On Thursday afternoon, after relaxing for a bit to make up for the lack of sleep, me and Ed headed off to take daytime postions of the paca we still have radio collared. As the cars are all in use for other fieldwork, we have to cycle over from TEC to the area where the paca lives. It was actually surprisingly fun; as it was late afternoon it wasn't too hot and there was quite a nice breeze. The bikes are all in various states of brokenness and it seems to vary which ones we could find. Being shorter than Ed I was left with the bike that has no gears and brakes which are operated by pedalling backwards...... a bit difficult to remember when you suddenly need to stop. The road is pretty bumpy and the bikes have no suspension but it was pretty funny, especially when we got to the flooded part and had to pedal through a small lake! Concerningly we were followed by several vultures for most of the ride! I had my first hot shower of the trip when we got back, as the hot water had magically appeared..... very exciting although I got too hot and had to turn the hot water off fairly soon.

On friday I was back on trap duty, we were collected by Bart in the morning and headed to big falls. The bait in the traps needs to be checked everyday and the only way to do this is by crawling head first into the traps, a pretty dirty job. But we got it all sorted fairly quickly and were able to head back to TEC quite quickly.

Saturday was back checking the traps.... and crawling in them again, but this time me and sophie had the access road traps which is a lot less work as you can drive to most of them. Sophie, zoe and me stayed the night with Becci which turned out to be awesome. Becci brought fresh fruit and veg from the market so we cooked a feast of coconut rice with fried onions, carrots and broccolli and freshly made guacamole and then had pineapple and king fruit for pudding. It was very exciting and made us realise that we don't get that much fresh veg. It was also really nice to get to know Becci more and just chat about the project. Sadly still no traps have been set off but that's probably due to the ridiculous amount of rain we've had so hopefully we'll have a couple of dry days soon and might start catching some animals.

This morning Becci dropped us back at TEC and we went straight out to do the paca daytime positions. Becci gave us a lift to the area, but the boys decided to be 'manly' and cycled the bikes there for us. We now know never to trust the boys with bike choosing, they chose the two tallest bikes and one which doesnt have any brakes or gears. This wouldn't be so bad if we could reach the ground while sitting on the saddle! So we took it in turns to ride that one trying not to fall off and inventing new ways to try and slow the bike down! We've had the afternoon off to try and catch up on some missed sleep and I managed to phone mum and dad which was nice.