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Our working day, while we were in Brazil, was dawn to dusk — about 5.30 am to 6 pm. We were up and out by 5.15 am, watching the light rush over the landscape, as it tends to do in the tropics (no languid, leisurely dawns there), then we headed to breakfast at about 6.30 am, feeling like we’d already accomplished something. Then there was the relatively cool, productive period until about 11 am, an agonising hour when our stomachs rumbled incessantly for lunch, followed by the flattening, oppressive heat of the early afternoon until about 3 pm. The final stretch from 3-6 pm was pleasant, gradually cooling, and with a lovely golden light cast on everything.

I mention this because I found it quite a pleasant way to work. There’s something just right about timing your working day to match the available light. You get a feeling of continuity as you watch the bats (which you saw leaving their roosts at the end of the previous day) returning from their night time foraging, and the cormorants and herons (which you saw coming back to their roosting trees the previous evening) leaving to start their day. Their activity synchronises with your activity, and after a bit of adjustment to the early start, you find that it sits very comfortably with the natural changes in your energy levels.

Of course, if you get up at 5 am, you have to go to bed at about 9 pm at the latest (though we rarely lasted past 8.30 pm), so it somewhat curtails your social life. And in temperate latitudes, your working day would oscillate wildly between unworkably short in winter, to exhaustingly long in mid-summer. Of course, this is how people used to work when their calendar was driven by the agricultural year, and artificial light was expensive and hard to come by. Explaining to your boss that you are late to work because it isn’t yet light is going to sound like the lamest of excuses now. But if I had more freedom to schedule my own day, I’d like to follow the periodicity of the natural day length more closely — I think that I’d have a lot more energy to spare.

It seems that I may have brought a little stowaway back with me from Brazil. A couple of weeks into the trip, I noticed that I had a small lump on the bottom of my left foot, between my big toe and second toe. That wasn’t very surprising, because I am — as I have said before — a mosquito magnet, and had gathered a impressive collection of bites by that time. However, this one seemed a bit different.

[Squeamish readers, please look away now.]

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I’m back. At least, I think I am. Brazil is such a huge country, and so far away from the UK that travelling from the centre of Brazil feels like an expedition in itself. I started back on Saturday, at 3pm local time, and didn’t get back to Birmingham until 1pm on Monday. There was the 20 hour bus ride, the hours of waiting at Sao Paulo airport, the 11 hour flight followed by another 1 hour 40 minute flight, and finally the taxi ride home.

Perhaps it was mostly tiredness and jet-lag, but I found that my senses got disconnected from one another. Like a group of tired children, they straggled along, getting out of synchronisation with one another. When I woke on the bus, sound roared in suddenly like a window opened on raging surf before sight and touch worked out where I was. On the flight, I realised that I had been staring at the back of the seat in front of me for several minutes after waking, seeing it, but not being aware of sound, touch or smell, or of thinking consciously about anything.

Bits of me kept getting left behind. I felt wide awake on the last part of my flight, then an intense, irresistible sleepiness ambushed me suddenly as we landed. Part of the problem, I think, is that long distance travel is done using stolen time, and there’s eventually a price to pay for that petty crime. On the plane, it’s night, but if you lift the window blinds slightly, you see fierce, shocking sunlight piling up against the glass, trying to burst the little bubble of time created by inter-continental flight. It finds you in the end.

I enjoy taking off. I like the burning roar of the engines, feeling the hand of acceleration pushing you firmly in the chest, pinning you to your seat. I like the sudden, gentle lurch as the wheels leave the ground, when you are falling and being lifted at the same time.

But it’s all disconnection, and I’m glad to be back with familiarity, slowly synchronising my senses again and re-setting my clock. I seem to be more or less all here.

Part of my plan for this year is to get rid of the car, and spend more time outdoors. Something that helps both aims (as well as saving us money and saving fossil fuels) is for me to commute to work by bike. I actually planned to start commuting in by bike last year, but my hospitalisation set that plan back a bit. Last week, I cycled in a couple of times, and I’m really enjoying it.

We’re really lucky that we’re almost on one of the National Cycle Network routes, which in turn happens to go very close to the University. So I can do almost the whole route through parks and very quiet residential streets, which makes an enormous difference to the feel of the ride. I used to like commuting in Oxford, but you did have to have your wits about you the whole time, and a healthy sense of paranoia that everyone in a car was trying to kill you, which didn’t make for a relaxing ride. Now, I can mostly glide along serenely — daydreaming, thinking about work, mentally composing blog posts — with only the need to keep half an eye out for rampaging dogs or oblivious pedestrians.

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Provided that I’ve got enough done by then, I’m planning to go to the MacExpo on Friday. I was in two minds about whether to bother, because I felt that it was a bit lacklustre last year. Now that I’m living in Birmingham, it involves a lot more time, effort and money to get to London, so I want it to be worthwhile. However, this year the show is at Olympia rather than the Design Centre in Islington as it has been in former years, so I’m hoping that they might have beefed it up a bit. I’m very keen to see the new iMacs and Aperture, as well as the new iView MediaPro, so there should be a fair amount to see.

Being a cheapskate, I found a cheap, off-peak deal with Chiltern trains, but the train comes into Marylebone, which isn’t the easiest location for getting to Olympia. I perused the Underground map, but even the most straightforward journey involved a couple of changes and a longish walk. Just as I was beginning to think that it might not be worth the hassle, I decided to look for bus timetables.

Transport for London has some really wonderfully designed bus maps and timetables. The spider maps for different areas are a really clear way to visualise how different bus routes pass through the location you’re interested in. From the map for Kensington Olympia, I could immediately see that the number 27 bus passes through both Olympia and Marylebone, and it even had an expanded view to show the detailed locations of bus stops for both directions at Olympia—-no more wondering which side of the road you should be on when you know nothing about the geography of the area.

If you search the Journey Planner, you can get detailed timetables for a particular route, centred around your chosen stop. The layout is admirably clear, with a simple line linking all the stops, and figures at each stop showing the estimated journey time from your starting point. I’ve always been put off taking buses in London because of the complication of working out which route you want and where the stops are. Now they seem to have got the information provision sorted out, but it remains to be seen whether the 27 really does come at 10-12 minute intervals as they claim, or that the journey should take about 24 minutes.

I flew back from the Pantanal; a journey which involved two taxi rides (one of an hour and one of an hour and half), two flights and three airports. The first of these was Corumbá, an elegantly faded town on the border with Bolivia. Corumbá Airport must be the smallest I’ve ever been in. It’s modern, clean and very comfortable, but absolutely tiny.

There’s almost no need for a boarding call, as there’s only one gate and the pilot can practically tap you on the shoulder personally as he picks up the keys to the plane. However, they obviously like to do things properly at Corumbá, and a someone at the gate made an announcement over the public address system, even though we were all a couple of metres from him. This professional veneer did slip a little when his walkie-talkie crackled into life during his spiel, causing screeching feedback. His expression was a picture. All the passengers started laughing (with him rather than at him), which gave him a fit of the giggles. By the time he’d got through the usual “we’ll be boarding in a few moments…” thing, everyone (including him) was laughing their heads off and he got a round of applause.

While I was waiting, I saw an older guy with ‘Baggage Handler’ written on the back of his shirt. At that point, I suspected that he was the baggage handler, singular, and felt a little guilty about the weight of my suitcase.

The Pantanal is a truly amazing place for wildlife. It should come with a health warning for biologists (or any wildlife enthusiast): “WARNING: liable to cause heart palpitations and shortness of breath”. Here are a few of my favourite wildlife encounters, and there are more photographs on my Brazil flickr set.

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This was my shower in the Pantanal, which I found it quite entertaining. The combination of bare wires, electricity, bits of casually-applied electrical tape and water had a kind of devil-may-care bravado about it, and I liked that fact that there were no nannyish notices around, warning you not to touch the heat setting lever¹ once you’d turned the water on. It felt like being treated as an adult, not an idiot. While I was there, I was musing that this kind of thing wouldn’t be allowed in the UK, where we tend to be quite scrupulous at separating water and electrical devices. Apparently, I was wrong.

We’ve had a problem for a while with a light fitting in the kitchen which is directly under the bath and shower. The bulbs keep blowing (tripping the circuit-breaker on the lighting ring main). Then this morning, all the power went out in the house, closely followed by an anguished bellow from Mr. Bsag, who was in the shower at the time. The electric shower had tripped the circuit-breaker, this time cutting all the power. I reset the circuit, but the same thing happened three times before Mr. Bsag gave up and filled the bath instead. So it seems that water is probably getting in to the electric shower unit somehow, and probably also getting in to the light fitting below in the kitchen and shorting it out.

The irony is that if we had one of the Brazilian showers, we’d be able to see what the problem was because the wires are all on display. As it is, we have to wait until an electrician can come round, and put up with the tedious process of running baths.

¹ The lever had three settings: cold, hot (actually, warm), and ‘Morna’. I never found out what morna was supposed to do.↑

We set out in the small motorboat after dark to take a look at the animals in and around the river. It’s very cool and still, and in the moonlight, eerie blue reflections of the trees are cast on the water. Our torch catches the twin red glows of caiman eyes, looking our way before quietly slipping under the surface. A family of capybara clusters near the bank, ears twitching and their long, square heads breaking the water like a collection of floating, furry shoe boxes. A herd of white brahmin cattle on the bank peers curiously at the boat, gleaming like pale ghosts. Everything is different in the dark.

Then the guide says he’s heard a jaguar, cuts the engine and turns out the torch. What a weight of silence! No cars, no aeroplanes, no human voices. Just the tiny night sounds of animals moving, breathing and hiding, and our own blood buzzing in our ears. History peels away: we are just Homo sapiens listening in the dark, not breathing, listening for the cat.

All it took was a couple of two-hour rides through the Pantanal to convince myself that I should become a cowgirl. Yes, I wanted to give up a life of science and spend my days riding the range, wearing chaps and wrasslin’ cattle—-or whatever else it is that cowboys do. I’m a little hazy on the details.

Like most pre-adolescent girls, I took horse-riding lessons when I was young, but I haven’t ridden much since then. I’ve also never ridden Western-style before, with a one-handed grip on the reins and long stirrups, but it was a lot of fun. My horse and I developed a reasonable working relationship, and broadly agreed on the direction and speed of travel, which is always a bonus. Watching wildlife from horseback is actually quite a good way to go about it. Many animals seem to see you as some kind of weird centaur-like half-human, half-horse creature, and so come a bit closer than they might if you were on foot. It’s great until one of the horses accidentally kicks a bees’ nest, as happened on one of the rides I went on.

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We had an unbelievably long journey to the Pantanal by road¹, most of which was at night. Thankfully, we had hired a very comfortable coach, with reclining seats, blankets, and all kinds of other little luxuries that made it a bit more comfortable. I sat right at the front of the bus (best seat in the house!), and watched the scenery for a while until it got dark, when I settled down to get some sleep.

In the very early hours of the morning, I woke up to see a completely empty road ahead of us, illuminated only by the twin cones of our headlights. It was absolutely straight and stretched away to a vanishing point where it dipped down, as if we were about to fall off the edge of the world. The land was flat and seemed to be almost devoid of any vegetation or habitation. The sky was flat and dark. Suddenly, lightning lit up the sky. Vivid forks etched the clouds before stabbing the earth and leaving dancing after-images in my eyes. Sheets of light rippled across the clouds, revealing the huge dome of the sky, the texture of the clouds, and the flat land below. It was like watching a stunning flicker book animation, or some scene under a strobe light. So captivating was it that I spent the next hour or so wide awake, marvelling at the light show.

¹ A journey time of 14 hours had been mentioned when we left, but in the end it took us closer to 19. ↑

In the run up to my trip to Brazil I was very excited, but also a little apprehensive. After all, Brazil has a slightly fearsome reputation for crime. That may be partially deserved in some restricted areas, but my own experience of the country and people was universally positive. Any country has cities with slightly dodgy areas, which you are wise to avoid, or travel through with caution. I can honestly say that I’ve felt less safe and more threatened in parts of Birmingham and London than anywhere I went in Brazil¹.

Brazilian people are lovely. Not just in a ‘Girl from Ipanema’ kind of way², but also in their warmth, friendliness, openness and generosity. I could give a slew of examples of the thoughtful and welcoming way in which we were treated—-despite our mostly lamentable lack of Portuguese—-but one instance in particular will probably illustrate it well.

After a day’s work, our rather large party (more than 20 people) set out for the nearest bar, to which we’d been the previous night. Unfortunately it was closed (possibly because we had provided a week’s takings in a single night), so we moved on to the next one on the block. This place was tiny, and only had a handful of chairs—-certainly not enough to seat all of us. We didn’t mind very much and were happy to stand, but noticed as we were ordering beers and sorting ourselves out that the few locals already in the bar were disappearing. I worried that we’d driven them out, but a few moments later they re-emerged from all directions, carrying chairs from their own houses for us to sit on.

Can you imagine that kind of thing happening in the UK?

¹ To give you some context to my comments (and for the rest of my posts about Brazil), I spent the first few days at our base in a small town about 3 hours from São Paulo with a large group of people from the University, then travelled with them to the Pantanal for a further few days. They then returned to their base and I stayed on in the Pantanal on my own for 10 days. Finally, I travelled back to meet up with the group for the last couple of days. ↑

² There are—-it has to be said (even though I feel shallow saying it)—-a huge number of physically stunning Brazilian people, both male and female. ↑

I’m looking at an enormous pile of stuff that I’ve somehow got to try to cram into a suitcase. Hum.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about travel tips. I’m sure that you’ve all got your own essential rules when travelling, but here are a few I’ve gathered over the years, tuned to stays in somewhat remote areas, doing field work:

• Always plan for the worst. Losing anything you’ve brought with you is going to be a pain. However if your passport, tickets or other important documents get stolen/go up in flames, you’re going to have a lot of work to do to convince the authorities that you ever had them. So I take a belt and braces approach: I scan all the important documents, then print copies to take in a different bag from the actual documents, and also upload the documents (as PDF files) to a web server. I’ve just started using Strongspace™—-developed by people at TextDrive—-and it’s a fantastic way to keep this kind of stuff safe and secure while you’re away. If all my possessions are lost, I can always get the authorities to let me log on to my Strongspace and download copies of my stuff. You can also use it to backup on the road, which will be useful if I manage to find some network access somewhere.
• There’s some kind of unwritten rule which states that however leak-proof you believe your bottles and jars of liquids to be, the effect of changes of temperature and pressue will prove you wrong. I put all containers of liquid inside one of those zip-up, airtight plastic bags, just in case.
• In fact, I use those zip-bags to keep together all the little things that tend get lost in your suitcase or rucksack. When you’re horribly jet-lagged on arrival and rummaging blearily in your luggage to find a particular cable or socket adapter, you’ll be glad that they’re all in one easy-to-find bag.
• Special breathable, lightweight, packable clothes are wonderful, but they’re also very expensive and likely to get ruined if you spend your days crawling around in the wilderness. I use Army surplus stores for a lot of my field work clothes. They tend to be very tough, have lots of pockets and are extremely cheap. I also look on the recycling of Forces uniforms as a kind of ‘swords to ploughshares’ thing.
• You can never have too many bandanas. They can keep the sun off your head or neck, keep the dust out of your mouth and nose, and they’ll also work as emergency towels, bandages or slings. They are lightweight, cheap (a stall in the indoor markets sells them for £1 a go), and you can scrunch them into a little corner of your luggage.

I think that’s about it—-what are your top tips for maintaining your safety, comfort and sanity when you travel?

At some point, I was going to write an entry about the fabulously hi-tech nature of Japanese toilets, but I see from Tom’s links on plasticbag.org that imomus got there before me; Japanize your ass! has a glorious and detailed history of the various kinds of Japanese sanitary facilities.

I’m also grateful to have a proper name for the electronic, all-singing, all-dancing toilet: the washlet. Not knowing the correct name, I had been referring to it as a ‘techno toilet’, which had a certain Wallace and Gromit quality about it, but was hardly accurate. Given my well-known adoration of all things electronic and geeky, I think it probably goes without saying that I was in thrall to the washlet. I made it my duty to try out all the buttons in a spirit of pioneering exploration, though there was a certain amount of trepidation until I had worked out what they all did.

The heated washlet seat is particularly welcome for another reason—-central heating is very rare in Japan. I find it bizarre that Japan—-a country that can organise highly efficient and thorough recycling of waste, and a train system in which trains depart on time to the second—-doesn’t have widespread central heating. It’s especially strange when you think that in the North of Japan, there’s snow on the ground for large chunks of the year, and when almost all houses and businesses have very efficient air conditioning for the summer. It doesn’t seem to make sense, but then a lot of cultural practices don’t make sense when you’re on the outside.

Part 3 of a series

(Read Parts 1 and 2)

We had to do it. Not just because we were in the home of karaoke, but because PD made us. She, it turned out, is a bit of a karaoke addict. I think it’s fair to say that GS and I were a bit dubious about the whole thing to start with, though we were encouraged to hear that you get your own private—-and more importantly, soundproof—-booth. At least we would only make idiots of ourselves in front of each other, and we do that all the time anyway.

After a somewhat later than planned dinner, and a quantity of beer, we headed off. PD told us that you can take your own drinks and snacks into the karaoke places, so—-to guard against the danger of being insufficiently inebriated—-we bought some more beer and a pack of Pocky (the slim and elegant Japanese cousin of the chocolate finger) in a convenience store. At that point, we couldn’t put it off any longer—-even by laughing hysterically and taking photographs of a chocolate bar called Horn—-so we took the plunge and hired a booth for an hour.

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