EXPEDITION REPORT- DAY 2

In all the best children's adventure stories, the intrepid pair start their account with the words "We awoke bright and early on the first morn of our journey". In this case we did, but it was only with the aid of the hotel's alarm call system, and we both had hangovers. Staggering into breakfast like a pair of two-toed sloths on Methaquaaqualone we eagerly (or as eagerly as one can at 6.30 in the morning) awaited the "Full English Breakfast" that the hotel menu had promised. After hanging around for ten minutes we were informed by a particularly taciturn waiter that the chef was ill and that we would have to break our fast with some spectacularly unattractive cornflakes and some even less appetising fluids which proclaimed themselves to be 'coffee' and 'orange juice'.

The three members of the crew whom we had met briefly the previous night then came into the breakfast room, looked somewhat annoyed at having to put up with the singularly unattractive menu offered to us, grabbed cups of what the hotel staff still insisted was coffee and joined Graham and me at our table.

They introduced themselves. First to arrive was Nick the cameraman. Over the next few weeks we discovered what an exciting career he had enjoyed so far. When someone casually mentions "having been in Bolivia before Christmas" and talks about the difficulties and privations involved in filming an ascent of Mount Everest for six months at a time, and all without any trace of self consciousness and without even the slightest hint of being a poseur, one can only be in awe of the bloke. I think that I can truthfully say that if it weren't for Nick we wouldn't have survived the trip. There are various incidents recounted in the following pages (and quite a few which have been left out in order to protect what remains of our tattered reputations), which we just wouldn't have got through without Nick's good-humoured and kindly assistance.

A few minutes later Dave, the sound man entered. Another quiet, unassuming bloke with a broad smile and a quietly acerbic sense of humour. Over the next few weeks we were to get to know him as well as we did Nick. Dave had the unenviable task of having to record all the sound for the documentary team. As this involved having to attach microphones to me and Graham, and therefore laid us open to electronic eavesdropping at any time - and also considering that Graham's and my conversation, when we forget that we are likely to be overheard, does sometimes border on the scatological, means that Dave should really be (if there were such a thing) be nominated for whatever the cinematic industry has as its equivalent of the Purple Heart for services over and above the call of duty.

Finally Warren joined us. I have never been any good at judging ages of people but I reckon that he was probably the youngest of the team, (either sitting at our table in London or awaiting our arrival in Puerto Rico with figuratively baited breath). He soon proved himself to be a wizard with gaffer tape and super glue and to be the best technician that I have ever worked with. Over the next few weeks he came to remind me of another Dave - the backline technician with whom I had done so many UK tours with the late lamented 'Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel', and whose quiet good humour had managed to deflect many a storm upon the ocean of a low budget rock and roll tour during the early 1990s. (See my book 'Road Dreams (1993) for details). This expedition was costing a great deal more money and the stakes were far higher, but Warren managed to keep the whole show figuratively (and sometimes literally) on the roads. Thanx Pal. If it weren't for you the film would probably never have been made.

Giving up 'breakfast' as a bad job, we loaded the enormous number of ungainly packages, parcels and bundles onto the crew hire car, and as they drove off towards Heathrow Terminal Two, Graham and I boarded the so-called courtesy coach and made our way towards the same destination. Making our way through the cavernous concrete tunnels which surround the singularly unattractive aviation conurbation that is Heathrow we felt that the journey was starting properly at last.

Ironically it was getting all our luggage (and the camera equipment) through Customs to get it out of England that was the most arduous administrative exercise of the whole journey. I had imagined that entering Mexico would be more difficult. I had been led by many people to expect a country where I assumed that half the officials would either be open to (or looking for) bribes, and quite prepared to make imaginary obstructions in our path if they didn't get them. I was wrong. Entering Mexico and even the United States was a doddle compared with leaving England, and to this day I am really not quite sure why. I am sure that there is a perfectly rational explanation - probably something to do with the Inland Revenue (or some similar government department) wanting to make sure what was taken out of the country was for legitimate use abroad and not for illicit sale. However, this book is about our search for the grotesquely surreal blood sucking vampire of Latin America and not for the whys and wherefores of the laws surrounding import and export from the United Kingdom, and so in the interests of brevity (and not boring all my readers stupid with unnecessary information) I feel that we should leave the subject and get on with the journey.

We negotiated Emigration and received our boarding passes. This is where Graham and I made our first mistake. We made straight for the duty free shop where I bought four hundred cigarettes and half a bottle of whisky and Graham bought enormous amounts of rolling tobacco. Unfortunately he neglected to buy extra cigarette papers. In most of the places that we were to visit, these essential items of equipment are seen as items of dope smoking paraphernalia, and are therefore either illegal (as in Puerto Rico) or extremely difficult to buy (everywhere else). So Graham's stash of Golden Virginia was pretty well useless, and as far as I know was largely intact by the time we finally re-entered the United Kingdom three and a bit weeks later.

What we shouldn't have done was to drink the whisky immediately, but in a spirit of bonhomie and good humour it seemed like a good idea at the time. Graham and I were mildly pickled by the time the aeroplane took to the air at about ten thirty in the morning and by the time we were half way across the Atlantic, and had drunk large amounts of the free booze kindly laid on by those jolly nice chaps at American Airways we were cheerfully, if slightly noisily drunk! Then a rather sexy stewardess who (although she was far from being in the first flush of youth) smiled sweetly at us and asked us whether we wanted to buy any duty free products. As we had finished our whisky it seemed a good idea to spend $20 US on a litre bottle of Jack Daniels which we proceeded to drink until the jolly nice stewardess politely came up to us and took the bottle away from us promising that we could have it back when we arrived in the land of the free. Perhaps the fact that we were singing cheerfully and making a series of biologically detailed comments about president Clinton (who at the time - as always - was involved in allegations of a sex scandal) had something to do with it, or perhaps it was the fact that drunkenness on an aeroplane is actually a federal offence according to US law!

We weren't actually causing any trouble. I very much doubt whether we were causing any annoyance whatsoever to the other passengers, but although Graham and I have got an enormous capacity for alcohol (at least compared to most normal mortals), it is only right and proper that the powers that be should have assumed that we were going to case trouble, even though there was no way in reality that we were actually going to. We then decided to go to sleep and when we awoke the 'plane was just about to make its long descent through the clouds towards the Florida coast.

For reasons completely unknown to me it seems that American Airways do not operate scheduled flights between London and either Mexico City or San Juan in Puerto Rico, so on each journey we had to go through Miami. I am not a great fan of mainland United States, and although some of my dearest friends are Americans I have never made any secret of the fact. Miami Airport, (which we visited four times in three weeks) is a particularly unprepossessing facility and is hardly likely to make anyone - least of all me - look upon the United States with a less jaundiced eye.

We managed to become separated from the rest of the crew as we tried to negotiate American Immigration. Unfortunately we managed to get in completely the wrong line and a process which should have taken about fifteen minutes took nearly an hour! Certain unkind rumours amongst other members of the team later in the journey suggested that this was because we were too drunk to know any better, but I maintain still that the real culprits were the Immigration Officers to whom we spoke to first of all, who spoke hardly any English and mistook our statement that we were travelling TO Puerto Rico as a claim that we were actually residents of the island (this despite our UK/EEC passports), and then became quite unpleasant when we tried to explain the true state of affairs to them.

OK the fact that Graham went off for a cigarette and precisely the wrong moment and then ended up in yet another wrong queue also didn't help, but on the whole the mistakes were not of our making. We eventually managed to negotiate the Immigration procedure and found the rest of the crew - who by this time had become convinced that Graham and I were stumbling around drunk somewhere else in the airport terminal and were therefore going to make them (and us) miss the next 'plane to Puerto Rico. We managed to board the next aircraft with about five minutes to spare and I THINK that we managed to convince Nick and the others that the delay really hadn't been our fault. I hope that they believed us.

The aeroplane taking us from Miami to Puerto Rico was a very much less ostentatious affair than the one in which we had traversed the Atlantic. The upholstery on the seats was far more shabby, the stewardesses less plastically attractive, and the food far less wholesome. Graham and I felt at home almost immediately. As we relaxed into our seats the 'plane took off and flew slowly across the Caribbean towards Puerto Rico. Being an internal US flight the alcohol was no longer free and so I surreptitiously poured Jack Daniels (from what was left of the litre bottle that we had been given back by the aircrew of the previous aircraft upon our arrival in Miami) into the complimentary glasses of Diet Coke which we were given. Graham wisely decided not to drink any more whisky.

Unfortunately, although (as I have stated already) Graham and I both have a fairly masterful capacity for alcohol, I am much larger than he is both in frame and weight, and I have also been a whisky drinker for longer than he has. Graham has an incredibly fast metabolism and is therefore very skinny. When he tries to match me drink for drink with whisky (especially as he prefers it with a much larger ratio of whisky to coke than I do), he has been known to come a cropper. He therefore switched to beer whilst I flew over the moonlit Caribbean in a haze of blended Kentucky spirit.

By the time we finally landed at San Juan airport we were both sober - well relatively so, but whereas I knew what to expect, Graham was less prepared for the wall of heat which hit us as we disembarked from the aircraft. Graham was dehydrated and felt decidedly unwell. Indeed, he remained under par for several days, but I felt immediately at home. I had forgotten the glorious essence of a tropical night; the coppery taste, the sound of crickets and tree frogs, and the rank smell of unwashed humanity and cooking food from the semi-legal food stalls manned by hawkers which sprung up like mushrooms alongside most of the roads.

All my worries about not being able to deal with the tropical heat vanished immediately and I luxuriated in the heat and the ambience of a place which although diametrically on the opposite side of the world to the place where I had been brought up was in essence so close to it that it immediately felt like home.

As we collected our baggage from the revolving carousel the three remaining members of the team, who had already been on the island for a week, turned up to greet us. Graham and I had met all three before.

First was Tom, the researcher who had originally contacted us nearly six months before. We owe him an enormous debt of gratitude because if it weren't for him we wouldn't have been there in the first place. Like the other two team members who were waiting for us at Puerto Rico airport he had a dreadful sense of humour but was (and presumably still is) an efficient and reliable researcher. He had visited the offices of the Centre for Fortean Zoology (a polite euphemism for the rather grotty mid terraced house in which I reside together with my cats, dog and turtles) in Exeter, the previous September and presumably what he had seen impressed him enough to make a favourable report to his bosses who eventually hired us.

The second on the scene was Marcus. A cheerful bloke with a passion for birdwatching and a shock of unruly hair. He was the producer of the film and although he had a fair amount of artistic input his main job was to deal with the money, the administration and the more complicated aspects of the project in order to free Graham and me to hunt for vampires and the rest of the crew to make what we all hoped was going to be a wonderful movie!

Finally Norman arrived. He is one of the foremost documentary directors in the UK, and although we had our differences at various times during the trip he is a man for whom I have a great deal of respect and with whom I very much hope that I will be working again in the future. He looked uncannily like an older version of the young John Lennon (if that isn't too much of a mixed analogy for anyone to grasp) and he had an impeccable taste in music and drinks, introducing me both to Radiohead and Margaritas (one is an English Indie band and the other a cocktail consisting of Cointreau, tequila and lemon juice - I leave it up to your powers of deduction to work out which is which).

This was the crew with whom our entire existence over the next three and a bit weeks would be spent. We loaded the thirty odd items of luggage into the two surprisingly spacious Japanese mini-vans and made our way across San Juan to the hotel.

At night, San Juan, or at least the parts through which we had to drive, looked like any other touristy and Americanised resort city across the world, and with the air conditioning on in the car we were safely cushioned from the outside world, but as we pulled up outside the hotel and disembarked again the heat hit us again and we were soon enveloped in the all encompassing womb like ambience of the tropical night.

The procedure of checking into the hotel took a surprisingly long time, but eventually we found our rooms, discovered how to work the air conditioning and then together with the rest of the crew we walked three blocks through the tropical night to a bar where we drank a rather pleasant beer from the Dominican Republic called El Presidente, and discussed our plans for the next weeks filming.

Tom gave us each an envelope containing $400 US as per diem expenses to last over the next three days. I put mine safely into the document wallet in the lid of my brief case which, despite its seeming incongruity, was my constant companion until my return to the UK; and Graham, overcome with bonhomie and a feeling of goodwill towards his fellow men, went into the bar to buy a round of drinks for us all. It was only the next day that we discovered that whilst doing so he managed to mislay/lose/have stolen (delete where applicable) three quarters of his per diem expenses within half an hour of being given them. This caused a few problems, but to a resourceful character like Senor Inglis, intrepid explorer and notorious skinflint of this parish, who has spent much of his life living on the pittance handed out to the unemployed by an uncaring Government, the strictures of living on about ten bucks a day weren't too bad!

On the way back to the hotel we popped in to a late night supermarket where Graham and I were to spend a lot of our off duty hours over the next week. Norman and I had to explain to Graham that it wasn't safe to drink unboiled tap water, and so we purchased several gallon bottles of drinking water, and some cheap comestibles with which to retire to our respective rooms and dream about the adventures ahead.