We met the Belizian deputy prime minister today! But I'll get to that in a bit....

Yesterday me and Sophie headed off to Big falls to move some camera traps around, they get moved around the transect each week. The jungle was ridiculously humid and mossie infested and we weren't actually very much help. The ground is really uneven and because it's been raining a lot, there are some very large puddles which are surprisingly deep! Arturo and Mitch manage to leap through the jungle missing all the puddles and disappear out of sight almost immediately! So by the time me and Sophie had caught up with very wet feet, they had already changed most of the cameras without us, but by the end we were beginning to get the hang of jumping between the puddles and Arturo made us sticks to help balance and check how deep the puddles were. I got caught out by one and most of my leg disappeared into the water! One of the transects was pretty much a river which reached over our wellies anyway. After we finished there, Sophie drove me and her back to the TEC where we were very pleased to find that the water was back on so we could have showers. The showers are so good here, really powerful, there isn't any hot water but we really don't need any as we're always so hot and sweaty. Dinner was an exciting chenge from rice and beans to pasta and mashed potato. Then headed out for night tracking, me and Ed managed to get through an entire pack of Haribo so spent most of the night on a sugar high and amusing ourselves over the radio with Lion King quotes and guess the film soundtrack.

This morning we had to get up fairly early, try and find some clean clothes and make ourselves look presentable for the ceremony. This was to anounce a new national park of land included in the corridor and for the government to officially announce that they were willing to help and work alongside the corridor programme, so a very big deal and very exciting! We were given t-shirts with the panthera, darwin iniative and university of Belize logos on the front and "working together for the Belize central corridor" written on the back. Charlotte, Sophie and me were given a lift to the ceremony, which was in a posh hotel in Belize city, by Bart and Beccis boss; the executive director of Panthera (Howard Quigley). This was really exciting too as he's had over 100 papers on Jaguars published and he talked to us about the project and about our involvement all the way there. The ceremony began with a prayer and the Belizean national anthem. Then there were speeches from various ministers and scientists including the deputy prime minister. Followed by the signing of the documents. After there was traditional ceremonial garifuna dancing and drumming. The drumming was particularly impressive as the guys were hitting the drums so hard and continuously for ages so we were sure that their hands must be hurting a lot but they didn't stop smiling! We had our photos taken with the deputy prime minister, belizian students and bart and becci. Then we had a very posh buffet lunch sitting at the same table as all the important people! We've now got the afternoon off but will be back in the field tomorrow hopefully baiting the traps.