Bewildered of Birmingham

I'm back from my travels, in body at least. The good news is that I do not appear to have any invertebrates making a home in my body like last time¹, and I don't even have that many mosquito bites, considering that my bite count is usually around the 50+ mark. However my brain does not appear to have entirely caught up with me after the long hours of travelling across several time zones.

My circadian clock has evidently given up for the time being, until it can work out when, exactly, the sun is rising this week, thank you very much. Consequently my stomach doesn't know when it should be expecting food, and I find myself waking up wondering a) what time it is, b) what continent I'm on and c) why I am not inside a mosquito net.

It will all work itself out eventually. When I know where and when I am again, I'll write about a few of the experiences of this trip, but until then, I leave you with a Puzzling Thing I encountered on one of my many flights.

I'm an obsessive reader, and usually have some form of reading matter at hand while I eat, particularly if I'm eating on my own. When I don't have anything to read, I'll read the labels on packets, jars and bottles instead. So, on a SWISS flight, I found myself idly perusing the label on the wrapping of my cheese sandwich:

Allergy information: May contain traces of lupins, nuts, peanuts, sesame seeds, soya.

Wait, what? Lupins?

I immediately thought, of course, of Monty Python and the mighty Dennis Moore, which made me giggle and look like a slightly unhinged person laughing at her sandwich wrapping. However, on returning to the welcoming arms of internet access, I find that lupin allergy is a genuine, serious condition, and that lupin flour is used quite widely in 'mainland Europe'². So now I know.

Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, riding through the night...

¹ I came back with a bot fly larva embedded in my foot last time. ↑

² I don't know if it's just me, but I detect a distinct subtext of "those crazy Mainland Europeans, using lupin flour in their bread!" in the reference to mainland Europe on that FSA page. ↑

Off to the wilds again

I'm flying out to Brazil again this afternoon, having finally finished my packing. For new readers, this is a work trip, supervising students doing their final year projects in the Pantanal region of Brazil. I'll be away for 3 weeks, with no internet access, so things will be very quiet here.

Mr. Bsag is looking after hearth, home and the cats while I'm away, and I'll miss all of them dreadfully. I've got endless hours of travelling (3 flights and one 5 hour minibus journey) ahead of me over he next couple of days, so please keep your fingers crossed for me that all my connections connect!

Rested

We got back yesterday from a week's holiday split between Surrey and Sussex. Our original holiday plans went somewhat awry for various unavoidable reasons, so we had to book something at the last minute, and ended up splitting our week between staying with my parents in Surrey for a few days, and staying in a B&B in Lewes, Sussex. Despite the fact that it was a last minute thing (or perhaps because of that) it was a wonderful break, and I finally feel properly rested. I didn't check email and barely scanned Twitter, RSS feeds and so on. I really enjoyed my online fast as I remembered how much fun the real world can be.

Having grown up in Surrey, I'm often quite scathing about it, but it actually has some very nice parts when you view it through adult, tourist eyes rather than those of a stroppy teenager. We had a lovely walk in the countryside, went to Brighton for the day and visited National Trust properties, courtesy of one of the best wedding presents ever from my much-loved and much-missed godmother: a lifetime membership to the National Trust.

Then, in the second leg of the holiday, we went down to Lewes in Sussex. It's a lovely town with some great buildings, a castle, and lots of independent shops. It also has a reputation for feisty, radical, rebellious residents, which is appropriate as Lewes was the birthplace of one of the fathers of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine. Lewes people tend to stand up for what they believe in, and are fiercely independent. For example, when the brewery Greene King took over the Lewes Arms and decided to stop serving the locally-brewed Harveys ales, the townspeople boycotted the pub. This lead to such a drop in sales (and some terrible publicity) that Greene King were forced to reverse their decision. The pub (in which we spent some very happy hours) is now run by Fullers, and is a lovely, quiet place (mobile phones are banned and there is no recorded music or fruit machines) — serving Harveys, of course.

I think that Lewes people are rather wonderful. Within an hour of arriving in the town, we were given a little guided tour by a resident, who started chatting to us in the Tourist Information shop. She said she was walking our way anyway, and pointed out the sights to us along with some local history. Everyone we met was friendly and justly proud of their lovely town. Three days in Lewes wasn't really enough, so we'll be back there, I'm sure. In the meantime, we really enjoyed the fresh air, the friendly people, and eavesdropping on intelligent, interesting conversations in the pub. Despite all that, it's nice to be home and have the cats back. They went into a cattery for the first time, and while they were fine, they are certainly enjoying being back home. I've never seen two such contented cats as Bella and Bianca last night, as they snuggled up with us on the bed for the night. I've also got another week of leave, so I'm looking forward to a bit more unwinding in the hope of being substantially more refreshed when I return to work. I haven't got around to downloading my photos off the camera yet, but some pictures of Sussex and Surrey will follow at some point.

Holland

I'd never been to Holland before, but I'm sure I'll go again after a week there for a conference and other work business. The people are very friendly and generally laid-back, the towns are pretty and there seem to be quite a lot of nice open spaces, parks and woodlands. But the best two things about Holland are the trains and the cycling environment.

We travelled on the train a few times, and apart from one journey where the carriages were over-full and we had to stand, the service was wonderful. You can easily buy tickets from the machines, the information at the stations is very clear, and — most importantly — the trains are punctual. We had the novel experience when making a connection of finding that our train was not only timed to meet the connecting service, but that the trains were on adjacent platforms. The pricing structure is also admirably simple, with only a couple of types of tickets, rather than the incomprehensible mess of Super-Advance-Third-Wednesday-in-Lent-Only tickets we have here.

And the bikes! Of course, I knew that the Netherlands was a cycling Utopia, but actually experiencing it is something else. Unfortunately, the schedule (and our finances) didn't allow for hiring bikes, but I was gazing adoringly at the lovely, upright, laid back machines gliding by. What I love about Dutch cycling is that it is taken as something absolutely normal and unremarkable. Cyclists there would think that you were a bit weird if you wore special clothes or — heavens! — a helmet, unless you were an actual, in-training racing cyclist.

Everyone, from little kids to elderly people, cycles. There are dedicated cycle paths on either side of almost every road, and everyone else has to give way to the bikes. The bikes themselves are very comfortable with full mudguards, lights and racks as standard equipment, and encourage a stately, gentle progress so that you don't work up a sweat. When it rained, cyclists unfurled umbrellas rather than donning waterproofs, and I saw couples holding hands as they cycled side-by-side. Parents also held the hands of their younger children as they crossed junctions together on their bikes, which struck me as very sensible and rather sweet. People sit upright, looking around them and beaming at passers-by. Wonderful.

Of course, the flat terrain helps a lot: it's much more difficult to look nonchalant and carefree while puffing up a 1:4 gradient, but the culture is completely different. The next time I visit, I'm definitely going to hire a bike next time I visit, and try to hold on to that carefree spirit when I'm dodging cars, dogs and broken glass on my daily commute.

In which our plans go astray

Mr. Bsag and I planned to go to London for the day yesterday. He had some prints in the Annual Open Exhibition at the Society of Graphic Fine Art, and was awarded a Highly Commended for one of them (yay!). He had to go and take down his work at the end of the show, so it was my last chance to see his work and the other exhibits in situ. Our plan was to get a cheap train to London on the Chiltern line, have a leisurely wander around the exhibition, get a few printing supplies from Intaglio, perhaps have a nice walk by the Thames, and top it off by having a cosy pint somewhere before coming home. It didn't quite go according to plan.

Impediment 1: We thought we'd be able to get a cheap walk-up fare which would allow us to leave any time on a Saturday as we've done before, but Chiltern have changed their rules, so we had to book a ticket on line. Chiltern's own booking page and thetrainline.co.uk showed completely different timetables. According to Chiltern, there were no cheap fares available, but thetrainline showed a few, leaving fairly late in the morning. Since we didn't have much choice, we went for the later, cheaper train.

Impediment 2: We had to pick the tickets up from the station, but we'd had problems before with the dreaded self-service ticket machines which you're supposed to use. However, it's a little-known fact that even though the instructions say you can only pick up your tickets at one of a handful of stations with self-service machines, you can actually ask almost any ticket office to print the tickets for you if you give them the booking reference. So we'd timed our walk the local station to leave enough time to pick the tickets up there, get a train into the city, then walk to Moor Street Station in time to catch our train. Unfortunately, when we got to the local station, the ticket office was inexplicably closed. With a train approaching, we realised that we'd have to get the first train to leave enough time to pick up our tickets at Moor Street. The ticket machine had a long queue of similarly irritated passengers, of course, so we had to get a permit to travel and leap on the train.

Impediment 3: If you pick up your ticket to London from the local station, they include the cost of the local train journey in the price, so you don't have to pay separately. But in our hurry to get the tickets booked, I'd forgotten to set the starting station as our local one. So when we came to join another long queue to exchange our permits to travel for tickets so we would be allowed to leave New Street Station, the dour railway official stubbornly pointed to the fact that our booking receipt said that the departure station was Moor Street, and we had to pay for two single tickets to New Street.

Impediment 4: With all this queuing and faffing about, we were getting rather close to the departure of our train. My heart sank as we ran into Moor Street Station and I saw the length of the queues at the only open ticket counter. I waited in line there for a minute or so, then decided to cut my losses and brave the self-service machines which had a shorter queue. When I got to the front, I inserted my debit card and entered the handy 20 digit booking reference (or so it seemed) on the touchscreen, whereupon the display announced smugly that it couldn't read my card. I tried again, hoping that sliding the card in and out of the slot slowly might allow the idiot, mouth-breathing software time to read all the ones and zeros on the magnetic strip. It didn't. I joined the queue for the other machine, fidgeting impatiently and looking at my watch. When I got to the front, I went through the whole procedure again, but this time, my card was recognised. Several geological eras later, our tickets had all been dispensed into the hopper, and I snatched them up and pelted across the concourse following Mr. B. We hared up the stairs, along the bridge and down the stairs, to see our train pulling out.

Impediment 5: The next train was 20 minutes later, but it was a stopping train and so would arrive 40 minutes or so after the one we'd planned to get, eating further into our already compressed day. Worse still, it was stopping at Wembley Stadium, where thousands of football fans were going to watch England play Kazakhstan. A large proportion of those fans seemed to be travelling from Moor Street. By some miracle, we both got a seat, and even though the fans collectively drank several lakes of Carling Black label, they were good-natured and no fights broke out. Still, we got slightly drunk on the lager fumes.

Impediment 6: London Marylebone Street! We got on the Bakerloo line southbound, and settled back thinking that the worst was over. At Oxford Circus, the train started making the ominous, escaping air sounds of a busted hydraulic system. Harried engineers bustled through the carriages with the hope that they might be able to plug something back in or slap some gaffer tape on something, but it was clear that the train was going nowhere, which meant that the Bakerloo line was going to be blocked. We jumped off the train, hurriedly consulted a tube map and decided to try our luck on the Victoria line to Stockwell, then change to the Northern line to get to Borough. It was a much longer journey, and there was a lot of running through corridors and up escalators, but we got there.

By this time, we had just 20 minutes or so to see the exhibition before the artists started taking down. We divided our efforts, and Mr. Bsag went to Intaglio to get his supplies, while I swept around the Menier Gallery. It was an excellent exhibition, so I was glad to have seen it, but it was a pretty lightning visit. Mr. Bsag joined me and we got busy with the bubblewrap and tape to pack up his prints to take home. It was a lovely evening, and it would have been really nice to wander along the river for a bit, but now we were convinced that we wanted to get a train before the final whistle at Wembley. We had a quick but very pleasant drink at a pub, then walked back to Borough tube station.

Impediment 7: As we got to the station, we could see that the shutters were closed. The lifts had stopped working, so they'd closed the station. We'd have to trek to London Bridge to get on the Northern Line. We stared. Mr. Bsag said, "You've got to be kidding", though he added a few more words of a four-letter nature. Off we ran again, this time encumbered by three large, framed prints.

In the end we made it back to Marylebone in time for our train, and the rest of the journey went smoothly, but we ended up only having about two hours in London, and countless hours travelling.

On those occasions when my best laid plans gang aglae, my mood tends to go in one of two directions: I either get incredibly irritated and snappy or I see the whole situation as increasingly hilarious. I went in the latter direction this time, so in a rather perverse way, I quite enjoyed it. It was almost like finding yourself in a very bad film, subject to the whims of a poor writer who doesn't know how to construct a believable plot. After each impediment I started to look forward to what this idiot would try to pass off as a plot twist next. "Broken-down tube train? Come on, at least throw some zombies in, then it would be funny, and you could go for the RomZomCom angle, even though it's already been done by Edgar Wright."

Mr. Bsag, it has to be said, was not of the same frame of mind, and regarded my amused, Buddha-like detachment with frank amazement, convinced that I'd finally gone off my rocker. My outlook might have had something to do with the fact that if I hadn't gone to London, I would have been finishing off submitting a grant -- something that I did this morning instead. It's all relative, you see: it might have been a catalogue of mishaps, but it wasn't wrestling with font sizes and page limits, and it at least gave me a good story to tell.

Lynmouth

We spent a few days last week on holiday in North Devon, staying at Lynmouth. When we actually stopped to think about it, we realised that it was the first holiday (as opposed to work travel) we'd had in 3 years, and I certainly felt like we needed it! In the last few years, we seem to have always been too busy, had too little money or to have been doing things like moving house to make even a short break practical. But getting a change of scenery every now and again is important to recharge the batteries, so I was quite excited about our little trip.

We suspected that we would have dreadful weather, but in the end we were incredibly lucky. It was very windy on the coast, and that seemed to keep most of the showers at bay, or at least move them along quickly once they had started, so we didn't get prolonged periods of rain. This was just as well, because we wanted to spend most of the time walking some of the coastal and moorland paths. Lynton and Lynmouth are really one town divided by an almost vertical cliff. There's a rather nice Victorian water-powered cliff railway to take you between the two, or you can walk up the zig-zag paths which connect the two towns.

All I can say is that people who live in Lynton and Lynmouth must be very fit, and have very supple knee and ankle joints. Even with the zig-zags, the paths had sections that seemed to have slopes of about 40°, and required a curious, flexed-foot shuffle to walk up or down. This also applied to the coast path and a lot of the other footpaths we used for our walks. The area isn't known as 'Little Switzerland' for nothing. Mr. Bsag is like a mountain goat, and climbs hills while walking or cycling with no perceptible effort. I, on the other hand, am clearly not geared correctly for hills, and while I can walk for miles on flat or undulating terrain, I puff and pant like a steam train on inclines. Despite that, we had some wonderful walks (with Mr. Bsag gently pushing me up some of the hills).

One of my favourite walks was along the River Lyn to Watersmeet (where two rivers meet, obviously). The river flows in a deep gorge which is thickly wooded with wonderful, lush ancient woodland. One benefit of all the rain we have had this summer is that the vegetation was even greener and more lush than it might have otherwise been. Every possible shade of green -- from almost black, through vivid emerald, to sharp lime -- was represented. Rain drops shone and sparkled on every surface making the whole wood glitter. Every rock and tree trunk was thickly covered in many species of moss, liverwort, lichen and fern. I couldn't resist plunging my hand into a plump pad of moss, and found that it sank finger-deep into the cool, soft fronds. Deciduous woodland is one of my favourite habitats, and with a fast-flowing river too, it was just about perfect. I could have stayed for days in that green-brown dappled light, just looking around me and sighing happily. The photo above is of a section of the woodland, high on the valley side, entirely composed of oaks. It might well be very ancient, but the soil is so thin there, with rocks close to the surface that the oaks can't get to their full size, and grow like ancient saplings, close together and corkscrewing towards the available light. Magical.

iPhone as travel companion

I travelled fairly light (for me, anyway) to Brazil, but one thing I was keen to take along was my iPhone. It turned out to be a very useful travel companion for entertainment (music, TV shows and books via Stanza) as well as a stopwatch, alarm¹, calculator, currency converter and various other useful widgets. We had no internet or mobile phone coverage at the site, but the connectivity was very useful during the interminable travelling. I found that with Airplane mode on, the battery life was great. I also took a Freeloader with me, which was brilliant for recharging on the go. The power supply at the place we stayed was not the most reliable, but there was certainly plenty of sun, so the solar panels of the Freeloader charged up its internal battery quickly. I could then recharge the iPhone (and my camera) up at my leisure. It works well in the UK too, though it takes longer to fully charge, but you can also charge it via USB from a laptop.

I lugged a paperback copy of War and Peace to Brazil (875g!), but if I had been a bit more alert, I would have noticed that it is available on Stanza, so I could have taken a weightless literary tome with me on my iPhone.

¹ I recommend 'Piano Riff' as an alarm tone. It brings a bluesy, dramatic start to the day, and you wake up composing "I woke up this morning [da-DA da-DUN]..." blues songs. It also goes well with howler monkeys. ↑

Snakes on the Plains

Watching wildlife is often the outcome of random encounters, and your luck never seems proportional to the time and effort you put in. Sometimes you lie silently on your belly on a freezing moor at dawn for hours and don't see so much as a rabbit, but at other times, you stroll along whistling and almost trip over a rare and wonderful animal. We were quite fortunate on this trip and had a lot of the latter kinds of experiences, including seeing not one, but two, whole anacondas.

Let's get one thing straight from the start: it's not like in the film. They don't suddenly lunge up out of the water and consume a boat and its occupants. They are fairly shy, and tend to lay low, quietly suffocating and swallowing smallish animals in private and out of the gaze of curious tourists. They also don't need to eat very often, so catching them in the act is even less likely.

We saw anaconda 1 on a horse ride. We were gaily wandering through a shallow lake on horseback, when one of the guides jumped off his horse, and started excitedly poking about in the rushes. He'd seen an anaconda which was in the process of constricting around a caiman and eating it. You might think that jumping into the water next to a snake big enough to swallow a medium sized caiman is a bad idea, but doing so while it's feeding on a medium sized caiman is probably as good a time as any, because the snake is actually rather busy. That was exciting.

The location of anaconda 2 was given away by some jacanas (big-footed water birds, similar to coots or moorhens). They were going crazy with alarm calls, hovering over a particular patch of water and looking very nervous indeed. When we looked through the weeds at the spot they were troubled by, we saw a lithe, yellow, spotted body slipping through the water. We were out of the water this time on a bridge, but one of the guides -- in his enthusiasm to show people wildlife at as close quarters as possible (with just a touch of wanting to impress the laydees) -- waded carefully in and grabbed the snake's head, hauling all 2.5 m of it out on to the bridge for us to hold.

I really prefer it when people leave wild animals alone, even if that means you don't get such a good view. Better a brief glimpse of a wild animal behaving naturally than a long look at one which would really like to go and hide in the water, thank you very much. However, there are times when you can't get a real impression of the physicality of an animal without seeing it up close and touching it. The warm, dry skin of the snake was beautiful, and the incredible smooth power of its muscles as it gripped our hands and arms was something that just looking at it wouldn't have conveyed. The guy put it back in the water gently, then backed away carefully. They may not rear up out of the water to attack you, but they do command a certain respect.

Dawn to dusk

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.

Incubation

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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Travel disconnects the senses

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.

Cycle commuting

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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In praise of Transport for London

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.

Brazil: Corumbá Airport

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.

Brazil: Pantanal

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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