It’s been a full week here in Belize and after decimating carefully managing the environment to clear around an acre of land for the new primate enclosures. But it hasn’t all been hard work:

On Friday we had a day off travelling to Lamanai, an ancient Mayan city with the highest Mayan temple in Belize which is suitably named the ‘High Temple’. This was our first day outside of our jungle home since we arrived. On our trip we encountered three crocodiles, a wide variety of birds and bats, howler monkeys and two spider monkeys which were, unbeknownst to us, illegally placed there and are going to be the first monkeys in the new enclosure we’re building.

Clearing the area for the monkeys took a good few days and the site we were working on was a Mayan ruin itself although we haven’t found anything but a few pieces of pottery. Building the cage has finally begun, the idea is that it’s around four times the volume of the cage it’s replacing.

Adrian and Zach

Hi all. Just coming to the end of our 3rd full day here already. Spent Monday cleaning down our new home and moved in. We are staying in the original hut built by HSX on their first visit here back in 94(ish). Some great construction, it’s still standing strong. Found lots of mice, scorpions, bats and other crawlies but hopefully they have moved out now!

Tuesday was great, we were shown the Manati here (Twiggy) and the 10 monkeys in various cages. Was good to hear more detail about what we will be working on and what help we can be. As soon as we have the pre-release enclosure set up some of the howlers will be introduced to it, as they progress to full release next year.

Today the bulk of the work started; clearing jungle for the new cages and painting the hut white. I’m sure everyone will sleep well!

Apologies for the lack of pics, my camera phone has died so can’t upload via wifi. Will try to transfer some from a camera next time.

Ian

So after a very long day travelling (up at 4am, arrived 830pm) we reached Wildtracks. Below is the view from our back garden this morning, not bad huh?

Everyone in good spirits and looking forward to setting up our camping area today.

Up at 4am.

Just boarding now, next stop cancun!

With just a few days to go before we head off on our expedition, I thought I’d give you a quick overview of who is going and what we are planning to do on our 4 week expedition to Central America.

The team consits of 11 members including 3 leaders, 3 network and 5 explorers. The team is as follows:

• Ian
• Mark
• Charlotte
• Max
• Tom
• James
• Clare
• Adrian
• Zach
• Aaron
• Colm

We are going to be based at a conservation charity called Wildtracks, on the North-Eastern tip of mainland Belize in a village called Sarteneja.

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Video:

The yearly annual search for snow and ice. The weeks activities include Ice Climbing, Winter Walking amongst lots of others.

Hey Everyone,

With a few people now having the technology we’re finding more and more videos coming out of training weekends and expeditions…

You can find them here on our You Tube page… http://www.youtube.com/user/HSXOnline

Thanks and enjoy…

Alan

HSX September Training weekend is taking place at Ferny Croft on 2-4 September. The main task will be to support the Belize training weekend but there will be the opportunity to complete some of your personal training. Please let Hayley or Craig know if you are able to make the weekend!

See you there

So…… That’s it.. All done and dusted… And what an awesome experience/adventure we all had. I won’t bother putting a trip report up here, I think Chris’ blog updates and the awesome photos tell the story… However, I will put a couple of things on here.

Firstly, I want to link you to one of the other runners post race thoughts… What a write up and he says it all pretty well.. Navigate here http://www.4deserts.com/blogs/comptetior_blog_new.php?pid=OTQy&blog=21 and read Ian’s second blog entitled ‘Till the next time…’

Who won the Prize Pot & Sponsorship update!!! Oh, the excitement… Well, thanks to all of you we managed to raise a whopping £6190.34 inc gift aid for Cancer Research UK… A massive thank you goes out to everyone of you.. And now, on to the prize pot winner or winners….

Well, we always said that the winner would be the person who picked the time slot for when the team didn’t finish and due to the unfortunate events of Chris being quite ill, the team didn’t finish Stage 5. So the winner of the entire prize pot is Ian Furlong. Well done Ian. However, we also felt that as two of us did finish, the person who bought the time slot at 41hrs, 47mins, 42 seconds which was where Rich and I finished also deserved a prize.. So, we managed to get a laptop donated to us by Geek Squad UK www.geeksquad.co.uk so we’d also like to congratulate Andy Wilkinson on his prize..

Two questions left…

Would we do it again? I can’t talk for the other two, but I would (and I’m pretty sure they would)…

Do I recommend it to you? Yes!!!