Entry 1
So I was sitting on the plane to Belize City next to this lady with a Jamaican Passport. She looks at me as I fumbling through my notes and says "first time to Belize?" I answer yes and she points to my papers and says "you'd better have a plastic to carry those in man, or all that ink is gonna run." I thought she was kidding. I was wrong.
I got off the plane and was assaulted by the Belizean climate. Just think of what your bathroom feels like after you've taken a long hot shower with the ventilation fan off and you are very close to getting an idea of what this place is like. I got stopped in customs and they asked me why I was carrying 200 meters of electrical cables in my bag. It was, I thought, a good question. Normal people, after all, don't carry that sort of stuff. Of course, I fortunately was armed with the knowledge that webcasting out of Belize was illegal since telecom has not been deregulated there yet, so I just explained that the cables were being used in a Natural History Museum research project in the jungle. Big lie, but they bought it, and I went on my way.
The streets of Belize city are... interesting. Everyone wants to try and get you into their car, which is a kind of scary thing when you watch the way people drive around here. I turned down five or six offers explaining that I was waiting for my own ride, and twenty sweaty minutes later a big and sturdy jeep came wheeling up to the curb for me.
Entry 2
The jeep ride was an experience. The main roads out of Belize City are pretty good. There is an exceptionally dodgy security checkpoint along the way and a bar/grill called "Cheers" that made excellent limeaid. We also passed a bridge that had a crocodile residing in a rock pool next to it. The roads from the bridge onwards were really rough. I tried filming as we were making the last bit of our way to the research centre, but the road was so bouncy I could barely hold on to the camera.
Las Cuevas Station itself was amazing. The whole facility is raised 3+ metres off the ground and all vehicles get parked below. The station has a dining room, a laboratory, a dozen bedrooms, a kitchen, two washrooms, an office, and yes, a pub (although it doesn't really count as a room since it is a free standing bamboo structure). The facility has a number of critters living at it. There's a horse named Speedy, who isn't speedy nor is he in particularly good health. There are tarrantulas all over the grass around the station. There are wild turkeys and loads of resident insects - including a mantis that had an affinity for my computer keyboard.
Entry 3
Day one at the station kept me really busy. Back at the tech room in London we knew that there was a problem with the satellite connection at Las Cuevas, but we weren't sure exactly what that problem was... so what once was "the musuem's problem" became "my problem". Well, I started with the satellite connection monitor to see how strong our signal was. I got readings of 17.2 +/- .2 and according to my manual this was more than strong enough for our needs. Next I started adjusting the settings on the satellite phone itself to make sure I was sending transmission properly. A few of the setting were off from what was optimum, so I thought "ah hah!" and promptly called london to establish a test webcast. And then it started to rain... and I'm talking SERIOUS rain. Well, I don't know if it was the weather, the phone, the satellite dish, or some tel-com failure on some other continent that screwed things up but the test cast went horribly. Trouble was, with so many variables it was very hard to sort out where the problem actually was. So, with horrid weather and nothing to be done at that particular moment I did what any sensible individual would do... I went into the nearest cave and had a look around.
Boy was it cool! There were stairs carved by the mayans leading into the center of the cave and a rough hewn altar surrounded by a circle of stalactites. As Chapal, the facilty asst manager, took me deeper into the cave I found piles of mayan pottery at my feet. It was unbelievable.
When I had had enough of a break in the cave I returned to the station had a couple of beers and went back to the communications technology nightmare awaiting me. I must say after my cave wander and the beers I was in a far more relaxed mood than I had been when I had left. So I sat down and started sorting though my options. The sun set, the black flies and sand flies swarmed up from below the floor boards, chewed the flesh off of my knuckles and made me miserable. However, somewhere between my relaxed post-cave mood and my late night misery I did sort out one thing... my connection problem was unique to the Museum because when I made a video conference call to the satelite company in Manchester all went perfectly well. Hmm...
Entry 4
Eventually the day came when all of our equipment had to be tested via a dry run with the museum. It took half a dozen connection attempts, but eventually we got a video conference connection that wasn't that bad. I waited while they introduced the event on the london end and as the minutes passed the connection just got worse and worse. Finally when I did start interviewing one of the jungle researchers the connection had deteriorated to such a state that nobody could really understand the content. Needless to say a lot more work needed to be done.