photos and seems a bit shocked, and i was like "si, aqui, ahora". I thought they´d be like "oh yeah, it happens all the time, deal with it", but instead, they grabbed a carrier bag and came upstairs and they emereged from the bathroom holding the carrier bag, wit hthe tarantula crawling up the side of it, with Jonas holding it at arms length and bending over, and Louis jumping away scared, and they weretrying but failing to turn the bg inside out, and as the tarantula was crawling up and nearing Jonas´s hand and he was going "ah!!" i took the lid off the bin and pushed itover, and he threw the bag (plus tarantula) into the bin and the two of them put the lid on it super-quick, and took it downstairs. Jonas was saying to me (in Español, but with actions) that they can climb into your welies, and if they bite you it swells up. i went to put my camera away, and went downstairs to carry on watching Spiderman 2, and saw the two of them poking around the kitchen bin, and i saw a tarantula, and they said it was "un otro! dos!" i thougth oh shit, and blamed it all on Spiderman! then at the end of the film, i was asking them (in no doubt dreadful spanish) what i should do if i see another in the night, and while i was asking, Louis pointed into the kitchen, and there was another tarantula (or one of the ones they´d released outside and had come back) in the kitchen!! AARRGGHH!! anyway, they said to catch it in these giant yoghurt pots they had, and they loaded me up with yoghurt pots and a torch, and that was me ready for the night!! Juan said to me that they don{t bite, and to be honest, i wouldn{t have been that bothered by one being there, but it was the reactions of the guys that freaked me out a bit! anyway, they didn{t return, and i haven{t seen one since.

i did,however, see a rat running round next to my bed, which bothered me more than the tarantulas and the bat (oh yeah, there´s a bat too which comes and goes) becausae it was right next to my bed. i tried to get a photo of it but it was too quick and kept running up the walls and behind shutters, the nwhen i´d open the shutter, it wasn{t there. it bugged me because it was noisy as if it was squabbling with another mouse. in the morning, the toilet paper had been shredded, apparently by the said rat. ah well.

a few days ago, i was going out on a survey, and Juan said to put a lot of bug spray on, because we were going to a place where there were a lot of ticks. i kind of visibly cringed and said i hated ticks, and he laughed and said he didn{t like them either, but he was like "a wild man" (his words) and he said that the place we were going to, one time he went there, and pulled 218 ticks out of his legs that day. i duly went crazy with the bug spray. naked, i sprayed it onto my body, then i turned my trousers inside out and sprayed the inside, and then put them on, and sprayed the outside. i also wore long socks and wellies. i found one tick crawling on my arm (which i hadny sprayed, as they{re generally lurking below wais height) and that was all. he said after that because it had rained, it was not that ticky(?) weather... but i appreciated the warning anyway!

however, i´d already had a tick problem before this.... for those who don{t know, there was a bit of a tick problem in CR before i left, and about 5 people had found ticks on themselves. i was one of the lucky ones who hadn{t, even though i played with the dogs, who you could see the fleas crawling on them, so i{m sure they had ticks too) but then when i was in Panama city airport, changing plnes between CR and Mexico, i feltsomething sjharp like a splinter in between my toes. i ignored it at first, but then it hurt again so off came the shoe and sock in the departure lounge, and ´{m sure you can guess what i{m about the say was there - yeah, a tick, happily munching away on my foot! i tried to pull it off wit hmy fingers, but i hurt and i yelled out in pain, thus attracting attention, as i then had to virtually empty my bag looking for tweezers, which i then grabbed onto the tick and yanked it off my foot. it hurt. and indeed it hurt for about another 4 days afterwards. that was a week ago and i can still feel it a bit, but that may be because after it was still hurting after 4 days, i thought maybe the head was still embedded in my foot (as i{ve heard can happen), so i had to pick off the scab, and have a scrape around in the hole to see if i could find any bits of tick. i think i pulled out something, but i´m not wholly sure if it was part of me or part of a tick. anyway that may have set back the recorvery, or may have helped it, i don{t know.

ok, that´s it for now. tomorrow i´m off to see some Mayan ruins in Chichen Itza, as it´s the weekend and i can amuse myself. then another week of forest surveys - this time with 4 volunteers, who will hopefully speak some english - if not, my spanish will improve even more!