It’s been a while since I updated this, we’ve been really busy with fieldwork this week! Last Saturday we went horseriding as planned. We took the bus from TEC and stopped off at the artbox, a random souvenir shop along the highway, for ice cream and cokes. Then we tried to order a taxi to take us to the horseriding place, which turned out to be a lot more complicated than we’d anticipated! Eventually we gave up and started walking down the road, which is when the taxi arrived and tried to claim that we’d told them the wrong place. The taxi dropped us off right next to the Belize river and we had to take a boat across the river to get to Banana Bank. The river was beautiful and surrounded by proper jungle. The horses were amazing and we spent two hours riding through jungle and cantering across fields, one of the best moments of the trip! So good that we’re hoping to go again before we leave. I felt pretty ill after we’d finished but a partially frozen coke and a sit down helped a lot! The riding place was also a hotel and had its own captive jaguar and a spider monkey on a chain- which we didn’t appreciate. The jaguar had a really nice enclosure through and posed very nicely for the cameras! We took the boat back across the river and then the taxi collected us. We waited for a long time for a bus along with an American woman and it began to get dark, she managed to flag down a Belizean family who offered to give us a lift to Belmopan. Just before we got there we saw the bus and so managed to run across the road and jump on, it was rammed full and there was a really racist woman sitting at the front who made some pretty nasty comments towards us. Not the best bus journey ever!

We didn’t do much on Sunday, but by Monday I was feeling a lot better so Sophie, Josh, Zoe and me headed to Dangriga to do surveys for Josh’s project. He’s collecting data about how much game meat is eaten across Belize. We had a fun day of talking to locals, quite a few marriage proposals and wandering around Dangriga. Most people were really friendly and very willing to help. The bus journey home was less enjoyable as a small girl got travel sick and threw up out of the window which then rebounded back into the bus; covering a lot of the passengers and slightly splashing me and Sophie!

On Tuesday I fnally made it back out to the field! We had to go to the second big falls grid and move the cameras to new locations. We also had to do habitat surveys at each new location. I had forgotten how much walking through transects is like an obstacle course and how sweaty it gets in the jungle. For a break we went to Amigos with Said for ice cold cokes, we may have all become slight coca cola addicts – it definitely tastes better here and is a lot more refreshing than just water. In the afternoon we went to one of the cayes to start data collection for my project. We had to cross savannah to get to the island of forest but once we got into the forest it was really nice and cool. We split into groups to survey the area and count burrows, it was actually pretty enjoyable fieldwork compared to some of the stuff we have to do.

On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we began data collection on Sophies project, which is looking at the accuracy of radiotracking. This involves some people moving to different locations with collars and us in a different location taking bearings of the collar locations. It can be very dull and hot as we stay in the same place for a long time and often there isn’t much shade. We’ve now nearly finished the data for Sophies project but we just don’t have enough time left to collect all the data for mine. It sucks a bit but I have a new project using camera data and studying the habitat uses of jaguars and Pumas which sounds pretty interesting. I should be discussing it later today with Bart and Becci. Today we have the day off as we’ve worked so hard this week, which is good because I’m absolutely knackered! We’re all starting to get excited about going home now as well; although we’ll be sad to leave TEC the thought of hot water, comfy beds and food other than rice beans and chicken is very exciting!