I went on a little adventure to Grand Turk last week to sort out the logistics for our move there in July and to draw some maps that the divers could use to select sites.  Grand Turk is just gorgeous!  Old school Caribbean, with colourful houses, flowers everywhere, huge salt ponds they call Salinas (which is going to get confusing when Selina arrives!).  Flamingos stop by to feed up, as do thousands of tourists from the huge cruise ship dock.  The island is almost bi-polar, asleep one day and bustling with activity as soon as a boat docks.  After browning my trousers on the tiny 8 seater, rust bucket of a plane over, I hired a car and drove around the island a couple of times taking photographs. The reef that runs along the west side of the island is all national park.  You can snorkel out from shore to the 7000 foot drop off, one of the largest marine trenches in the world.  I stayed at a lovely place called Bohio and set up my office every day at a table on the beach.  The crazy south african head chef there kept me fed and entertained… She has a gloriously filthy mouth and I found myself imitated her ‘bloody’ this and ‘bloody’ that 😉  The wild donkeys wake you up in the morning with their constant braying… and at five o’clock each day they came to the hotel to drink out of the water bucket and got into a street brawl with the wild dogs.  I sat next to the TCI chief vet that night as he patched up the broken dogs… never argue with a donkey. On the last day I hung out the the fishermen who were all wonderfully welcoming.  They taught me how to clean and prepare fresh conch… which is extremely difficult, not only because their little eyes are staring at you while you chop off their penises but they excrete a tremendous amount of slime which means you are in constant peril of chopping off a digit.  Fishermen are a dirty lot and I discovered some amazing facts about conch… did you know they have the longest penises in proportion to body length of any animal!  I can’t wait to go back there and start interviewing.

Over the next two weeks we have to finish the interviews here in Provo, conduct two community meetings to share our results and pack up.  It’s going to be full on.  I can’t wait! 😉