PUERTO RICO EXPEDITION REPORT: THE BATCAVE TREK

As Tom and Marcus negotiated some complicated deal with the folk from the Civil Defence Graham and I filmed the local lizards which were larger and slightly more fearsome in appearance than those which we had seen in the relatively civilised lowlands of San Juan and its environs. Whilst I was stalking a particularly recalcitrant anolis specimen round and around the tattered trunk of a tall palm tree, Marcus and Norman summoned us, instructed us to get into the van, and together with a large and battered jeep the three vehicles proceeded in some sort of a convoy down a dusty road towards where we were reliably informed, the 'Batcave' could be found.

From what I could gather from the conversation taking place in the front of the van, we were able to drive a certain distance along the road, but would be unable to go any further. Indeed, a pair of impressively locked and bolted gates, some eight foot tall, then loomed in front of us.

I am not sure what happened next because as has been related at various instances during this narrative, my knowledge of the Spanish language is limited to "Dos Margueritas por favor" and "Hijo de Puta!"("Two Margueritas please" and "Son of a Whore!" respectively). During the next few weeks my knowledge of the language increased slightly, to the extent that when we were in the Mexican desert a week or so later I was able to ask exactly how many animals had been killed in a particular Chupacabra incident, but even then, the Spanish for "How much do we have to bribe you in order for one of your guys to take a pair of bolt cutters and cut your way through these chains so we can make a documentary without having to pay an exorbitant sum of money to whichever of the local big bosses wants to charge us for filming here?" was a task far beyond either Graham's or my limited competence.

This is, however, what I gather was being negotiated, and, I suspect (but neither know or care) that some money changed hands, because eventually a tall, ageing and slightly fearsome bloke in a red singlet took a pair of bolt cutters and together with a motley collection of Civil Defence bods (who seemed to materialise as if from nowhere), cut through the bolts allowing us access to the nature reserve (or whatever it was) from whence the forces of law and order had attempted to exclude us.

It was bloody hot. In fact, although I had rapidly acclimatised to the heat on the island, this was probably the hottest day that we had during our stay and before we had even started (what we were reliably informed was) the thirty minute walk to the 'Batcave', my shirt was sticking to my back, and although I still had my trusty Panama hat on my head (it had been bought for me three days before on Norman's insistence that together with an extravagantly phallic cigar it made me look something like Orson Wells), I was beginning to feel too sweaty to be able to preserve the natural dignity of an Englishman abroad. I therefore did what I thought was an extremely clever thing and figuratively hitched a lift (OK I just climbed aboard) the jeep which was taking the equipment over the bumpy roads of the national park (which were far too rugged for the civilised and slightly effete vans that we had been travelling in) to our destination.

"That was clever," I thought. I was convinced that the so-called half hour walk would be completed in about seven minutes slightly bumpy travel, whereupon I could regain my composure in the shade of a convenient tree, and thus look fresh and rested by the time we were ready to film us 'arriving' at the "Batcave".

However the best laid plans of 'Animals & Men' tend to go (as we said the next week in the desert) 'Prickly Pear Shaped'.

The 'Batcave' wasn't a half hour stroll from the locked gates as we had been led to believe but was a forty five minute climb up a rocky hillside that sloped at an angle of over forty five degrees in front of us!

I have never made any secret of the fact that I am extremely physically unfit. Let's face it, when you are the size that I am, to try and do so would be a singularly pointless exercise. For too many years now I have eaten too much, drunk too much, smoked too much, ingested too many chemicals and taken practically no physical exercise. Now, suddenly, I was to regret these excesses with the very real possibility that this hillside before me was to be my nemesis.

As a child in Hong Kong I had spent many hours playing on hillsides like this and so the terrain was not at all unfamiliar. However, the prospect of clambering up a slope, the prospect of which was making younger and far more physically fit members of the film crew wince in anticipation, reliving experiences from my childhood thirty years before was not something that I was relishing. However, I was damned if I was going to let anybody realise, and so as far as possible I tried to be 'ahead of the field' as it were and to treat the whole affair with as much nonchalance as I was able.

OK, my stance as leader didn't last more than five minutes and the ascent took me a fair bit longer than it took some (but not all) of the rest of the party, but I did it, and I eventually reached the summit with my honour (and my Panama Hat) relatively intact. About half way through our ascent there was a loud tooting noise from the open area at the bottom of the hill, and, looking down, we could see that reinforcements - in the form of another four Civil defence bods (two of them female) was at hand. This brought the total number of our party who were trespassing upon the Parks Department property to about sixteen.

The two female Civil Defence volunteers were a shapely and beautiful lady called Isabella. She moved with the lithe grace of my cat (with the same name) at home in Exeter, and a wonderful lady called Maria. She was about half my height and of roughly the same build and physical characteristics, making her somewhere between sturdy and circular.

The two of us hit it off immediately, much to the ribald delight of the assembled party, and we flirted outrageously for the rest of the day as we courteously helped each other up slippery rock faces and into the cave. By this time it was starting to rain and the rocks were becoming slippery. As we approached the entrance to the cave it became apparent that all was not well.

A torrent of muffled curses from the technicians at the top of the hill and inside the cave mouth where they were sheltering from the burgeoning rain storm told Maria, Graham and me that something was amiss. Knowing that, whatever happened, Norman would want to film our final approach to the cave, I sat on a comfortable rock about fifty yards down the hill, offered a cigarette to Maria, lit one myself and stared into the middle distance waiting for something to happen.

Graham went ahead to recce the situation and found out that there was some unexplained fault on the cables which were an integral part of the lighting rig. There was also a second incipient problem. The entrance to the cavern was so small that until we had access to some proper lights it was problematical whether I would be able to get in through the tiny gap. Warren was dispatched down the hill to find a replacement cable and a selection of necessary repair tools, and I still sat on the rock musing on the utter ludicrousness of the situation.

To have made it up the hill unscathed and without even having been particularly more out of breath than the rest of the party was, to me at least, a seriously impressive achievement and I was feeling rather proud of myself. I looked forward to my return to the UK if only so I could tell friends, family and psychiatrists about how I had managed to slay one of my own personal dragons. however, having managed to slay the dragon and lay it (figuratively at least) at my feet and those of my dusky (if rotund)maiden Maria, it seemed as if the whole episode had been completely pointless. If we were not able to actually get into the cave then we might as well have stayed back in the hotel watching "Confessions of a Mad Housewife" on Cable TV.

My mildly pointless reverie was shattered by the arrival of Graham who had been examining the entrance to the cave and was somewhat amused to find out that the Civil defence folk were using what looked suspiciously like a petrol bomb to illuminate the dark cavern. He followed up this piece of information with an obscure reference to my collection of Irish Rebel songs which I had taken half way across the world to listen to in my hotel bedroom each night and then disappeared off into the undergrowth with a cackle.

Within minutes Warren arrived back with the necessary bits of kit and within a very short length of time the essential repairs had been carried out and we were ready to resume filming. Maria and I climbed up the last fifty yards and hugged each other as we reached the summit. We then disappeared into the murky depths of the cave.

Filming being what it is, however, this was far more complicated than it appears. We actually had to go in through the entrance of the cave on five separate occasions being filmed from every conceivable angle before we were allowed to actually enter the cave and explore.

Whereas, as one might expect, we found absolutely no evidence that these caves were haunted by El Chupacabra we did find evidence that showed WHY the local people, riddled as they were by a mixture of peasant superstition, Santeria madness and Roman Catholic guilt could well believe that these caves were, indeed haunted by a monster.

There was evidence that the cave was quite well frequented by the local populace as the walls were covered in graffiti of various types. Even with my limited knowledge of the language it was obvious that ninety percent of what was written on the walls was of the "Ramon Loves Dolores" ilk, but it was equally obvious that other inscriptions were nothing of the kind.

One of the most annoying things about our whole trip is that neither my photographs of Graham's video tape of the carvings that we found inside the cave actually came out. Time will tell whether the Channel Four footage shows anything recognisable, but within only a few yards of the entrance of the cave was a little niche in the rock where it was obvious that candles had been placed in the near past. Above the burned-out candle stubs was what was obviously a fertility symbol carved into the rock. It looked (and this is from memory) very similar to the familiar image of the Sheela Na Gig which is found over much of the celtic world, except for the phallus sticking out of the top of its head. This hermaphroditic deity was obviously a figure of some respect amongst the local people. We asked our valiant guides for an explanation but none was forthcoming although I remain convinced that they knew a great deal more than they were letting on.

There was other evidence that this cave had been used for ritual magic in the relatively recent past, and there was also no doubt that the cave was the haunt of at least three species of bat, one of which the local people believed (although whether or not it actually was) was a vampire.

Another species of bat that inhabited these caves was evidently a fruit eater because our guides pointed out some pale and anaemic plants that had apparently grown from the seeds of the Moca plant - a favourite food of the bats which had been excreted onto the ground below their roosts. I collected specimens of some of these Moca nuts and eventually I managed to get them back to the UK. In the early summer I shall try to germinate one of them.

Another of my specimens from this part of our journey was less lucky. In a cleft in the rock I discovered a peculiar looking snail whose shell appeared very much in the guise of a flying saucer. I collected several of these creatures over the next few days, and although my original hypothesis - that they had evolved this peculiar shape so that they could live in the crevasses in the walls of these mountain caves - was disproved when we found specimens of the same species in the open ground at El Yunque rain Forest two days later, they were interesting specimens.

I named them Norman and Marcus, after our beloved Director and Producer and managed to keep them alive for several weeks. Unfortunately, however, they expired soon after I got them back (probably totally illegally) to the UK. Sad but true.

After about an hour filming in the caves, our guides pointed out that the rain was coming in quite strongly by this time and by using a series of graphic pieces of pantomime they pointed out that furthermore the rocks on our descent back to the truck would be treacherously slippery if we left our descent much longer. There was a third aspect to our predicament which lent urgency to our departure - it was getting dark. The climb up had been difficult enough in broad daylight but, to go down through a burgeoning sea of mud in the gathering gloom seemed to be an exercise which was designed to stretch intrepidness beyond reasonable limits and so we all elected to leave.

Much to my surprise the descent was somewhat easier than the climb had been and I got back to the bottom of the hill safe and sound to a barrage of cheers from the Civil Defence folk who, by this time I think, had actually got quite fond of me and were busy teasing Maria and me about what they saw as our burgeoning romance. We drove back up the track to the gates and the road with me and the chap in the red singlet (whose name, it turned out was Ernesto), sitting in the front and everyone else packed like sardines into the back. Ernesto sang as he drove, and tried to teach me a complicated refrain of a song (which I later found out) was a lament for someone whose sweetheart had died of an unspecified disease. It was quite a cheerful tune, and although the words were quite beyond me I picked up the melody easily enough and we warbled our way up the hill. My attempts to teach Ernesto "We're on the One Road (The Road to God Knows Where)" were almost as successful and although no-one else in the vehicle knew what we were doing we enjoyed ourselves.

When we returned to where we had left the other vehicles the Civil Defence Volunteers invited us to join them at a roadside bar which was, as far as we could gather, their social club. There those who could play pool challenged the locals to game after game of what I must admit I have always seen as a remarkably uninteresting exercise, and the rest of us drank smoked and ate tortillas.

When it was time for us to leave, the men in the party all either hugged me or shook my hand and Maria kissed me goodbye. Joking apart, there was a definite attraction between us and I felt a slight tinge of regret as I realised that I would probably never see her again. Feeling like a cryptozoologist with a girl in every port I got into the van next to Graham, waved goodbye to our new-found friends and let Marcus drive us back to San Juan.