Happy Times are Here Again

Happy Days are here again and I am leaving after working my last day, just a matter of packing all my shit and waving all goodbye tomorrow. I am so happy I was skipping and dancing around the turbine as they were having many problems and found that they have to basically strip the whole unit to the bare bones. I still did a full butterfly recovery whilst 30 guys were ripping things off like crazy, I don’t care anymore I need to get away and have a few beers and relax and feel like I belong to the real world not this artifice in the jungle. My wife was singing down the phone to me tonight knowing I am leaving tomorrow afternoon and we are planning some nice things for my birthday and I want a nice 10 days at the beach and just do things and eat things and drink things that I have only been dreaming of over the last 30 days. I will Blog lots of pictures from Costa Rica of me living again. Eating and drinking and dancing and acting like man just out of prison. I just hope I get some good news about my new posting for next year. I know I am here for another rotation at least after the new year but hopefully it will be my last.

Dear Buddha Please Stop the Train

Today we had our three visitors arrive from Italy and unfortunately for them they had to jump straight into working only 1 hour after getting here all jetlagged and dishevelled. But working as in the sense of pointing the proverbial finger and telling people what to do. In fact the controls engineer arrived and knew before he got here that he would have nothing to do and yes I confirmed to him that all the controls issues were dealt with and he would have basically nothing to do. But that is OK I have learned a few things from him already, its great talking to really experienced guys as they know all the little tricks that you would take years to learn alone. Like never forgetting to grease your nipples, that is always important. So today we were pulling the whole thing apart looked like an explosion in a spaghetti factory, things hanging off everywhere, perhaps this was a bigger job than they thought, the visitors did confide that they would be lucky to complete on the dates suggested but as we all know customers say one thing and everyone knows deep down it is just a wish they are making. So we have two guys running shifts and a guy who is basically surplus to requirements but that again is people making desperate measures to keep things on time. Who do I blame for this attitude, obviously the upper management is to blame for mostly pushing for unrealistic time schedules as they are pumping $2.5 million a day in liquids and that is no company secret. So they want the units running as fast as they can for as long as they can but they eventually need a service. I also blame the turbine manufacturer for agreeing to these unrealistic timetables as they should firmly tell the customer that it is impossible. All the guys who do this type of work for a living know exactly how long something will take under perfect conditions and that is when everything is working properly, what happens when the unexpected happens and we need some special stuff or a spare that isn’t here, we could be shut down for 2 weeks waiting, but again you can never plan for that anyway, a bit like trying to book into a hotel and then finding the bellboy irritates the hell out of you and you end up beating him with a telephone and this can take away several days of your life in jail, all totally unplanned. Once again I was made to feel inadequate before these guys as they speak fantastic Spanish and also perfect English, I feel like a stupid schoolboy, I have to get better with my Spanish so I can feel proud and join the conversation.
I am still counting down the days until I leave and I feel sorry for all the people who are having to stay working in the god forsaken corners of the world all over Christmas and cannot enjoy a time with their loved ones. It all seems like a nightmare sometimes being here doing strange stuff and not understanding why your doing it, just circumstances led you to this point in your life, riding a runaway train without knowing where it is going and if your ever going to stop, you could jump but it looks like a desert out there and the indians are all riding donkeys waving what look like rubber chickens at you in a dangerous way, so you hold-on wondering if the train is going to crash on the next corner or stop in the middle of the desert with no water or food and if anyone will ever rescue you. Or will it take you to a land of blue aliens with no genitalia Oh baby that would be the ultimate point of a nightmare, I think my nightmares need a psychiatrist to look into them perhaps I need some anti-psychotic drugs or maybe just a few beers.

Safety Gone Crazy

I am suffering from a bout of safety gone crazy from my employer here in Peru. Today we were meant to start the shutdown maintenance but first we had a good 2 hours talking to about what was going to happen and this was from 7-9am, then I thought we could get on it, as it is my turbine and I wanted to do many things, so we went to the motor control centre to knock off all the power to everything and as I was about to power down the first item, a large OOOOOOOHHHHHHHH!!!!! Cam from behind me and the mechanical guy was waving his head about like a demented bobble head doll. So I pulled back and asked him what the problem was, he said I couldn’t touch anything as it was all going to be locked out by the shift supervisor. Well I can handle that but he said we will be lucky to get it all done by 11.00am, this was 2 hours from now and I was thinking how the hell can this take 2 hours when I could do it in less than 2 minutes. There was an never ending stream of guys with note books taking lots of data down and coming back with little stickers and standing in line with locks and then the supervisor would end up with a queue of guys behind him as he put on a clamp and locked it up all these other guys would add their locks and the cranking motor had a clasp with 21 locks on it, can you imagine that, 21 locks all dangling on this clasp. I couldn’t believe my eyes, he then told me this is getting out of control, the safety procedures are going crazy he confided, this happened one after another mountains of locks and tags looking like insane Christmas decorations on the handles. It finally took 1 ½ hours to get all this done and I was blowing steam at this point and I wasn’t allowed to climb the ladder to peak on top of the turbine, my own turbine, prevented by some written crap by some highly paid lawyer no doubt, and all this paperwork has to be re-approved at the beginning of every shift. It is a wonder that we will get anything done at all. Luckily they have about 20 mechanics to do all the nut and bolt stuff and I just watch. I do sometimes thank Buddha that I have got to this point in my career as I hate skinning my knuckles on the sharp bits of metal that is part of the turbine package. We went into the air intake housing and the smell of have decaying insects was intense and I wasn’t expecting it to be that bad. That means they will have to throw away all those very expensive filters, I did tell them to turn all the lights off in the plant but would they listen.
So my italian specialists are arriving on a specially chartered flight tomorrow and they will start pointing the fingers at things and hopefully they will have good English or Spanish to get over what they want. This is the first time I will see inside a turbine. All these years and never seen the mean bladey spinny thingy that makes it go round and round, i just press the switch and keep it running.

Missing the Land of My Birth and Tea

What is it I miss about the UK the most. It is friends and family of course and knowing your surroundings and feeling comfortable. That is a nice feeling being in your house snuggling up in front of the TV to watch a familiar program and understanding the language. The BBC is an institution that I really do miss, the programs are unequalled anywhere on the planet and if I could I would pay generously for a TV service to give me the BBC again. I think I could only get BBC America and I am not sure how up to date it is. That is a small part of life and a pretty insignificant part of life at that. So I miss only a small part of what I can do in the UK, what I cannot do in the UK is far larger, I cannot go to the beach all year round and eat exotic food and wear shorts and flip flops all year round. I cannot go into the garden and see interesting and exotic birds all year round and live an outdoor lifestyle, these are the major things that I can now do and really enjoy them, perhaps living in two parts of the world is the compromise but that isn’t normally possible, it would be greedy to expect to have such luxury of living in two nice parts of the world and still not pay tax anywhere. I even had my pension assessment for when I retire and I get an amount that I would consider a tidy sum if I am still in Costa Rica, plenty for eating and drinking in that part of the world, but if I was to retire back to the UK I would certainly be destitute, heating and living in the UK is expensive compared to Costa Rica, my weekly bills including Gasoline and water and electric and food even comes to about $100, this you would agree is tiny compared to my American friend who is telling me he heating bill for his house is $650 a month alone. Now that has got to hurt. So why oh why do I think about the UK so much then, it is the familiar that always spring to mind, the familiar faces and familiar language and the things you know, I spent 25 years learning the road system and it feels unfair to have to learn a road system that doesn’t have road names and street signs that mean much. You have addresses like, 250 mts passed the Galaron supermarket and then left for 400 mts more on right. This is silly as you can see. So familiarity is what I crave for. Learning a language is hard and isn’t a trip, luckily my wife is multilingual and does most things for me. So what else do I not miss, I don’t miss the expensive plumbers and builders, who are so very cheap in Costa Rica, I don’t miss the cold windy rainy days, even during the cooler months in Costa Rica the coast is always warm even during the rainy season and the air is fresh and clean and invigorating. Having so few people is nice to appreciate, not struggling with shopping and traffic and beach holidays is refreshing. So why do I still miss the UK, it is me inside thinking about long lost feelings that I wouldn’t get back if I were to return. Perhaps I am just feeling sentimental about the good old country but I don’t think I will ever return to the land of my birth. Life is funny but I cant go back to paying 50% of my money to the tax man, now that is a feeling I don’t want to think about.

Cheers and a Merry Christmas

Today I was told in Spanish that my Spanish is starting to sound natural and that it is a huge improvement over the hopeless attempts I was making many months ago. So I was pleased as punch but I will not deceive you all by telling you I am fluent, far from it I am still only a beginner and still have much to learn, my biggest problem here is that everyone wants to learn English and wants to practice all the time even when I am just wandering about they want to burst into conversation in English even if I do not know them, I also spend all my work time speaking and writing in English, as my Italian company write and speak in English and all my buddies and family speak in English and technical conversations would be totally impossible for me in anything other than English so I am destined to spend years trying to perfect my basic schoolboy level Spanish, only if I was thrown into the deep end and only had Spanish speakers would I pick it up quicker.
I still haven’t received my travel plans for my trip to Florence and I keep checks on the availability of flights on expedia.com, I saw that all the AirFrance flights are now fully booked for my dates so there goes my Airmiles, and all the nice red wine and cheese, I quite like that airline as the planes are new and clean I took Iberia a year or so ago and it was the oldest plane in the world, it still had Wright brothers painted on the cockpit door, the seats were all so goddam worn out and shabby looking I was shocked that such an old plane was still in service on the trans-Atlantic run, I vowed never to fly on such an old plane again but basically I have no choice over who I fly with, the company gets the cheapest flights and I just have to catch them, luckily the airline I am using for Peru is all rand new Airbus A320’s and very nice they are too and the red wine is also nice, but if your in economy the sandwich is $5 but the beer is free, what a crazy way to charge. I just drink the beer and red wine. Its only 4 hours and I need to lose a pound or two, so out goes food and in comes beer, it’s only because I am going to be beer free for 4 weeks in Peru honestly. Cheers and Merry Christmas

Counting Down

I have got to the point of the rotation of counting down the days, it is something that is not good to do as it just makes the days go slower. This is a very bad habit that I have always wanted not to do but always failed to stop the countdown for the last week. This is harder here as I have very little in the way of work to complete, I am preparing a list of activities for the shutdown and hopefully that can enable me to pass a day or two, I will be unfortunately looking after 22 guys who are arriving tomorrow to start the shutdown mechanical work, there isn’t any supervisors arriving from Italy for another 6 days so I am going to have to make it up as I go along. But if I wave my arms about enough and shout a little bit I will sound like any other Italian supervisor.
As you can imagine there are lots and lots of dragonflies here and all sorts of species and sizes. They are very spectacular and also very dangerous as I knew they were insectivorous but I didn’t know how big their jaws were until I was handling one the other day. I was taking the butterflies off the screens as I do 3 times a day and I saw this huge dragonfly with the biggest eyes I have ever seen on one and I grabbed its body from behind and was about to put it in the bag with all the other captives and it was able to spin its body round and down towards my finger and grabbed hold with its huge jaws and pinched like a bitch. I thought it was going to cut through the flesh and I started one of those huge wildly swinging movements rapidly trying to shake this beast off my finger. It did let go and got stuck again into the screens but I am now very wary of the bigger dragonflies. I still pick up dragonflies but I grab them right on the thorax as they cannot spin round from that position. One more lesson learned from the crazy world of the Amazonian jungle creatures.

Prison Life

I thought it only fair that I should tell my boss on site here that I had actually asked for a transfer to another site, adding that I liked to travel about and see different places and experience different lifestyles, not adding that I am getting to hate the isolation of being in the jungle with no social life and finding Spanish hard to pick up and wanting to see my wife a little more than I am. I told him about the possible transfer to Trinidad and that there are 27 gas turbines to work with and how I could take my wife. Somehow he seemed to think I am the opportunity for him to tag along and he hasn’t left me alone since I told him and he smiles at me in a very strange way all the time now and after every meeting he has in the morning he comes into my office and asks me how I am doing. Admitted he is a nice guy but I am getting a very unnerving feeling about his advances. He just smiles far too much and asks me far too many times how I am doing, totally unlike a site manager. They normally grimace and just grunt demands at you and then tell you what a crap company you are working for. So him being so nice is unnatural so I am trying to keep him at bay, I can field tough questions I cannot deal with a Cheshire cat grinning at me when talking it just aint nice to look at, plus he has these huge false teeth that frighten me, I imagine them jumping out at me.

One reason for wanting to leave this place is to get away from what can only be described as goddam awful accommodation. They are converted office type buildings, they have walls paper thin so you can here the metal frame beds squeaking as people turn over in the next room, you can here people coughing at night from many rooms away. The bathrooms are awful and just basic and have to be shared with another room , the shower leak on the floor and the floor is actually rotten and is starting to disintegrate and these are the rooms for the management, the rooms for the labourers are nothing more than bunk houses, 20 to a room and sharing 1 bathroom. They are probably the worst accommodation I have ever had to live in. Zambia was a nice little hotel with pool and bar and wonderful food in the restaurant. Turkmenistan was the local old communist 5 star hotel, with great rooms and everything you could want, but here in total isolation we have nothing other than the room in which we sleep, and a crappy gym to try and work out in. I am not happy with the place and need to get away, I am seing my manager in Italy next week and hopefully I can get him to release me early and get away to some normal type environment, where you can go for a walk and have a beer and go to the cinema and maybe run naked on the beach, anything that I would like to do and not worry about it and feel normal, here it feels more and more like a prison and working is not meant to be like prison. My buddy in India Slyght, has been complaining very badly about the horrible place he has been working for the last year almost, he complains about the shitty place as it is remote and the crappy people and not getting home often enough, which is what we all work for, to enjoy ourselves at home a lot, not once a year or twice but regularly. Like once a month, OK OK I know I get home once a month but I am letting the isolation get me down a lot. I don’t think I could ever do time in prison, it would feel like the end of the world to me, but at least I would get more reading material and the gym would be OK and I may get sex more regularly.

Planning to Take My Birthday Holiday Treat

Today is a day or rest, very similar to every other day I have here actually but I was basically keeping out of the torrential rain that was pounding down all night until mid morning. I am starting to plan for my leaving this rotation, I have been lucky that the planned shutdown for maintenance is on the day I leave, so I miss all of it, but actually I would have liked to see how you take apart a gas turbine, I only work on them when the mechanical stuff is finished and it needs to run.
What is the most important part of getting away from work, having lots of fun, and where? where it is cheapest of course you impetuous fool. Costa Rica is pretty damned good for the cheap part but very primitive in most others, overall still a far better bet than most developed northern hemisphere countries. So I will start planning my relaxation and I will try my new hobby of snorkelling again as that is something to get good at and I may even try to take a PADI course to go scuba diving, the problem with scuba diving though is that it is that it can be very dangerous. You can read all the time how some experienced diver has disappeared or been eaten by a shark or was washed away by the tide or got trapped in a sunken vessel, actually when you think about it just snorkelling can be just about as dangerous and the last time we went to Cahuita my wife was frightened to death by a “shark” in 3 feet of water, I didn’t see it but the next day I saw the “shark” and to be honest it was a very big fish and it moved with such speed that I knew it could bite off my ears and I wouldn’t be able to stop it, and it did frighten me as I knew I was in its element and I was like a lumbering elephant compared to that sleek fast moving fish but I suppose that is why I found it so compelling and fascinating. The colours and activities of the fish were as interesting as the birds flying around the cabin site and just floating about in the warm waters was more relaxing than just laying about on the beach drinking beer, well almost as relaxing but far more interesting. It is the thoughts of this that keep me motivated doing this job in a far away land with not much to do in the way of social activities.

Summertime Blues

Today was what looks like the beginning of the summer/winter depending on your point of view, the temperature doesn’t alter a great deal but the amount of rain does alter immensely. It has rained everyday for the last week but just a quick storm but it is making it very humid. The locals regard this as winter as it is miserable with loads of rain everyday but technically speaking it is the summer. Now I am a sun worshipper in fact it is the only thing I do worship is the sun perhaps the sun god Ra. He ripeth the fruits I eat and darketh my pasty skin with a goldeneth aura. I love getting my nearly naked body in the sun. This site bans the use of short sleeve shirts and trying to go sunbathing unless you are trying to get thrown off site. So even though I am in the tropics I go white again and I have to top up the tan when I get back home. This trip I will probably go back to the Caribbean as it is so delightfully relaxing and quiet and reasonably cheap unless you stay over Christmas and I don’t really want to. I don’t want to miss all the repeat films and the repeat national geographic specials and all the other repeat stuff. no actually I don’t want to spoil myself by spending more than 10 days at the beach, from being on the beach ti flying back to Peru in 2 days would be far too depressing, I have to be here for the new year which in my book isn’t that bad as I cannot ever remember having a great new year ever. Mostly too many drunk people, I did have one good one where I sang karaoke all night with the guy running the show and it was all female singers, I laughed a lot but that was a rarity. So this year I am going to spend 5 days in Florence for meetings then go to the beach for my birthday and hopefully celebrate my next project in Trinidad being awarded to me. I love a small town called Cahuita and it is a tourist destination that has the only coral reef containing national park and is alive with wildlife.






The cabin is 100 meters from the sea and it is amongst the coastal forest, full of racoons and sloths hanging from the coconut trees on the beach huge iguanas everywhere and more birds than you can shake a stick at, plus you get offered recreational drugs all through the town

Talk Talk and an Invitation to Heaven

Today is a good day for me as I have been joined by an English speaker, and this after 3 weeks of broken English is total joy. Not having to explain in stuttered English or my horrendous Spanish is a delight. I am working as assistant to him helping get our remote monitoring equipment working again and for once I feel like I am using my brain on a job. He was here about 5 months ago and we have many things to catch up on like jobs and houses and computer shite. Like old buddies, funny old game this travelling engineer business. I really miss working hands on, there is something very satisfying about putting some wires together and making the unit work as a whole, a bit like a giant toy but this one can explode and kill you and is very hot all the time, a little like Mike Tyson.
I have just gotten my invitation to meet and greet all the project managers for this site in Florence Italy and this time I am going, I turned this down last time as I had only just arrived and was still suffering from Jetlag and homesickness basically. Only thing is that it is late autumn and will be cool and windy and rainy. So not much visiting this trip but at least I get to meet all the guys again in the office. Perhaps I can do much investigating for the transfer to Trinidad as that is my priority for the next few months.

Plot Hatched , Fruition Basically Zero

Well my plot has come to fruition but the results are not what I had expected. I wanted to be fired from this project but all I got was a delegation from the Environmental dept, the boss and his sidekicks. I was almost laughing at the pathetic attempt to make it look all serious and as though I was a perpetrator of heinous crimes. The end result is that I am not allowed to make a collection of butterflies on my desk as beautiful as they are, and I am using the words of the boss, I am still allowed to bring them back from the unit and take photos of them but I am not allowed to keep them on my desk. If it wasn’t so ridiculous it would be contemptible. The only reason they gave was visiting government people may see them. So it wasn’t that obvious I had been giving the inspector a guided tour of my butterflies. We will see what the inspector can conjure up back in the office with any presentation she will give with pictures of my desk full of butterflies. The other thing that happened to day was a meeting with the plant engineering manager and it was one of them meetings where he finally realised that talking to someone with more experience of the Gas Turbines than him is very useful and could be beneficial to the operation of the plant.
Meeting goes something like this, “David, we have had a meeting and we need to find out what are the root causes of the failures of our units”, “Jose the root cause is that you have no spare parts and we cannot do any maintenance”, “oh, that seems important”, “yes, and you bought a very cheaply put together unit so now your suffering from having cheap crap on it”, “oh , yes that also seems important”, “if you want higher availability then you will need to spend lots of money”, “oh OK thanks Dave”.

So after 30 minutes of a meeting, I now get free hand at ordering mountains of spares and perhaps a new fire and gas protection system. Sounds good to me so I will go crazy and order everything.

My Desperation Knows No Bounds

Well today I was feeling still miserable after Mybogsite decided that they were complete and utter wasters and gave up trying to compete. I had a small chat with the Ministry Inspector for the environment and a small plan began to hatch in my mind. She has always had an interest in the huge butterfly collection I have in my office as it is plainly visible from the corridor and I do not try and hide it. So she was wanting to take pictures of it and she asked me if she could come round with me to see where I get them all from and watch me rescue others. I agreed of course and as I know this activity is basically illegal as it is the collection of wild creatures which is forbidden by the company’s bylaws of development here I assume. So if I can get the woman to take pictures of me collecting butterflies off the screens and putting them into a bag of mine then she may show them to some important person and then I get fired form this site as I am doing naughty things. This could be very good as I may get my new project sooner rather than later but it may cause some embarrassment at my company and I may be the sacrificial lamb to be slaughtered to satisfy some higher up persons desire for revenge. This I think willnot happen but it is a possibility. She followed me around and took pictures and saw all the huge piles of moths accumulated in places and took more pictures and this will get to someone I am sure of it. Whether or not I will get my transfer earlier or not I don’t know but I certainly want to get away from here. I need a beer now and again and some normal activity for a year or so maybe 5

Almost Like Getting a Death Sentence

I was mortified today when i was first sent a mail from a buddy telling me about other blogging sites and i just never thought anything of any consequence of it, it was only when i noticed a huge letter addressed to Dear Myblogsite member did it sink home that i was about to be evicted from my comfotable home without a care in the world from the miserable bankrupt assholes at Mybogsite. i was quite beside myself with rage and sadness about losing my only diary i have ever had in my entire life. so i have to find a site where i dont have to pay, very important and have the same features as before, unfortunately there isnt any, so i am going to move my entire library to blogspot over the next few days maybe a week and start my life afresh, bastards.

It could be my Nemesis

Why is it that whenever the shit hits the fan it is always just before dinner and you have to miss it and then catch a freezing cold leftover thing that tastes like crap and looks like crap and is crap. It was the same again today, I was just walking out of the office and I saw a huge flare

But I could still here the unit running I thought anyway and I was just thinking of something nice to eat and as I walked into the canteen the staff informed me the control room was trying desperately to get hold of me, I had been on the phone for the last 30 minutes ringing the wife about activities I wanted to do when I got home, like which beach we were going to go to for my birthday and what things we are going to buy for the new house. So I new the turbine has tripped and I thought back over the day what things had been going on and there are still some issues of the lightning not completely covered yet and I was hoping that the signal I had forced and then unforced wasn’t going to go bananas but it looked like it did, I had 10 managers looking over my shoulder as I was trying to get the unit running but there were other problems that kept jumping into to make the job doubly difficult and the miserable unit just kept tripping and in the end I was manually making the temperature for a dead exhaust temperature thermocouple, this is all very boring technical stuff but I am trying to give you the picture, lots of prying eyes and many shitty things going wrong, it was horrible but I finally got the unit running and it was loading up, I told my controls equivalent that I was going to remove a force on a signal and his faced changed into a picture of horror, he started questioning me over and over of the need to remove this signal, I did take it off and nothing happened as I knew it wouldn’t, but he looked relieved, he then told me there was going to be an inquiry about the unit tripping earlier as I had removed a forced signal and now the big boss was going to shout a lot and pull faces and generally be a spoilt brat and try and be really important, as all these guys think they are anyway. So I laughed a lot as I may use this opportunity to get off this site and have a longer break than normal while I get a new assignment. We’ll see what tomorrow brings in the way of loud so called important people and see if I can piss them really off to get off this project but not out of my contract company.

Cheeky Little Frogs Sneaking into the Accommodation

Last night I found out where all the little baby frogs (Toads Actually) are originating from. When I walked into the accommodation corridor there were two frogs just by the door, and I could see that they were able to sneak under the door from the platform outside, so they are getting in through the door and then crawling under the room doors as when I got into my room there was another in my bathroom again, so another chase occurred I did also catch the two in the corridor and put them out as well. There is nothing worse than getting a squashed frog on the soul of your boot to help you slip on you ass, nasty business that.

Insect Evolution Questionaire

Quick lesson on insect evolution, how can you tell the difference between moths and butterflies? One fly's at night and the other during the day, No. there are moths that fly during the day. It’s not as easy as you think, in fact you cannot tell them apart biologically. Only physically can you tell them apart and that is by looking at the antennae. Butterflies have “Club” like antennae and moths have feather like antennae. This is the definition but it is a little bit more subtle than that. Some butterflies have antennae that don’t really have the club but a slight enlargement at the tip. But moths are pretty easy as the featheryness of the antennae is pretty easy to identify. Most moths are you know, big and fat with huge red staring eyes and large teeth with which to bite your neck at night and large talons to scratch your eyes out with, well that is what most women think about moths. It is only because I have seen many butterflies here that looked slightly different and when I tried to identify them, they are in fact moths and as beautifully coloured as butterflies. This is when the difficulty of trying to see the differences has been obvious to me. I have also learned that some of these butterflies are very difficult to keep as a specimen as there abdomens contain an oily substance that leaks out and kills the refractive properties of the scales on the wings. So the collectors have to remove the abdomens. Another interesting thing ( If you can call it that ) is that insects evolved from ( not intelligently designed ) segmented worms. This can be seen by the fact the bodies of insects are segmented still and the head is in fact 3 segments fused together. Wonderful isn’t it.

Intelligent Design My Ass

I am going to enter into the fray over intelligent design finally. It is easy for the bible brigade to claim that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is just a Theory but it is based on fact of evidence. That long ago there were dinosaurs and creatures that looked like the animals we see today around us. This is direct evidence that over time environmental pressure actively selects the fittest of a species to survive just because it is slightly better at coping with its environment. This is sound fact and seems quite unarguable. But to claim that some super intelligence made the things we have around us is just as ignorant as claiming the earth is flat. We all can see the religious zealots trying to push the creationism theory again but relabelled. The creationism theory was ruled illegal in the USA after the Monkey trials in the 50’s I think, so how on earth have the blinkered believers of the bible been able to pull this stunt once more. Let's have the argument about whether the bible is actually nothing more than a story from the dark ages used by the hierarchy of the church as it was then to subjugate the masses of uneducated peasants into slavery. The bible tells us quite ridiculous fantasies about curing the sick making the blind see and turning water into wine well I can tell you this all sounds like snake oil salesmen trickery to me. If anyone today was to claim such stunts we would all laugh and call them insane but 2000 years ago it was easy for anyone to persuade these peasants that we had a miracle worker and that this man must have been sent from heaven above to do what, turn water into wine, I think not. If he was so damned good then he could have driven the army of satanic Rome away with the wave of a wand, and cured all illness, prevented the famines and eliminated all the pests and converted all the criminals. But no he sacrificed himself for the greater good. Well If I was the son of God I would have saved my own soul first and then saved the others, so I think that it is right that religion is kept out of schools for kids to make sensible decisions about there beliefs and not to have to half baked idea of a super intelligent designer making things like sea cucumbers and slugs. If the designer would have been so good he would have given me teeth made entirely of pearly white enamel never to decay and bowels of steel so I can eat anything, plus while I am mentioning it, hair that never goes white, being able to eat anything I want and never getting fat, never having to shave and being able to sleep all night long and never having to get up to pee in the night, that is what a really smart designer would have done, and as I said in a previous Blog, who designed the designer, they would have been super super intelligent Aliens, now they are the ones we need to talk to about sea cucumbers.

Jealous Macho Men lacking intelligence

I have discovered some facts here about the macho culture of Peru that is not far from the norm of typical small minded men all over the world. We have a very nice and very professional HR woman who is a great person and has been adopted by all people onsite like a mother, the only problem is that she has become far too popular for her own good and as she had praise heaped upon her by everyone from the project manager down, the ugly green head of jealousy has arisen and her direct managers, two quite miserable and obviously mean men have taken it upon themselves to make her life unbearable and miserable by criticising her comments, complaing about her conduct even telling her who to speak to and who not to, what bullshit is that. so that she has decided to leave all within the space of 12 weeks. It was shocking to find her almost in tears again today after dealing with the assholes who think they can put this woman down like she is some peasant selling vegetable or something, this woman is pure selfless efficiency and jealous macho guys just hate that don’t they, a woman getting praise. So she has told them she is not renewing her contract and isn’t coming back after her 1 week holiday, they even screwed her on her time, as they originally told her she would be working 2 weeks on and 2 weeks off, but they made her work 2 on and 1 off, I think that was a ploy to just get more work out of her and not employ another, so now they have none and the replacement will be hopeless and to make matters worse is that she was a great coffee maker and who will I get to clean all the cups and make the coffee in the morning plus she was a great English speaker which for me was critical . goddam management screwing with my coffee maker.

Three Times in a Row, Never Fail to Get The Worst Exchange Rate

I am totally preoccupied with the Euro to Dollar exchange rate as I am buying my new house and I have to transfer loads of euros into Dollars. It dominates my day and I am not even sleeping for thinking about what the exchange rate is becoming. When I first moved to Costa Rica I was working in the USA and I managed twice to wait all week hoping to get a better rate only to watch the rate go the wrong way and finally buy at the worst possible moment, twice!!!, I ask you what sort of financial dealer will I ever make. Well unfortunately for me the week I want to move lots of money I have been watching the rate for 2 weeks and the last day I have and the rate has slumped again to the worst it has been for 2 years so a bit of a record for me. I have decided to not worry about it as the house is nice and I am going to live in it and that is worth more than anything. Another thing that is occupying my time is the prospects of my next project, I was really hoping for Brazil but the more I read about the murder rate and horrible finances I am more inclined to go elsewhere with my wife.


24 Gas Turbines Working Here

One huge project is the Atlantic LNG in Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. Now this is a normal place to live and I could take my wife and try and lead a normal life for the first time in many years. But as with any desires I have to temper them with a little bit of reality as I cannot force my boss to send me there and I have to ask nicely as it is common courtesy but I am lucky that I have a skill set that is in very short supply and filling my post is nigh on impossible so I can pick and choose the open slots around the world. Another huge thing in my favour is my location to the site and being only a couple of hours away is great as many Italians would rather work the other way like the middle east as it is much closer. I should explain my company has mainly Italian employees as it is Italy based. So this side of the world we have few if any of the controls engineers needed for that project so I am very hopeful for the post. Luckily they are in the middle of an expansion project and they will probably be looking for more guys to work there and I am just jumping up and down wanting to get to the top of the list. I have mailed my boss at least 3 times in the last 2 weeks, my time here in Peru is only scheduled until January and then I would love to go to Trinidad. I’ll just have another peek at the exchange rate.

Leaping About After a Frog

Now it’s just not right, I know I am a wildlife nutcase and that everyone knows that I usually have strange things in my pocket, but to put a small frog in my bathroom is just not right. I went into the bathroom last night and I thought I saw a funny coloured cockroach running very quickly out of the corner of my eye. I turned and saw the cockroach move again very quickly, far too quickly I thought, and as I put my head under the sink to see where and what it was I saw this tiny frog leap an incredible distance of about 3 feet and this frog was no bigger than a thumb nail.

As you can imagine I was shocked it was a frog but then I was chasing this frog crazily around the bathroom trying in vain to pin it down and it really was a fantastic jumper. But I finally caught it and put it outside the cabin, but if I was not put in my room by someone then I was wondering how it got in there. Could it have swum up the toilet, too nasty to think about, it could have come up the shower drain and spent time splashing in the shower cubicle. But I was still amused by it.

Very Special Tropical Butterfly

I show so many pictures of things in my blog that i normally don't put them in one at a time but this Butterfly is so amazing that i just had to make a special entry for it, it is one of those things that make me gasp when i look at it and that doesn't happen that often, but the wings of this one are so unbelievable that they dont look real, quite astonshing almost mettalic.

Stupidity Reigns

There is a news item that has been doing the rounds lately and I cannot imagine what was going through this guys head to bring him to this point in his life. Would you deliberately glue your ass to a toilet seat in a department store and then claim it was the fault of the store for ignoring him for hours. The legal system in the US has a lot to be blamed for in this case and it is this compensation mentality that is making stupid people do stupid things and gluing your ass to a toilet seat is a pretty stupid thing to do. I couldn’t bring myself to humiliate myself to the point of having firemen unbolt the toilet seat and lift me off like some shop dummy, which I think this guy is basically, and then try and turn it into a legal claim. The most stupid part of it was that he has tried it before, twice even and now everyone knows he is an ass, literally. Even more bizarre was the woman who claimed to have found a finger in her Wendy’s chilli, now that is a strange thing. Admittedly finding a foreign object in your food is bad but trying to make people believe that you found a finger is just trying it on too much, it is stretching the imagination pretty far to think that a factory worker would get home and find his finger missing and then not tell his company, or get a lawyer to claim compensation, and let his finger find his way all the way into the food chain in Wendy’s is just completely and utterly insane, this was a news item that I followed with great interest as it was a subject very close to my heart as I love Wendy’s chilly to the point of dreaming about flying into the USA and going straight to the airport Wendy’s restaurant. So I was desperate to follow the story and find out many months later that the woman and her husband had hatched this plot, a very good description making them sound like a couple of stupid chickens. The husband had a friend who had had a finger accidentally cut off at work and the husband had actually paid the guy for the finger with the intent of using it in the extortion claim against Wendy’s. It was blatantly obvious it wouldn’t work, it was too damned high profile and they could DNA test the finger and perhaps someone would connect a missing finger on someone they know to a finger turning up in a Chilli pot in a restaurant. The husband got 12 years and the wife got 9 I believe. So compensation culture has got people doing the most stupid things and perhaps it is just stupid people doing stupid things. The ultimate I ever read was a guy who was trying to make a claim on his insurance policy and he needed to help of his friend and local asylum cell mate probably as they must have been insane to consider this, the guy wanted his friend to cut off his leg with a chainsaw so he could claim disability. Yes yes I know it is so crazily unbelievable that I still have trouble actually believing that someone would even consider this and the friend actually considering doing it for him. But they went ahead and the “friend” did cut off his leg with a chainsaw and the guy blead to death very quickly as you can imagine and the friend was then eventually charged with murder. So stupidity rules but it gives all us normal people a good laugh at the same time.

Lightning Never Strikes Twice, Bullshit

Well excitement never comes in small amounts it only comes in bucketfuls and not when you really want it to, a bit like a car crash, once its over you think about all the excitement it gave you but yesterday when the lightning storm came over the plant and drown me while I was doing my butterfly rounds I never suspected there was going to be so much excitement. I went to the offices in the plant and was sat with the controls engineer talking about places to go on holiday in Peru when there was this almighty explosion and the building rattled and the radio started crackling with lots of chatter from the operators and the engineer told me one of the units had tripped because of a lightning strike on the plant.

I wasn’t too concerned as you know things happen and it takes a while for the unit to stop spinning and so we finished our teas and took a steady walk into the control room. upon entering I looked a the screens which control my machine and I was shocked and horrified with the alarm screen flashing huge blocks of alarms on and off, this is not what you want and not something that can easily be solved. I was trying to understand what was happening and we had temperatures jumping and falling 800° C, again this isn’t possible and not healthy. It was obvious now that the lightning had struck part of the turbine package and had damaged the control system. This was now looking really serious and I wanted not to be here. I spent a while trying to sort out what was damaged but the big problem is that everyone with any importance was looking over your shoulder and was wanting an explanation. Luckily the engineering manager is pretty reasonable and he was just wanting to know the extent of the damage and he was actually calling the boss in Lima to pass along the bad news. He didn’t want to make any decisions himself and to be honest neither did I. I felt like a mountain had fallen on my shoulders, all I could see was 50 alarms flashing on and off before my eyes, it was very off putting. We also found out we had virtually no spares of the cards that were damaged and that made things worse so we started robbing cards from one unit to get the other one started, after 6 hours of messing about we got one unit running and the other looked like a car wreck in a telephone exchange. But we started putting back some of the dead cards and we were able to get the control system up and functioning but with many dead signals. To save my ass from getting fired I asked for written authorisation to force any signals I needed to get the unit running, they said they would give me verbal authorisation and this basically Isn’t the same as if the compressor was to explode then everyone would deny any knowledge of the verbal agreement and I would get my ass fired down the road quicker than a Klu Klux Clan member in downtown Washington DC. But I agreed and we forced things and a few other things were not working but we finally got the unit running about 11 hours after the lightning ruined my day. What made it worse was that I had got some sort of virus and was feeling pretty shitty and I had not slept well so all in all it could have been a better day to have such a catastrophe happen, in fact it could have happened better if I wasn’t here but that is wishing it on some other poor guy. I went to bed feeling like crap and wondering if I could have a good sleep and an easier day. No such goddam luck ( is this turning into a monster whinge )
I slept like crap again and the phone blasted me out of bed by the engineering manager at 5.45am asking me if I had completed all the e-mails to the factory in Italy and organised the conference call, I bluntly told him I was still in bed and done nothing as I was still feeling like shit. He probably knew and was giving me an early morning call just to get me rousted and ready for the day. We had a conference call where the customer started pointing the finger at GE equipment and we achieved nothing of any great importance other than to piss off the project manager in Italy who seems a really nice and genuinely interested person who wanted to help us all he could but it degenerated into the your going to pay for all this and I could imagine the project manager laughing silently as GE has the best Lawyers in the game and never lose when it comes to contracts and payment. We’ll see who pays in the end.

Can All Amputees Please Put Both Arms In The Air

Now normally you never see an amputee in the developed world as it is classed as ugly and all amputees get prosthetics that look like the real deal, in fact Paul McCartneys Wife has a false leg that looks better than her good one. Aside from that it is almost unheard of to see an amputee without their artificial limb. But I can tell you never have I seen so many amputees than in Costa Rica. Its like a plague of limblessness broke out and limbs were just falling off. I couldn’t get over the fact that there was so much of it about. Ok I know that medicine is much less developed but to see so many people without arms and legs was shocking, but there are several facts that you have to consider. Lots of people work on the land still in Costa Rica and they use very dangerous tools like Machetes. Long and very sharp and it is easy to cut yourself and in the tropics with a dirty wound infection must be easy and if you leave something going nasty and oozing lumps of green puss then your leg or hand or arm is going to fall off, eventually with the help of a surgeons knife of course. But I still find it shocking and the numbers do amaze me, in fact most people don’t seem to think it is that out of the ordinary. Perhaps it is an extreme form of body sculpture, woohoo look at me I only have one arm, perhaps dancing in the nightclub on one leg, spinning on your head with only one leg in the air is the latest in craze. The most bizarre thing I have seen was a crew of aerobic instructors and the leader only had one arm and wasn’t the slightest bit afraid to wave his stump about in the air, what made it more bizarre was the fact that the “girl” attendant behind him following his moves was in fact a transvestite with silicone implants, as the muscles were just huge and bulging, no visible bulge down below thank goodness , I had only just eaten when I saw that, but the “girl” was making eyes at me, but even though “she” was good looking I only had eyes for the amputee. I have seen something as crazy though, I saw a legless man in Equador hopping up and down the middle of the street, eddy Murphy style as in the film trading places. I felt it unfair to throw paper money out of the window at him as he may get run over by a car in his rush to retrieve it so I was actually doing him a favour and saving him from certain death under the wheels of a huge truck. Perhaps some of us in the developed world would think that a blessing for him though.

My Last Big Holiday in the Galapagos Islands Last Christmas

Popular Misconceptions about the Galapagos

1, It is a tropical paradise with blue skies and warm seas, WRONG
For much of the year it is fed by the Humbolt current that comes up from the Antarctic along the west coast of south America, bringing cool water16-20 C and creating cloudy conditions and fog on the taller islands for about 6-8 months a year but no rain, most of the islands were cactus desert, with no leafy plants at all, the trees that do exist have no leaf during the dry spell. The sea is too cold most of the year to allow coral to grow so no coral reefs.
Hence I was incorrectly dressed for most of the trip and snorkelling was impossible for more than 15 minutes at a time, when the current changes to the panama current it is the rainy season and the sea warms to about 22-28 C, Jan to May.
2, The islands are small and closely grouped together, WRONG
The islands are huge, Isabella is over 100 Kms long and the islands are spread over 250Kms of deep ocean. This means that when travelling between them involves ocean going boating through rough seas for many hours, it took me 2 days to get my sea legs some trips were 7 hours long,
3, The Galapagos Islands are full of wildlife, WRONG
Nearly all the tortoises and iguanas are gone and there are only about 20 species of birds on the islands which have all been hit very badly over the last 200 years by alien introduced species, rats, cats, goats ect, so is impossible to see much in the islands and only a few spots where the iguanas and tortoises are still found are thronged by tourists
4, All tourist operations are experienced and professional, WRONG
The tourists must have been going to the Galapagos for along time but without doubt the operators are the most unprofessional bunch of amateurs I have ever come across, everything about our cruise came over as the first time they have ever done anything like it, only our guide was great, perhaps it was the boat owners who were just useless, the hotels in Ecuador in general were hopeless,
5, The Galapagos islands are a holiday of a lifetime, WRONG
Only the ardent wildlife nutcase who likes camping and doesn’t mind about roughing it will enjoy the archipelago. I can say it was a huge and fantastic experience but it didn’t live up to the 40 years of expectations I had about the place, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone for just a holiday, it is a special place but it is in the category of backpacking.



On Arrival in Quito we had to get our tickets for the onward flight to the Galapagos Islands from the local airline, we got a taxi to take us to a cheap hotel and asked him to take us to the airline office which is next to the airport, it turns out this guy is from the fields doesn’t know even the airport, so we went up and down the perimeter road for 30 mins trying to find this place and his questions on the radio were getting more and more irate replies from the radio operator, so we finally find the office and we parked on the opposite side of the road, Jenny went in to get the tickets and I sat with the driver, a military policeman moved us on and we had to go around the airport once more on getting back to the office the driver managed to crash into a parked car, I was hysterical with laughter at this point and pissing myself silly, the driver had to get out and barter with the other driver and ended up paying him cash, maybe $50 maybe $100, but the $6 fare wouldn’t cover that, after jenny got the tickets we set off for the hotel , the driver went up a side street and I was amazed that the hotel was 100 meters from the airport, I was laughing myself even harder at the fact we had been ripped off about the taxi fare as we could have walked in 5 minutes, but the entertainment was great.
We arrived in Baltra the airport of the Galapagos in the morning and was met by a grey sky and very fresh winds, I was shocked by this, the place looked out of the wild west all cactus and dead looking trees, we got to the boat in the harbour and we found a converted fishing vessel, it looked very old and when we got into the rooms we were shown, the smell of diesel was so strong we asked to be moved to an upper deck room, this was much better but it was still an old ship and not well looked after, we sailed and immediately we realised that this was a sailing holiday, the boat was rolling and rocking and bouncing of the waves, not good for people not expecting to suffer sea sickness. We had to sail about 1 hour to the first island and was met by the strongest smell of concentrated urine I have ever encountered outside a shop doorway, we had arrived at a seal colony, honking sea lions everywhere, it was fantastic, we landed amongst the baby sea lions and were walking through the cactus forest looking at marine iguanas and land iguanas, amazing stuff,

but island after island of marine iguanas and land iguanas and sea lions gets tiring even for the wildlife nutcase like myself,





a couple of islands later we had our first chance of snorkelling: we dropped off on a rocky outcrop called the devils crown, an old caldera . We landed into the middle of a huge school of marbled rays and white tip reef sharks, with millions of other amazingly coloured fish surrounding us, it was almost a shock to the system, and the water temp was also a shock, we were supposed to swim around the rock, but I was shivering so badly I could hardly get my breath, we had a couple of sea lions swim near us and I was frightened as they are huge and swim up to you fast when your not looking, like a big shark looming up to you, the whole thing lasted maybe 15 mins as I was chilled to the core and had to get out, but those sharks were scary anyway.
The boat we were on had a badly corroded anchor chain and it took maybe 15 mins to raise it, but on the last island before the main one the chain broke and we lost the anchor and they had to send a couple of the guys out with our snorkels trying to find the anchor, after 1 hour they gave up, someone would have to pay for that, probably the captain.
When we got back to the main island for a day, we had a look round the town and it is a glorified shanty town, with terrible buildings everywhere, the Darwin centre was OK but only had about 6 exhibits, most of the breeding stock and collection were out of bounds, there was some enormous tortoises there, which did look false as they were so big but the poor things were ex pets and as there origin wasn’t known, which island that is, they cannot be used for breeding, poor devils.



We went on with our tour of the northern islands, this is where the tour is elongated just to extract money from the tourist, we saw basically nothing on 4 islands apart from 2 Galapagos penguins and the seas are much deeper here and the seas were very rough, it was something I could have lived without seeing and I was unhappy that it had done this but you now realise that there isn’t a huge amount of wildlife here apart from a few islands, sea lions are everywhere, but you can see them all over the world, so I would recommend the 5 day or even 3 day tour of the southern islands if at all, it is so remote to get to and the connections are poor and the service is crappy as they know some tourists will always come, I had a great time but I am a wildlife nutcase but I can see when I am being exploited.

On arriving back at Quito we wanted to go to the equator line so as we had a map from the newspaper and it didn’t look far on the map. so we jumped on the nearest bus and paid the 40 cents,
( US currency ) and sat and watched the world go by for 1 and a half hours, it must have been 50-70 kms away, I was amazed at the desert like mountains, just barren huge mountains, and it was goddam freezing, very cold winds, again I was inappropriately dressed only shorts and t-shirts, everyone else had jackets and scarves, we got to the tourist attraction and found it deserted, it was a huge place maybe 10 restaurants and 30 nick nacks and clothes shops but we were the only people for the hour we were there, it wasn’t as impressive as I had expected and they wanted to charge extra for all the things you wanted to do like climb the tower and visit the museum, I didn’t bother as I though my $1.50 would have covered all costs, robbing bastards. I also found the exertion of walking and talking took away my breath making me gasp, it wasn’t until I read the altitude on the tower I realised why , it was 2880 meters high, almost 10,000 feet, and it also explained why it was so cold, I spent almost the entire time looking for an ethnic shirt made by the local Indians but couldn’t get anything nice or big enough as they are all midgets in comparison. but as I walked through the airport I managed to get one big enough for my Christmas party in Malabo. It is a strange mix of laces and Indian woven fabric and cheese cloth, honest it looks nice, you may get a picture from Malabo Christmas party. So that was it, a hard slog and very expensive, 12 days seeing a very poor part of the world and having to cope with the hopeless amateurish ways this part of the world call service, been there, seen it done it and probably willnot go back to Ecuador, there are many other interesting places to go, I fancy Madagascar or the Seychelles, we’ll have to save up for it next year

Being the Court Torturer

Today was one of those days when I was feeling like I was at a loose end with nothing really constructive to do and so I created a task to check some vent settings just to satisfy my curiosity. The frustration that I suffered from it made me think that it wasn’t really worth the effort. I should have gone for a walk down the river or into the jungle, or anything other than try and get some people to use their initiative, that is something I have realised that in poor countries that is the first victim of not wanting to screw something up. They are so worried that if they do something wrong they will get fired so unless you are stood waving your hands giving them detailed instructions about what you want them to do , they will do nothing. So today it took me 45 minutes to get a guy to turn a handle through 90°, the temperature shot up nearly 100°F in the compartement and if I hadn’t bypassed the trip signal, I would have shut down the Gas Turbine. So I had to run back out from the control room to the guy and then tell him to turn it back through 90°, it was a farce of the highest order and since I have been frustrated by the total lack of any imagination here on sight I have given up totally. I am just thinking about my next project and my manager has agreed to let me go , it is just a matter of finding the next reasonable project where I can take the wife and have a normalish life.

I am also suffering what can only be described as a plague of petty thievery. When I leave at night to go to my room someone sneaks into my office and steals my butterflies, this isn’t what you call property theft but it pissed me off enough to want to castrate the culprit and cast him out into Peru lonely and poverty stricken. I know that here poverty is the real deal and that someone losing their job is a bad thing but if I ever find out who it is then I will do something nasty to him, not sure quite what I could do without getting fired myself but I would want revenge. I would make him follow me around the sight bagging up all my butterflies so he can suffer the sweating I do when I am engulfed in the horribly hot air of the cooling fans, he is taking the easy way to collect the butterflies by taking my star specimens. Oh I want to do something really bad to him, has anyone got any suggestions, I could tie him down over an ant hill and the ants here are really nasty, with huge jaws. I could fill his underpants with leeches, oh yes that sounds particularly horrible, I need to know he is suffering. Sorry I am getting my imagination running away with itself. Life is such in another time I could have been the court torturer and been a very happy content man and would have worked quite independently without supervision and on my own initiative. Unlike some I know here.

Butterfly Giant or the Reincarnation of Helen of Troy

Today I found a giant butterfly that I can honestly say took away my breath, I had to climb on a door to reach the creature and it was huge and a startling array of colours and patterns, I was shocked by its size and just fantastic colours, how evolution came up with a design like this I will never be able to understand, perhaps it was intelligent design, but if that was the case, who designed the designer, perhaps that was super intelligent design. That is another whole Blog sometime. So I still had a hundred or so other beautiful much smaller butterflies to release but I delicately held it in my fingers to stop it flapping as they can destroy their own wings very easily if they go crazy flapping away inside a bag. I walked about 100 yards away and opened up my bag and released all the smaller ones and then held up my hands and sat the butterfly on my hand to see what it would do, funnily it started to lick my finger, it was taking in all the salts from my sweat, apparently butterflies will take salts from any source and a typical method of catching these butterflies is to urinate on some bare earth and the butterflies can smell it a good way off with their antennae, as that is their smelling organs. So my huge Morpho butterfly was drinking my sweat and not really being bothered about being sat on my hand I was able to open its wings so I could have a very close look at the colours. It was a sort of pale iridescent blue around the centre of the wing and then turned to gold around the edges and then jet black around the outside with white spots along the edge, it was quite amazing. The underside was also just as colourful and it was full of white lines and huge eye spots that were blue and purple and green, just a rainbow of colours and it then lifted off with ease.


It didn’t flap like other butterflies, it sort of wafted it wings gently and then was able to glide into the wind, I didn’t think it had aerofoil wings but it was able to generate lift with no problem and just went away like a small bird of prey. The wings must have been 8 inches wingtip to wingtip, and for metrical people that is 8 inches. It was one of those occasions where words failed me, I was left with such a feeling of awe that I could do nothing but watch it just sail away like a mirage. I was feeling elated that I had saved such a fantastic creature and that perhaps the intelligent designer could let me win the lottery for saving one of his most wonderful creations. And if not then he can kiss my lily white ass.

Bertie the Bat

I spent all day with my tired worn out little insectivorous bat in my pocket and I kept looking in on him and he seemed quite comfortable so at 5.30pm I decided it was dark enough for him to fly but when I took him out of my pocket he looked as tired and worn out as I when I put him in, I was feeling concerned as he has spent all day recovering and didn’t look any better. I suspected that he had just had too much battering whilst trapped on the screens, probably chilled too much. I took him back to my office and put him inside a small box on some leather gloves and the first thing he did was make a very strange arching manoeuvre and I though he was dieing in my hands as I was moving him, he moved a little and then urinated on my hands but making sure he missed himself, I think it was a him , he seemed to have a small penis, but bats are strangely put together.

He had one tiny hole in his wing but he seemed OK to fly

So then after I put him in the box I decided to try and feed him just for curiosity’s sake as I had never done it before but I had seen it done on TV. I caught a small flying insect inside my office, it was tiny like a small flying ant and I held it by the wings and held it under bertie the bat’s nose and he snatched it out of my fingers, so that was it, I went outside and while trying to catch more things for him to eat I bumped into the site manager and said hello and invited him to watch the feeding of the bat, now having wild animals here on site is a sackable offence and I told him the story and he was quite impressed, I fed it a larger waspy type thing and again he snatched it up and gobbled it down crunching on the hard bits, all very funny from such a tiny thing. I closed the lid and I went for dinner, when I got back about an hour later I opened the box and I was mortified the poor thing looked dead, absolutely no movement at all, I poked its ear and nothing it was stiff, I poked its head harder and this time it spun around and squeaked some very irritated sonar noises at me from a very agitated looking head, it was completely asleep and I had woken it up poor thing, it had had a bad day totally, I went and caught a lager moth and offered it this and again it took relish in making the crunching noises again and ate everything, I had to ring the bank at that time and so I put the lid back on and whilst I was in mid conversation about a credit card application I let out a howl as the bat was climbing out of the tiny gap in the end of the box and I had to poke it back down with my fingers probably to the amusement of the women at the other end of the line as I was giving her a blow by blow description of what I was doing, she probably didn’t believe me anyway. How many people do you know who have bats on the table and have been feeding them moths. Nor me also. So I realised that it was time for bertie to be on his way, I took him outside and it was totally dark by now and I just opened my hands and he jumped of my and in a sky dive type affair and flapped his way round and round the area where we were as I think he was trying to find out where he was, like, “ I remember there being a large machine here this morning but all I can see are these two stupid looking tall creatures with their mouths open”. He was probably right, one of the soldiers was watching me as I released the bat. He probably wanted to scream “witch ,witch” or womething. So there I was as proud as a new daddy watching my baby take to the wing and only 12 hours in my company. So there you go rearing a bat isn’t that hard , they are pretty tame and he settled down inside 2 minutes to spend all day in my sweaty pocket, he loved it and took food straight from my fingers, I am still amazed myself so don’t think I had done it before. Good job it was a small one as one of the bats I have rescued before was about 4 inches long and a wing span of 12 inches, now that would have been a different matter. So life now goes on and I am still collecting my butterflies and moths and strange insects and the weather si still very nice and warm, just trying not to think about the rainy season when I come here next rotation in January.

Batman To The Rescue

Today i have performed what i would call a mercy mission, no i didn't save a drowning man or put out someone who was a blazing fire, i found another bat spread eagled to the screen on my cooling fans. from the beginning it looked exhausted and very cold, it oculd have been up there for 12 hours, so when i managed to get it down it was so cold it couldn't fly and i was lost for what to do. now i have seen many wildlife rescue programs and bats seem no harder to look after than mice. So i put it in my pocket for safe keeping and i have been very careful not to move about quickly and it has been sleeping there all day. it looks fine and didnt complain like it was when i first got hold of it. it is now 5 hours later and i think it is just resting and when it is going dusk i will take it out to release. It makes me wonder what they are paying me for here in Peru, looking at the Gas Turbines or rescueing wildlife, personally i prefer the wildlife but the pay is crap.
Here is the tiny bat looking quite comfortable and sleeping .

Desperate to Move House

The day after I got home I have to go and get my Visa from the Peruvian Consulate, this is a crazily easy thing, you make up some details and then pay $30 and 2 days later it is all in your passport and you then leave, so easy that any criminal can do it without thinking hard. So I then get my air ticket to fly and the weather is miserable and raining, not normal rain but horrible heavy beating rain that makes the tin roof on my house ping like an out of tune steel band. I hate the roof of my house, I had also noticed that a wet patch had appeared in my bedroom ceiling and when I finally got into the roof space to check I found drips all over the roof , I was getting desperate about the house, I hate the place, it was only meant to be temporary and that was 2 years ago, so now I was determined to change houses, only thing was that Jenny is still at university and it would be difficult for her to travel and things, we had tried moving to the beautiful south and found nothing so I wanted to move into a new house in San Jose itself. We got into the car the next day, this being Wednesday now and went for a drive around the area of Escazu,



view of surrounding hills

This is the posh neighbourhood where all the rich Americans live who are avoiding paying tax in the USA, and this is probably the only place in the whole country that you can buy nice new houses. It is easy to find, it is on a hillside easily viewed from anywhere in the city of San Jose, you can see the 10 story apartment blocks, again the only place you can see them , on out way to Escazu we passed through a suburb called Heredia and we saw a sign for a condo, Jenny by now was getting the house hunting bug so we pulled in and went to look at the houses, they were nice 2 floor houses and a little patio but the house was pretty small but it was laid out very nicely and the quality of the finishing was fantastic, the bathrooms were the best we have seen with the most exquisite tiling I have seen, in fact the tiles were the biggest I have seen, maybe 80X30 cms, Jenny wanted to buy it there and then but I said we had to look round to see if we could find something nicer and cheaper, it didn’t have much of a view and the neighbourhood was pretty nasty, they wanted $125,000. we left to carry on with our journey, so we arrived and drove around and found a really nice condo with trees and fountains and were told that plots cost $350,000 alone without the house, so we drove away miserable from there, but 10 minutes later the guy rang us and told us that he new a realtor that could find us a house anywhere in that area. He told us if we wanted he would get him to ring us for an appointment, so we agreed not expecting anything, this guy rang 2 minutes later and offered to take us around all the condos and houses that he had for sale, this was an offer I really wanted to take up as trying to find anything was hard work and everything is hidden in little condos amongst trees. So this guy turned up in his $100,000 top of the range Range Rover, now I thought this man knows how to sell and make money and probably sells only huge houses, we did tell him our price range, he took us to a pretty nasty house that wasn’t new and was too small and needed shitloads of stuff doing to it and only 2 bedrooms. The prices was $145,000, far too much as I wasn’t wanting to pay that. He then took us to a development out in the wilds and amongst some trees and even though the idea was nice I couldn’t imagine living there, so we left, to be honest I wasn’t in a financial position to but at this time , we told the guy that we were looking for perhaps 6 months down the line, well he took us to a small condo development and it was nicely laid out and it had a swimming pool and a nice garden area but the quality of the houses was horrible and I didn’t like it at all, Jenny could only see the pool, probably imagining herself around it in her bikini, so he took us to another place but the owners were not in , it was high on the Escazu hills and they looked interesting houses but they were $165,000, again probably out of our range. I said it wasn’t critical about the pool and he immediately said, right and took us to this small Condo inside a gated residential area, this was in a nice flat area within a large residencia, the roads were quiet and not many kids running about the area.



The drive looked nice as we drove in and we could only see the show house as the keys were not available for the unsold house. As soon as we walked into the house you could tell that the quality of all the finishing was top class,



All the doors were great and highly polished and the skirting boards were nicely finished, the walls looked great and the rooms were huge. Once we got upstairs I was in heaven.



The master bedroom was immense and had on suit bathroom with great tiling and a huge shower and double basins, the bedroom had a huge walk in closet and beautifully finished off, the other bedrooms were equally large and with walk in closets. The other bathrooms were just as nice and nicely finished off, it had a loft access to enable you to stuff your junk up there,



Downstairs it had the a nice kitchen and large laundry room and the granny apartment complete with another bathroom, I was taken, I told the guy I have to have this but will the owners let me pay over 6 months, he arranged the meeting and we met the owners Thursday morning, the day I fly to Peru. It was a crazy meeting and over coffee we spoke about how the payments would be made and it seems the guy is a Cuban exile who lives in Miami and his house had just taken a good beating from the hurricane Wilmer, he is a doctor and very well spoken with that typical Miami Cuban accent. He lives only 2 houses away from our condo so we knew that he likes the area, I was so happy about the house I am thinking about how I can generate some extra cash so I can move into the house early. The other problem is with a house of this size how much is it going to cost me to furnish it, I think it will be minimalistic, a few nice pieces of dark furniture here and there with off large ornaments to make it look tasteful, my excuse for being cheap. So from wanting to look around to buying a house all in one afternoonand I am so delighted about the house by far the biggest place we looked at and with all the things we would have wanted and a granny flat for my sister to come and visit, perhaps a spare bedroom for my brother and his wife to use when they visit. I just want to move in now, my desperation may get the best of me.