field trippin

on sunday morning, all 33 of us south caicos vagabonds headed down to the dock and boarded a boat to north caicos, the second largest of the eight main islands. some group members were, uh, not feeling so hot, due to a nice combination of the rocking boat and the activities of the night previous, but at the end of the hour and a half boat ride, the majority of people were at least half alive. we had completed our midterms the week before, and everyone was pretty rowdy to be out and about, able to attempt to forget everything we had crammed in our heads the week before. i'm pleased to say this operation was a success for me at least. i've skillfully forgotten lots of things, like the definition of resource management (i mean, what is a resource even? i used to know that at one point many moons ago), and how long the larval stage of the queen conch lasts, and the scientific name of a number of fish that all look pretty much the same. i've kept a few nuggets of wisdom in my head to whip out at random times though, in case my nerdiness is called into question. like! did you know that the male spiny lobster initiates mating by brushing his antennae against those of his lady's? pretty cute right.

i think this lobster is into kaity (girl in the background) though she doesn't appear to return his sentiments

our field trip consisted of two nights camping on north caicos and one spent in provo in a hotel with what?! a warm shower?! say it's not so. on north, we spent our days going to a number of local historically or economically significant locations, such as wade's green plantation, a couple farms, mudjin harbor, and the conch caves. the abandoned plantation was cool, i think, but i was mainly concerned with catching lizards so i may have missed some of the finer details of the place. i did catch that there were lots of buildings (the slave quarters, the kitchen, the overseer's house, and the armory) that were all labeled wrong by some college students playing at archeology. moral of the story, never trust a college student. the farms were neat too - i learned how to get a papaya down from a tree with a long stick. see! i'm learning all sorts of useful skills here! 

skills.

mudjin harbor….hold the freaking phone. i felt like such a googly-eyed grinning buffoon, but i'm not sure i have ever seen a place so perfect. running into the water there for the first time, my friends and i were all pretty much in a complete delirium of happiness. it's kind of impossible to describe what made mudjin harbor so unreal, but as insufficient as it sounds, the water was a shade of blue you could drown in. when we swam out, the waves were huge, so the color was probably just warning us to stay away. too bad that was impossible. the entrance to the harbor was a huge, open cave, and you could walk over the top and down through a hole to a smaller, more secluded beach. it was pretty breathtaking, and if i could spend every afternoon swallowing salt water and being a googly-eyed buffoon at mudjin, i definitely would.

is this real life?

the conch caves, located on middle caicos, were AWESOME. i've always been kind of a creepy person, so caves are right up my creepy dark alley. we learned the names of some formations (my favorite was "cave-poo" - that's the official name) and that gave me a nice chuckle. we saw quite a few cute lil bats and learned a lot about guano and its uses, but the most useful lesson being to keep one's mouth closed when peering up at the cave ceiling so as to avoid any falling guano. lots of scatological lessons here.  

the aptly named cave-poo

back at the campsite, we all commenced with being eaten alive by bugs. there were a fair share of mosquitos, but the real ghouls were tiny biting flies called no-see-ums. what i want to know is how something tiny enough to be called "no-see-um" can have such a painful bite that, a week later, still itches. damn biology. that little sucker is pretty well evolved. in a moment of boredom, i tried counting how many bites i had….i got up to 102 just on my right leg and i had to stop. the good thing is that since i look like i have smallpox, no one tries to encroach on my space! it's almost worth it. 

the field trip was fun and i accomplished my unrealized life goal of becoming friends with a forty year old donkey who lived at the campsite (her name was eliza), but i was ready for spring break by the time we reached provo. the whole next day was devoted to surveying for our environmental policy class, but the real bed and oh my gosh the shower did a lot to perk me up. words cannot describe the sweetness of that first shower. warm water? shampoo that's not biodegradable goop? uh shaving my legs? the one downside was that i did discover that i'm not actually tan at all - the color i seem to have acquired over the semester was simply a coating of dirt that came off with freshwater and soap. you win some, you lose some. 

surveying the next day was an interesting experience, but overall a good one. i was surveying about plastic bag use in spanish, and that proved a little bit of a challenge. i'm definitely not fluent in spanish on the best of days, and when you take away the casual conversational aspect and replace it with words such as "reutilization" and ideas such as "coral suffocation," it turns out i have to resort to a lot of hand gestures and blushing. but it was probably good for both my spanish skills and whittling my ego down to the size of a pea. it was getting frighteningly close to kumquat size.