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!
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