Monkeys and Manatees are awesome!

It’s not taken me long to decide that monkeys and manatees are awesome!

Thursday was a super busy day at the centre. We had two film crews in to film the manatees - it was all designed to raise awareness about the animals and to teach people about the devastating effects motorised water sports/ water transport can have on manatees. There was also a group of school children in along with the documentary film crew who were in to learn about manatees (and to help make the documentary more cute!) so it was a very long day with lots of additional cleaning jobs to be done in preparation.

Duke and Twiggy were centre of attention for the whole day. Duke is a young male manatee (184 lbs) who spends his time in the pool under the watchful eye of the volunteers. He eats seagrass and is tube fed milk once a day by Si, the lead volunteer. Sometimes the volunteers are in the water with him to play and to make him exercise. I have just come back from my first swimming/ wading experience with him and it was really special - he brushed up against me numerous times and I felt his whiskers on my feet and knees as he tried to figure me out. I've heard that he can be a little frisky as he’s reached that age but I guess I'm not his type as I didn't experience any of that!

Twiggy is a larger manatee (296 lbs) and is due to be released in the next couple of days. Twiggy had a bolt on her tracker changed on Thursday so she was hoisted out of her lagoon pool (a part of the lagoon that is closed off), weighed and then it was changed. It was changed because the bolts are designed to rust and drop off after between 12 and 18 months and she had hers fitted 8 months ago as she was due to be released then but the release was delayed. Wildtracks would like to keep track of her when she is released into the lagoon to monitor where she sleeps and where she is finding food but then they will pick up the tracker after it comes loose. She gets a banana milkshake every morning and then is let out into the lagoon for the day to find seagrass. She then comes back in at about 5pm to have another milkshake which she loves!

With regards to the monkeys, they get fed 4 times a day (6.30am, 10am, 2pm and 4.30pm) and get a combination of fruit and leaves. The Howler Monkeys get smaller pieces of fruit than the Spider Monkeys as they have tiny mouths. There are 6 adult Howler Monkeys at Wildtracks and they are all lovely. Spartacus is a funny one and likes to play and bite. He was raised from a baby by the Wildtracks volunteers but he is in a cage with his adopted mummy, Kofi now. She is very patient with him and waits until he has had his milk before she gets hers! She was also in a playful mood today and spent some time checking Simon’s hair for flees (I’m not sure if she found any!). There are also 5 Howler Monkeys in a pre-release enclosure. Sultan is a comic and loves to pull funny faces and joke around. A couple of the pre-release monkeys have escaped over the past couple of days (once due to a fault in the electric fence and they came over the top of the fence via the trees on the second escape!).

Spider Monkeys look fantastically funny when they run on the ground or across a branch as they wave their arms in the air as they go! I really hope I manage to get a video of this over the next month. They do not have any thumbs and, according to John (a volunteer with a huge thirst for knowledge), they also have ball and socket joints in their wrists to allow them to swing better. The Spider Monkeys have grown on me after my initial meeting with them didn't go so well (I nearly lost half of my hair and my necklace to Duma!). They all have different personalities but, on the whole, they are playful and loving. Si, Paul and John tend to go in with these monkeys as they can be quite strong and, when they get upset, they could do some serious damage! I witnessed Pancho, the male monkey, having a bit of a tantrum and he actually managed to break one of the branches in his cage - it would have been quite dangerous to be in there with him! I stand outside, as we can feed from there, at arm’s length to avoid hairloss!

Yesterday I was very lucky as I got to meet the baby monkeys. There are 7 baby Howler Monkeys and a baby Spider Monkey called Izzy. I played with the four smallest Howlers for a couple of hours yesterday. My favourite is Pebbles (who was nicknamed 'Splat' after she kept making a splatting sound with her feet as she landed on my lap). There is also 'Underarm Biter' (Peanut), 'Crash Lander' (Polly) and Sam who are all adorable. I have been asked to supervise play sessions with the 4 smallest monkeys and Elliot, who is slightly older and has been playing a little rough. It is hoped that they will all move into the same enclosure outside once they're a little bigger.

I have realised over the past couple of days that I have serious tail envy. Why did humans evolve without a tail?! I was discussing at breakfast the fact that, if I had a tail, I’d be able to carry another handbag around with me that could contain a pair of flat shoes for when my feet get sore. The possibilities would be endless! If evolution didn't take so long I would sit up in a tree and wait for my tail to appear!

I've arrived in Belize!

3 flights, 36 hours and countless cups of tea later I have arrived in Belize. And it was worth all of the pain of the travel to get here!
When I arrived in Belize City airport I hopped into a cab and got dropped off in the middle of no-where in the hope that a bus would turn up to take me to Sarteneja. I missed a call as I was in the car and, thinking it was Paul at Wildtracks, I asked the driver if I could quickly borrow his phone to make a local call. His response was "take your time, you're on Belize time now"! Brilliant! If I was in London the driver would have been breathing down my neck until I cut the call off mid-conversation for fear of death by stoning! The bus turned up (when it was due as well!) and I instantly noticed a huge difference from the UK. There was Caribbean music blaring out of every window and two people, a lady from Taiwan called Joy and a Californian guy called Maurice, instantly struck up a conversation that lasted over an hour (if you can call it a conversation as I think I only managed to get in two words on the whole trip!). Maurice is a combination of Forest Gump and Benjamin Button. He told me he was 60 when he looked no older than 40 and he's been a Marine, a Realtor, a billionaire, a model for a beauty school (when his wife was learning how to do manicures at the local college) and he's now moved to Belize from California to smoke Cuban cigars and drink rum! Not sure how much of it I believe but it kept me awake on a potentially boring journey with his stories of dating Californian women and being a Vietnam war veteran (hmmm....).
At Orange Walk Paul met me on the bus and, after some shopping for vegetables and food for the cats, we made the very bumpy drive to Wildtracks. There were 14 of us at dinner yesterday and I am still trying to learn  all of the names and backgrounds but they seem like a nice bunch and I think they will help to make it a great month.
This morning I met the Spider Monkeys and Howler Monkeys and I almost lost my top, glasses, necklace and half of my hair! The Spider Monkeys are strong for their size! The Howler Monkeys look very sweet and I think I will like working with them. I am undecided on the Spider Monkeys but I guess we just need to give it time to get to know each other. Some of the volunteers have been here months and have managed to develop lovely relationships with the monkeys so I hope that I will be able to do the same. I'm yet to meet Duke, the manatee, but I hope this will happen soon!
I've also met two lovely (but flee ridden) dogs, thousands of army ants and a couple of snakes who were hanging out in one of the cabanas. All in all, a productive day. And it's only 12pm!

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Germany

What kind of a fool goes to a Nazi concentration camp memorial on a Sunday in the middle of the freezing cold German winter without a hat and wearing trainers that are designed to keep your feet cool when you exercise?! I've been indoors 2 hours and I still haven't fully warmed up!

Warning: do not read on if you're of a nervous disposition. I haven't tried to fluffy up the facts!

When we first entered the site of the camp we were taken along an external road and shown the SS casino - a place for the SS to relax, eat and socialise. We were told that some of the prisoners in the camp were 'employed' to work in the SS Casino cooking, cleaning and sometimes even babysitting (!) and there wasn't a single report of a prisoner attempting to poison or kill the members of the SS, even though they had access to knives and plenty of motive and opportunity! I find this fascinating as, as we learned later in the tour, these men were being subjected to the worst kind of cruelty and torture imaginable! This SS Casino is currently being renovated but, as with many of the SS buildings in this area, will probably be used as a tax office in the future - it figures!

Picture: the SS Casino (also called The Green Monster by the prisoners).

We were next taken past some out-buildings that were used as function rooms for when visitors would come to look round the camp (seriously!). Sachsenhausen was used as the model for all other concentration camps so many people would come to see how it was done and take this 'wisdom' on to build other camps. This meant that it was also used to test lots of different ideas which I shall come onto later.

As we entered the camp we were greeted with the "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Works Makes (you) Free) sign that until now I had only ever associated with Schindler's List and other movies relating to the Holocaust. It was quite a shock to see it! It was explained to us that Sachsenhausen was designed based on an equilateral triangular perimetre (so that less guards needed to be employed to guard the camp) with Tower A in the middle of the bottom side and the role call area in front of this set in a semi circular shape. It was explained to us that role call was done every morning and every evening to check that no-one had managed to escape. Usually prisoners were given 40 minutes to get ready in the morning, after a 4:30am wake up call, and then needed to report to role call. This would sound OK to most of us, however, there were 54,000 prisoners in a camp build for 10,000. Prisoners would sometimes get crushed in the rush to get to the washrooms and sometimes they drowned in the sinks and toilets as well. One role call lasted for 13 hours one January morning in which 170 people dropped dead from the cold. We stood there for about 5 minutes and I couldn't feel my fingers even though I had gloves on!

 Picture: Arbeit macht frei sign underneath the entrance at Tower A

A typical working day would be 12 hours for the male prisoners (females were not introduced into the camp until much later to prevent reproduction) . The jobs would range from peeling potatoes to heavy manual labour. Homosexual prisoners (who had been imprisoned just for being homosexual!) were asked to try out boots for the army made by big companies (e.g. Dassler which later became Adidas!). They would walk/ run in the boots with 20kg packs on their backs for 12 hours a day. They were usually malnourished as they were only receiving 50% of the recommended daily calorie intake (20% once rations became harder to come by during the war) and they would usually only last at this task for 6 days before they died. The SS were making money from big shoe companies based on exploiting innocent people but it was OK because they were turning the homosexuals into 'proper men'! It makes me really cross!

All the way around the perimetre of the camp were electrical fences and rows of barbed wire. In the beginning, prisoners decided that the best way out would be to throw themselves on the electric fences to commit suicide - surely that would be better than years of torture and abuse. After a few months, a section of gravel was put just before the barbed wire and electric fence with a sign that stated "Neutral Zone, you'll be shot if you enter". And the prisoners wouldn't be shot clean in the head or heart; they would be shot in the leg or chest and left to bleed slowly to death. So essentially the Nazis had set up a system whereby the prisoners couldn't even decide how they were going to commit suicide - they took away the last bit of control that the prisoners had!

Picture: Barbed wire and electric fence with the gravel 'neutral zone'

The camp was built in 1936 to initially house anyone who politically opposed the Nazi regime but later on prisoners were brought here who were, in the Nazi's eyes, racially and biologically inferior. Over the years 200,000 prisoners passed through Sachsenhausen. The prisoners were placed in a hierarchy to assist the SS in maintaining control - coloured triangles were sewn onto the tops to distinguish the different groups. Communists were given red triangles, homosexuals were near the bottom with pink triangles and Jews were right at the bottom with yellow triangles.

Picture: The camp uniform with the coloured triangles in the bottom corner

Because of this hierarchy, anytime a prisoner of note was brought to the camp, for example Stalin's son, they were taken directly to the prison (within the prison?!) to prevent them from disturbing the harmony of the camp. They were interrogated, tortured and housed in terrible conditions, however, their conditions were no worse than the rest of the prisoners.

Picture: Conditions within the prison

Jews were segregated in the 'Small Camp' to the side of Sachsenhausen. Many of them had good trades before being arrested so many were put to work to restore watches that had been taken from Jews at Auschwitz or to make counterfeit British money. The plan was to drop the Sterling into UK cities but it didn't work. If it had, it would have destroyed the British economy.

In 1942 the Jews from Sachsenhausen were sent on the death march to Auschwitz as, at this time, Sachsenhausen was not a death camp. In 1943 Station Z was created (note a direct comparison to the entrance called Tower A) to "liquidate" prisoners. As I mentioned earlier, this camp was designed to be the model camp and to test ideas before releasing them to the other camps as standard. Station Z housed a gas chamber that, amoungst other things, tested how little gas needed to be used to kill the prisoners. It wasn't enough that they were taking the lives of other human beings but they were concerned about saving money as well! I can't get my head around it! Prior to the gas chamber, prisoners were killed with a shot to the neck but, to make it nicer for the SS, the didn't have to look at the prisoners as they killed them. The prisoners were tricked into believing that they were having a medical exam on entering the camp, would stand by a measuring stick on the wall, the SS would stand in the room next door and shoot through a specially designed slit in the wall. Bodies were piled up in the next room and cremated (but only after any gold teeth had been removed to be melted down and used).

Picture: the foundations of Station Z. Top right, the gas chamber. Bottom right, the waiting room for the 'medical exam'

The last place we visited on the tour was the Infirmary Barracks. In these very modern looking rooms hepatitis vaccines were tested on the prisoners and the doctors attempted to prove that Jews were physiologically different to 'Pure Aryans'. Ironic really as these same doctors were testing vaccines on Jews that would be used on Germans who, theoretically, were physiologically different! Baffling! Needless to say, the doctors didn't manage to prove that Jews and Germans were different so all of the inhumane testing was completely useless! It wasn't until later in the camp's history that Himler decided that he could get more work out of healthy prisoners so he allowed the doctors to help the sick instead of testing silly theories!

Picture: The Infirmary

The worst part about the whole thing is that the Nazis knew that what they were doing was wrong because they tried to cover up the evidence. And yet they still did it! At one camp they built a farm where the camp had once stood and paid a Polish family to say that they'd lived there the whole of their lives!

There is one overwhelming theme of thoughts in my head right now - how could anyone do this to another human being and why would they want to? I know I couldn't, no matter how much I believed I'd been wronged by someone!

R.I.P everyone who was murdered in Nazi camps

Picture: The memorial statue that was erected at Station Z

Picture: The memorial at Station Z continued

Ypres and WW1 Battlefields

Welcome to my first blog from my trip in Europe!

I've just got back from a battlefields tour of the Ypres Salient and I'm absolutely blown away. I've studied the war at school, seen countless movies and done my own reading around the subject but I was still totally unprepared for what I've witnessed and experienced over the past 2 days.
I attended The Last Post at The Menin Gate last night and, although I didn't really have a personal link to anyone whose life was being celebrated, I still felt that the whole experience was incredibly moving. I actually felt very drained afterwards, as if I'd just attended a funeral!

Picture: Menin Gate

Then, bright and early this morning, I was taken on a tour of the battlefields near Ypres by a very knowledgeable Englishman called Bob. He has spent the whole of his life studying the two world wars, could recount verbatim letters/ stories/ poems from the front and could answer any question that was thrown at him. Firstly he took us to Hill 60 (a hill that was created by men who, as they created the railway, needed somewhere to throw excess soil). This was German occupied for a long while as it was 60 ft above sea level and gave a great vantage point. But what struck me most was the distance between the German front line and the Allied front line - it was literally a stone's throw away! Bob described to us how the miners were employed, at 6 times the wages of the soldiers, to tunnel under the German territory. In 1917 a series of explosions were set off by the Allies underneath the German territory resulting in a huge amount of German deaths and striking fear and shock into the rest. The Caterpillar Crater was created by one of these explosions and it was said that a huge cheer could be heard from the Allies as this was detonated - it was very motivational for the men! Bob had mentioned that it was predicted that thousands of bodies still lay under the grass at Hill 60 and there certainly was an eery feeling as we walked around.

Picture: Caterpillar Crater

Next we went to Hill 62/ Sanctuary Wood where we stood in preserved Allied trenches. I walked through a Communication Trench where I noted how cold and wet it was (and I was only there a matter of minutes, not years as the soldiers had been!). I wasn't able to stand straight as it was underground and I spent most of the 90 seconds that I was in there praying that there weren't any rats! Thankfully it was pitch black so I wouldn't have been able to see them anyway! Interesting note: we'd started chatting about Birdsong when we'd visited Hill 60 (as there was a link with miners and WW1) so when we reached Sanctuary Wood Bob told me that Eddie Redmayne had hired him a couple of years back to help him to understand the nature of trench warfare and to give him a good idea as to how the soldiers felt. Apparently Eddie had walked through this Communication Trench 15 times to get a really good feel for it - I walked through twice and knew that I didn't like it and didn't want to do it again!

Picture: Inside the Communications Trench

It was interesting to go at this time of year as it was very wet and soggy and the trenches were filled with water - I couldn't go in the Support Trench as the water would have spilled over my walking boots and I might have got trench foot (OK, maybe I'm being dramatic but my feet would definitely have ended up damp!). What struck me was how narrow the trenches were. It's unbelievable to think that the men slept, ate and socialised in such cramped conditions. There were holes literally metres from the trenches that had been caused by shelling, so I guess the men wouldn't have been getting much sleep anyway due to the noise. Bob had also mentioned that the Germans were big fans of eating rats - they were apparently a delicacy!

Picture: The Support Trench

Outside the museum was a great example of the Howitzer which Bob explained was a German brand that the Allies copied and improved over the years - quite cheeky to use their own design against them, I think!

Picture: The Howitzer

Next we went to two cemeteries - one was a battlefield cemetery and one had been created after the war for the Australian men. There were some stones that backed up against the wall of the battlefield cemetery which I later learned meant that the soldiers had been buried in that cemetery after they'd died (these were recorded) but then the cemetery had been shelled during the war. When the Commonwealth War Graves Commission came to restore the cemeteries (most of which had been makeshift cemeteries in the battlefield) they had no body to put with the stone so the stone was laid next to the wall. It was amazing how many of these stones I saw on the 4 hour tour!
We also went to Tyne Cot Cemetery - the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world. Almost 12,000 soldiers were buried here. The thing that saddened me the most was that around 8000 of these graves were for unidentified men! Sometimes a rank was put on the stone but oftentimes it was left blank. An inscription was put at the bottom of all of these stones of "Known Unto God" that was chosen by Rudyard Kipling which is a nice touch, however, it must be sad for the relatives who are not able to visit a specific stone and know that their husband/ father/ brother is buried there.

Picture: Tyne Cot Cemetery

At the end of the war, King George had visited the site where Tyne Cot Cemetery now stands. He'd declared that the Cross of Remembrance be built on top of one of the German Bunkers - it is still there today.

Picture: The Cross of Remembrance on top of the German Bunker

Lastly we visited The Brooding Soldier - a statue that marks the spot of the first gas attacks in WW1. We were told a lovely story of how one of the soldiers (a Chemist back at home) knew that the natural substance for neutralising the chlorine gas was urine. So news quickly spread that, when the next gas attack happened, the soldiers should wee on some cloth and hold it to their mouths. A horrible thought now, however, I'm sure I'd rather inhale my own urine than die from exposure to the gas!

Picture: The Brooding Soldier

All in all, a really interesting and thought-provoking day. Compared to what these men went through in the battlefields, we have no reason to complain with the easy lives we live today! It was freezing up on those hills (and I was wearing 3 layers - some of the Canadians and Scots were wearing kilts!). The noise in 1914 must have been deafening, the smell unbearable and the fear of potential death at every turn must have been incredibly traumatic, not only for the men on a daily basis but for their families who would have had to pick up the pieces when (if) they got home.

I have loved wandering round Ypres (Ieper), especially since I'm one of only a few tourists in the whole town, and I have found it very interesting to see how the community have rebuilt there lives in the past 90 years. Buildings were rebuilt to replicate the buildings that were shelled (from around 7 miles away in the battlefields) and farmers came back, picked the shells and hand grenades out of their fields and got back to work. They are still finding unexploded shells today and every month the bomb disposal unit blows them up - unbelievable 100 years on!

Next stop = Bruges tomorrow!