I don't work for a uni no, I'm part of a three-man expedition team of a cryptozoology centre. They raise money for expeditions & then my team gets sent out to the middle of nowhere to hunt for monsters & weird stuff. The other guys are full time & so live in abject poverty. I'm a science journalist the rest of the time. Crytozoology is just a hobby.
We were in Mongolia for four weeks, all but two days of which was in the deep Gobi in tents, or with the nomads in their girs. I flew back on my 30th birthday at the end of May & had breakfast in Ulaanbaatar, caviar & blinis for lunch in Moscow, & ecstasy for dinner in London
I started doing this about seven or eight years ago & used to spend a month every year out of the country. I've been all over the place. The last one was a month in the Guyanese jungle paid for rather unbelievably by Capcom, who thought that a great way to advertise their game 'Monster Hunter 2' would be to send some real monster hunters out to the Amazon to look for the world's biggest anaconda. We discovered a new species of bright green scorpion and lots of Arawak Indians blew our minds telling us of their encounters with 'little people' in the jungle who 'lived under the trees'. We found people who swore they'd seen a monster snake (30ft+) in a small lake under a waterfall waaaaay out in the mountain jungle, but there was a heatwave when we went so it wasn't good snake weather, although we found some unbelievable tracks. Lots of reports of weird animals. Giant horned snakes, weird giant man-eating cats, two-tailed red caiman, etc.
The best expedition so far was two months in the Sumatran rainforest looking for Orang Pendek around a warm lake in the crater of a volcano. Climbed a couple of thousand feet down the side of the mountain into a waterfall-ringed sinkhole that even the locals said had never been explored & watched the Cicadas emerge from their thirteen-year underground hibernation at exactly the same time as, on the other side of the world, a friend of ours in Texas had the same experience. That was pretty cool. Amazing people. Our guide was the local shaman & all the villagers swore he could turn into a tiger. I was supposed to be there again a month ago but I've just started a business & couldn't manage it. Just too much work. They went without me & returned two days before the earthquake flattened their hotel & much of the rest of Padang. I haven't met up with them for a debriefing but from what I hear, they actually watched the Orang Pendek for about a minute & got tons of evidence, footprints, hair samples, half-eaten coconuts for DNA testing, etc.
I'm kicking myself. 'Too much work' seems such an utterly pitiful reason to have missed that :slanted:
However, we should be going to Tajikistan next year, looking for the Almasty, the Russian yeti
This is reading like a CV ...
