Giant Green Turtles and the BBC Relay Station

On Tuesday, March 20, we climbed around Fort Bedford which is situated on the lower part of a cinder cone just inland from Georgetown.  Some of the cannon are 19th century and two other rusty cannon were last used to scare off a Nazi submarine in World War II. We had a tour of the BBC World Service relay station courtesy of a friend of Howard Peters, who worked there until February.  The station gets BBC programming via satellite and rebroadcasts it on short wave radio to Africa and South America from this unique dot in the South Atlantic ocean.  The service provides unbiased news coverage, especially to those in less democratic countries.  The power supplies, amplifiers, frequency generators and tuners (some made in the 1940s) all operating at 11,000 volts and 100,000 watts are impressive!  If you're worried about cell phone exposure, don't wander into the BBC's field of transmitter antennae!  The BBC operates the only power station on the island and uses 90% of the power it generates.  The BBC also supplies, via desalination, almost all of the drinking water for the island. Nearby we swam at English Bay, one of the only two "safe" swimming beaches on the island.  Very warm water!  On Wednesday, March 21, we finally had a successful walk on the paths around Green Mountain.  They are definitely jungle walks, overgrown and sometimes requiring considerable exploration to determine the course of the path.  All is made more interesting by the fact that the paths are mostly cut out of the steep slopes of the mountain-side.  We have learned that parts of the Garden Cottage, in which we are living, date from 1817, and that our water is unique in that it comes from a well high up on the mountain and reaches us via a 300 meter tunnel through the mountain. Readers of this blog will find it unsurprising that we ended up at Phyllis's Village Takeaway, eating a delicious chicken curry for dinner!  After dark, we went to Long Beach to see green turtles coming onshore to lay and bury eggs.  The turtles are easily frightened but don't see red light very well, so Meg made a red filter for our torch out of parts of a plastic bag!  We saw many of these 400 pound, 3 foot long female turtles leaving the sea, crawling up the beach and digging large depressions in which to lay eggs.  The turtles have been doing this for several months.  We also saw a baby turtle that had recently hatched, claw his (or her) way up through the sand and head for the sea.  It had a tendency to head in the wrong direction, so Meg gave him an airlift to the water's edge.  Hopefully, he can head out to sea where it will be safer.