Forest Kingdom
Ice Claw with all it's freezing terrors for Max Gordon will be published at the end of June, but of course I am already writing Book 3 in the Danger Zone series - Blood Sun.
I wanted a contrast to Ice Claw and decided to explore ancient civilisations in Central America as well as bringing in a modern day threat that Max has to face.
It took me three days from the time I left my home in Devon to walking into the oven that was the Belize mountains and jungle where the Mayan ruins are to be found. There wasn't much in the way of communications out there and a few things did not turn out exactly as I would have liked but now I'm back I can tell you about it.
Thanks to the very sick man in Seat 60A who spent ten hours coughing all over me it didn't take long for his germs to lodge nicely in my chest and begin a breeding programme of some serious bacteria that eventually wound up as my very own lethal-grade germ warfare stockpile.
I could have given my body to the Ministry of Defence and let them use me as a weapon of mass destruction.
Obviously this time bomb did not explode until a couple of days down the road - in just the place you do not want to get sick - the jungle.
Before that though it was an overnight stop in South Beach Miami - yes, it looks just like it does on CSI Miami, Miami Vice and all the other films made there. I had a camera problem and these good guys helped me out: Shafik and Joe - they also told me that no one used a landline phone in Miami because mobile companies offer them deals of 2000 free minutes a month! Rip off Britain take note. And they wanted to say hi to all Max Gordon's friends - who, if they are ever in in Miami - should just stop by. I wish I'd bought my new computer from them - even paying VAT on it back in the UK I'd have saved £500.
After a 5am fruit breakfast that could have probably fed half the starving world, it was an early morning start to Miami International. If you thought fighting the crowds at a Premiership match was bad - try this place. Contained chaos. Check in by machine, bag weighed, then take your bag to another holding area where it disappears on a trolley. Then queue for security (it took an hour). Everything went into the bins. They even took the caliper off a disabled man's leg and put that through the scanning machine. Belts, braces, shoes, sandals, jackets - and there were only a couple of machines available. Elderly women were being body searched, push chairs were being partly dismantled and checked - security is one thing - this was obsession. They have a serious problem of being very frightened down there!
They herd you into a glass cage, holding up your trousers and hoping no one actually notices your toe peeping through the hole in your sock - which everyone does of course. Not me, you understand because I was clever. I wore boat deck shoes without socks. What I forgot was how cold your feet could get standing on tiled floors and it's been a long time since I could balance on one leg and blow on my foot to warm it up.
They hold you in the glass cage until it's your turn to go through then they unpack your carry on - open up and check your laptop and swab it with a special pad that's put into a machine that detects any explosive residue - or maybe it's for drugs. This is Miami after all. And they wouldn't tell me what it was. Why was I asking? I'm a writer and I'm nosey. Needless to say I did not get an answer. Security! This was the only airport that did this, so it must be a Miami initiative or the fact that we were going to Central America. I don't think there are too many people drug running going there - on the way back would seem a bit more obvious.
Two hours later we're flying across the Yucatan peninsula, the offshore reefs and mangroves, landing at Goldson International Airport, Belize. This is what you see at the entrance.
A fan palm (as I called it, but it is in fact a Traveller's Palm) and an old Harrier Jump jet, which I thought might have been my connecting flight. But it was a decommissioned plane and my road transport arrived and hauled me two hours overland to the eco village where I was staying.
The Belizean people are wonderful. They're laid back, and don't let anything bother them. Their country escaped all the Central American civil wars with CIA-backed militia groups over the years. Their first language is English - and they have a good education system in place - mostly, it seems, old fashioned education run by Catholic and Anglican schools. It certainly seems to work. Everyone is keen to be educated, knowing this is the route to improving their lives. English, Spanish and Creole is what they speak daily.
This isn't the hut I stayed in - mine was deeper in the trees - but you might be able to see the roof made of palm leaves. It was hot! No breeze and 37-38 Celsius - what's that, about 98F?
I had something that squirmed and scratched inside my roof and pooped on my bed every once in a while. I don't think this was personal. It must have been a lizard, maybe a small gecko - but this larger iguana had his underground home just outside - maybe it was one of his relatives he was putting up in the penthouse suite. (You'll have to double click to enlarge this - it was a very quick shot of him - so didn't have to time to zoom in on him.)
I was already starting to cough, and could feel the bacteria having their get-together party
so I pushed on and did a three hour jungle track hike, through the dense secondary jungle, up a few hundred metres past Mayan burial mounds - and finally spotted one of the Mayan ruins in the distance that I would visit later. this is a picture of one of them.
The heat was fairly oppressive with very high humdity and most of the exploring had to be done in the early hours of the morning. The rickety old fan in the hut was pounding away like an old propeller blade, and I would lie underneath with a wet towel draped around me to keep the fever under control. The staff in the eco-village were a very helpful, and I thought I could manage without trying to find a doctor in the very small town about an hour away.
I paddled a few hours down river, and you can see from this picture, that the jungle is dense all the way to the waterline.
There were caves along the river filled with bats, but as we approached, they flew away so quickly it was impossible to photograph them. We moored at a small town and spent an hour wandering around. It was a real mixture of people, and some of them hanging around the bars looked fairly frightening, though I think that was just because they wore bandannas on their head and had some interesting tattoos. Needless to say, they all look like cut-throat drug smugglers, but in fact were very friendly guys. Everybody seems to get on with everybody.
When I was in the jungle, a big brown snake suddenly slithered right across my path - almost on my feet. It moved so quickly I'd barely had time to react. In fact, I didn't. Snakes are usually more scared of us than we are of them - at least that's the theory.
I was definitely starting to feel a bit dodgy at this stage, so thought I'd better explore the river, while I was still able. My guides assured me that there were no crocodiles or poisonous snakes swimming around in this strecth of the river. If there were crocodiles -
- I hoped that this blobby white thing in the water might be mistaken for a plastic packet.
Later, one of the guides told me that the crocodiles hatch their eggs upriver, and sometimes the baby crocodiles would be swept down by the current. And mummy would come looking for them just about where I was swimming. But who would want to eat a soggy plastic bag?
But here's one of their ancestors who didn't make it.
Anyway, things got worse and I ended up lying in the dark hut for five days, unable to eat, and having more and more difficulty in breathing.
The hallucinations were weird and it felt as though my head was going to explode. At one point I was sharing a small one-man tent with George Clooney who was reading one of mu Touch of Frost scripts by torchlight. He said some really nice things about the script (well, by all accounts he's a very nice man) and signed it, saying he hoped that we'd work together one day. See what I mean? Crazy hallucinations. But that was one of the better ones.
We were due to go to the coast after the jungle, because I was going to swim on the reef and check out the sharks and manta rays, because Max has to survive something quite drastic near the mangrove coast in Blood Sun. I was determined that before I left this beautiful country that I was going to check it out for myself -- though how I was going to pull that off, feeling the way I did, I just didn't know. Rather than take four hours overland to the coast and then a boat ride we flew out in a twin engine Islander -here's a picture of my life-saving machine.
And a view as we flew over the peninsula towards Ambergis Caye:
Thankfully, there was a clinic in the town (which has sandy streets and where everyone drives a golf cart buggy to get around.) There are plenty of some bars and a couple of resorts and the doctor there came out to see me in my room. She created a cocktail of drugs and put them into a hypodermic, the size of which was scary - and the gunk looked like a chocolate smoothy - apparently they were 'Domestos' injections - designed to kill every known germ!
This was going to be the start of my treatment, and she told me, repeatedly, that I was really ill. I wish doctors wouldn't tell you that - I was trying to be positive. Those hypos were huge and they found their way into my rear end - which maybe isn't such a small target. Anyway to cut a long story short, after another five days of treatment I decided I just had to have a go at the reef, as it was my last day on the island.
A fast boat with a marine park guide took me out and we snorkelled just this side of the main reef. I have no idea how I managed to breathe through the snorkel, feeling the way I did, but I think I swallowed so much salt water that it must have drowned some of the germs. The manta rays and sting rays, sharks and conger eels were below me about 5 m down and we bobbed and watched turtles idly going about their business.
With a final dose of medicine, and a much lighter credit card, I started my journey back to America. From Miami, I had another two weeks of travel because I was going north to the coast, where a nuclear submarine base is located, near Seattle (because I'm also thinking of another story for Max and want to set it in Canada and America) and then on to Toronto to speak to my Canadian publisher, who, along with the Americans are publishing The Devil's Breath in September.
But now I had pneumonia. It was going to be a long two weeks.
I'm saving some of the pictures from this journey because I want to post them when we get Blood Sun published next year, but I'll leave you with one of the most beautiful butterflies from the Mayan jungle - the Blue Morpho.
Hope this blog wasn't too long!
