The big day has arrived - the day I present my work to the world at the first conference I’ve attended at an international level. I was rather nervous all the way in on the bus to the congress, but ignored my butterflies to focus on the first session of the morning.

I was very worried about how it would go to begin with, but once I had the first person dealt with, it was quite easy and I soon began to enjoy it. After all, as Dave reminded me, I knew the work better than any other person there, so I was the one in control of the situation.

My poster proved to be very popular, mainly because not much work has been done in the area I’ve been researching, and many people were interested in the numbers I was finding. Many of the posters were largely ignored by the masses, but mine was besieged with queries for half an hour after the poster session was officially over. Okay, so perhaps “besieged” is a strong word, but certainly “popular”.

One person reading it asked how many soil samples were taken, and that he hoped I’d had technical assistance and not had to do them all myself. I replied that I had a beautiful yet gullible partner in Diana (”come on Di, let’s go do soil sampling, it’ll be more fun than last time, I promise!”) and he felt that she should have been given credit to her. I’d like to make it clear here that the offer was made to her and she turned it down.

At the end of the day, I sat around with Dave Chapman and a couple of his old buddies from his days of study in England, drinking beer. Yes folks, that’s right, drinking beer. The beer over here varies from pretty bad to very bad, but there is a quite acceptable one called “Skol” (gotta love a beer with instructions!) which I’ve become partial too.

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001