Tropical hardwood burns hotter and longer than European softwood. This is a good lesson to learn before making a BBQ in the Caribbean. We made a fire European girlguide style (small kindling, fanning the flames, larger logs, then charcoal, praying for it to catch) and soon we had a towering inferno which took eyebrows off at 50m. Even when Vitol, one of the locals, raked the ashes down to nothing (really nothing 2mm of dull embers on the sand floor), it burned hotter than the 9^th circle of hell, for hours and hours and hours. The chicken went from frozen to burnt in 3 seconds and scarred the hands of anyone trying to manoueuvre them with a fork a foot long. Still, with Juana's rice and beans (plus cold beer) it tasted good. Menno took the battery out of one of the trucks to power the Mayor's stereo and after dinner we danced bachata (which means the locals performed and the foreigners shuffled). The Slovenians were a bit concerned to realize that they were seen as excellent dance fodder by the local girls. Its just not done for men to sit down when there's dancing to be had, especially if girls are clearly waiting, which they were. El Cabo is a place where one should break one's no dancing rule, I do.

As a result we were on site a little later today. This was also due to the fact that we have apparently been assigned a guard to lead us to and from the site. Ciprian (the guard) even helped out a bit by hacking at some undergrowth with his machete, but spent the rest of the day looking out to sea.

The surveying is going well. We manage about two 20x20 grids with the magnetometer and one grid with the radar per day, and Branko seems confident this speed is sufficient. I'm happy just moving the rope and kicking stones out of the radar's path and chatting to the locals (they chatter, I haltingly reply and compose questions which come out wrong). Like Ciprian, I spend a lot of time looking out to sea. It's one of the nicest things to do on site. Next week however, we will make a couple of exploratory pits to test the origins of the geophysical signals…