USA

By Dr. Mike on August 11, 2009 6:58 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment

During the filming of 'Bite Me,' I had plenty of encounters with snakes, both planned and unplanned.  Generally I'm not fazed by snakes, especially for someone more used to tiny micro-organisms (even if the tiny things are often the deadliest), but ironically my most exciting snake encounter wasn't in some exotic tropical country, but in Florida.

The morning in question didn't start well.  A local wildlife expert (who also happened to own the airboat in which we planned to travel across the Everglades) limped over with his foot in a huge bandage -- crocodile bite!  As he was unable to help us he had arranged for a colleague to take us out, but when he finally arrived his hand and lower arm were bandaged up -- alligator bite! We had also expected to meet a pest control expert in order to do some fact finding, but unfortunately he was in hospital after being attacked by killer bees.  I tried to avoid thinking that these were all bad omens!  At least the weather was nice, and anyway it didn't take long to find another volunteer to accompany us on our snake hunt, and luckily he knew how to handle big snakes. 

The plan was to cruise out into the Everglades in the airboat in search of one of the 260-strong population of Burmese pythons.  Then we aimed to capture it and deliver it to the authorities.  The Pythons now breed and live in the Everglades, but nature certainly didn't intend them to do so.  This bunch of reptiles all originate from former pets that were released into the wild when they became too big to handle.  Once enough of them were slithering around the area it was inevitable that a few males met a few females and now they are established as a rather unwelcome breeding population.

It didn't take too long before we found a python, and it was huge.  I was secretly hoping to find a snake big enough to look good on camera, but not so big that it could potentially eat me.  The crew seemed pleased to have found such a monster, but I wasn't so sure.  This one was a good twelve feet long and had a girth bigger than my thighs.  OK, so it might not actually eat me but it was really massive. 

I tried not to show that I was having second thoughts.  When catching snakes even a virologist knows that commitment is everything.  Second thoughts are bad.  Once you go to grab a snake behind the head you need to be both swift and confident because a tiny hesitation can result in a bite.  Pythons may kill their prey by suffocating them rather than simply by biting them, they may not be venomous, but they've still got bloody sharp teeth.

Albert, our local volunteer came forward to offer some advice.  "If you're going to catch this snake, boy you need to get some backbone" he told me. 

Thanks! I thought, wishing that he could say something more practical, which thankfully he did a minute or two later.

"If you don't want to get bit work out how much spare length he's got in them coils.  As long as you stay further away than he can reach, you should be alright."

At that Albert stood about five feet in front of the snake as if to say.  "This is about the right distance."  But it wasn't the right distance! The snake lifted its head and struck with amazing speed grabbing poor Albert's forearm with its huge mouth.  Luckily it didn't hold on, but plenty of blood was spilled and needless to say it did nothing to build my confidence.  As you will see in the show, I did grab and hold the python without being bitten, suffocated or eaten -- and without becoming the fifth casualty of the day -- but it was so incredibly heavy and strong that I stood no chance of getting it onto our airboat.

The Python was quite an edgy encounter, whereas learning to drive the airboat was just pure exhilaration and fun.  I love the idea of a hand-built boat powered by an old-school Cadillac 500 series V-8 with a dirty great aircraft prop grafted to it.  The thing was noisy, quick, and could get across all sorts of terrain which would beat any other sort of boat.  Driving it was a unique experience. I sat high above the reeds, the big V-8 bellowed behind my ears as I steered the boat left and right by pushing a lever backwards or forwards.  The only downside was that while shouting over the deafening machine I managed to wear out my voice -- something that you need to use as a TV host!      

The USA always surprises me.  I thought that I'd had spent enough time in the country to get to know it quite well, particularly the southwest where I've spent weeks touring around on motorbikes with my brother.  But Portal, Arizona, gently sneaked up on my subconscious and became my favourite location of the whole series.  I love the tropics and have a passion for travelling in undeveloped or remote areas.  All the other locations we visited were fascinating, exotic, exciting, culturally diverse - truly remarkable places, but Portal had an atmosphere of its own - and I loved it.  Portal is a tiny settlement in southern Arizona nestling under the Chiricahua Mountains close to the borders of both Mexico to the south and New Mexico to the east.  It has history (Geronimo was captured around here and sent to a concentration camp in Florida), it has wildlife (even David Attenborough spent time here) and it's a Mecca for bird watchers. It has desert, it has forests, and it has mountains which tower thousands of feet above the town.  The area is full of wildlife, both beautiful and harmful, but for me it was the people who made our stay there so great.  Oh - and a tuned up 1966 Chevy pickup which I was kindly allowed to use as a run-around!      

Mexico

By Dr. Mike on August 5, 2009 10:32 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments

Within days of arriving in Mexico City we were all suffering with nosebleeds and headaches. They were probably caused by the relatively high altitude (around 8,000 ft) and dry climate combined with the infamous pollution levels.  That said, Mexico City was a surprise to me. It's far cleaner and more beautiful than I expected - at least in the centre - and there are some great places to visit nearby.

When leaving downtown Mexico City the pollution initially became worse as we drove through the suburbs causing our eyes to run and our throats to burn, but it was worth the drive because we found two great places to film (and bug-hunt) within an easy drive of the city centre. The first was Xochimilco, about fifteen miles south of downtown Mexico City. The urban sprawl reaches far further than this in most directions, but the waterways here are a real oasis.  The name Xochimilco means place that flowers grow. Transport is by punt or motor boat and it's very tranquil - most of the time. Amazingly about one hundred and twenty miles of canals dating back to Aztec times still survive here. However, it's definitely worth avoiding weekends if you want some peace and quiet later into the day (maybe if you are filming for example!) because the afternoon is party time with seemingly hundreds of colourful boats full of revellers jostling for position. We tried to avoid the party goers by punting further into the canals, and we did escape the music, but the huge fireworks that they seemed to love aren't particularly helpful when you're trying to film.

The other real gem was Teotihuacan, about twenty-five miles north east of downtown Mexico City. It's a city which was deserted before the Spanish arrived in Mexico. Overlooking the deserted ruins is a huge pyramid (the third largest in the world). It's called the 'Temple of the Sun' and to reach the top you have to climb three hundred steps. The place was so photogenic that we filmed loads there and I calculated that I had climbed over two thousand steps by the end of filming on that day. But what an experience!

A story which I really wanted to film regarded the pig tapeworm. I've grown beef tapeworms in my own guts. They are nasty to look at but relatively benign. However the pork tapeworm can be a real killer and it used to be a major problem in Mexico. Our first job was to locate a sick pig, with evidence of worm cysts. With the help of an expert this was achieved relatively quickly.  However the pig was at a vets surgery three storeys above the street, and to get the animal out we had to manhandle it down a rickety metal fire escape in a carrying case. This wouldn't have been a problem had the pig not just relieved itself within the case as we approached the top of the steps. Typically I was below and in front of the case and predictably, as the case was tipped over slightly to get it down the steps the pig's urine leaked out all over me. At the time I felt a little hard done by, but now I realise how lucky I was. Only a month or so later no one would get near a sick pig let alone allow themselves to become soaked in it's pee. Thank goodness the pork tapeworm story was filmed before the emergence of Swine Flu.   

Cholula is a town just outside the city of Puebla. It boasts 365 churches, 365 saints and 365 festivals. In other words there's an excuse for a party every single day of the year, and as I was to find out, we had timed our visit perfectly because the 'Carnival de San Pedro Cholula' is the big daddy of them all. To be honest it didn't start well. As I left our hotel with Ben, our local fixer, a bloke wearing fancy dress and with a huge gun in his hands saw me as a potential target and shot me in the face from about ten paces away. It certainly woke me up. Even thought there was no bullet or shot in the gun the muzzle blast and a mild powder burn made my face sore and my eyes sting.  It also made the rest of the crew become very nervous. Some of the locals seemed to be very highly charged and the atmosphere was very patriotic.  The carnival was a corruption of earlier festivals celebrating the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. In typical Mexican style this had been adapted to local tastes and the costumed combatants at the carnival represented indigenous Indians, Turks, Spanish and a collection of other characters. The noise made by hundreds of old style replica guns was extreme, so much so that many of the locals had cotton wool stuffed into their ears. Again partying Mexicans had stopped our filming because of the noise, but it was a great excuse to join in ourselves. After eating some chilli flavoured grass hoppers we totally gave up filming a market scene that we had planned and returned to our hotel. Then while walking along a non-descript back street a woman jumped out from the wall with a gun. I stuck my fingers into my ears just before she let it off into the sky. She seemed friendly enough so I asked if I could look at her gun, and at that a bunch of men poured out of a shop that resembled a hole in the brick wall and shook our hands. They offered us beer, and then told me to shoot the gun. I was told that you can't trust the things not to blow apart so was instructed to hold it with my left hand over the fore-stock, right hand over the trigger guard and keep it away from my body. Then the charge, which I would estimate to be about twenty times more than I would load into a .30-06 cartridge, was added and I was instructed to pull the trigger. BOOM! I was nearly sat on my arse - and that was only with a blank charge. My ears were ringing for the rest of the evening, but it was great fun. After countless more offers of beer we said our goodbyes and returned to the hotel. The locals here were certainly making sure that I was enjoying their carnival spirit. 

Puerta Morelos and Cancun hardly seem Mexican at times, in as much as the Mexicans seem to be outnumbered by Americans for most of the year. But this means that huge hotels are springing up all along the coast in a region that Jaguars used to use as migration corridors and where spider monkeys were common. Xcaret, is a superb cultural park, based on the coast with interesting attractions and healthy animals to study. We spent a whole day at Xcaret, and if ever I take a vacation in Mexico I would take my family there.  It's a celebration of Mexican culture and wildlife, but the sad thing is that just a few miles down the road the 'real thing' is fast becoming a thing of the past.  A year ago at the botanical gardens there used to be a colony of around forty spider monkeys, now there are fifteen. They take refuge in a tall tree no more than five metres from a dirty great highway. Cecelia showed us around, telling us that the forests in southern Mexico, Guatemala and the surrounding countries are the biggest of their type in the Americas north of the Amazon.  Wildlife corridors are essential here for the survival of many species, but under pressure from developers, tourists, hotel chains and some politicians I can't help thinking that she is fighting a desperate rearguard action in her 65 hectares of potential hotel development land.

Mexico is a very complex and diverse place, far more so than I ever realised.  I loved the food, the beer and the good times we had there. The scientists we met and worked with were among the most highly motivated and well educated in the world and this, combined with fascinating locations made Mexico one of my favourite 'Bite Me' locations.

Coastal Australia

By Dr. Mike on July 28, 2009 10:52 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments

The barrier reef is one of seven natural wonders of the world. It's so big that you can see it from space, and it's full of life - much of it deadly, but our shoot came closest to going wrong because of an overgrown stinging nettle. And typically I also managed to give a home to another parasite unintentionally, which never made it into the show.

One truly bizarre animal is unique to Australia. It's so weird that when it was first discovered many people believed it to be a hoax. Of course I mean the duck billed platypus. We really wanted to see one close up, so I joined a group of research scientists conducting a monitoring programme. It isn't just that the platypus is very weird, very photogenic and very Australian. Our interest in the animal was the risk it posed to anyone daft enough to try holding one, because the males have venomous spurs on their rear legs which can inflict a painful injury. The reason why the beast never made the show is because after several very long late-night stake outs the nearest we got to one was about two hundred yards, but little did we know that while I sat on a log with one of the scientists I would again become the unwary and unwilling host of a rather uncomfortable parasitic creature - a whole bunch of them. I remember the words well as Stephan cautioned us: "Hey mate do you want us to catch scrub itch or something making us sit here."  Giles, our director, gave a polite laugh and we carried on filming. A few days later my waistline and an area around my buttocks itched like fury. I had become home to a colony of trombiculid mites, which were burrowing through my skin. Not what we wanted to film, and bearing in mind what bit of skin they were burrowing through, certainly not something to show on TV.

During the two months or so that we spent in Australia we had two days off. My first day off was spent in hospital so I had high hopes for the second, and had even managed to rent a 1,580cc Harley Davidson Soft tail motorbike which I planned to ride to the Daintree rainforest a couple of hours north of Cairns, but as ever our plans were to change. 

We had been directed to a piece of woodland where the 'gympie gympie' tree thrives. Our contact even showed one next to the path and told us to be very careful with it. The thing has a hit something like a stinging nettle on steroids.

In order to get a decent sequence I was sent into the woodland and we were going to 'hunt' for a specimen, but thinking I was clever I thought that now we had found an example I wouldn't bother looking for others as carefully as I should. Big mistake! I blundered straight into a really big specimen and was instantly hit with extreme stinging pains. I strongly suspect that the footage wasn't used because of my expletives, but on the other hand it may be because at some point in all the confusion the camera hit the deck, breaking the polarising filter and causing a good deal of other damage. The next days filming had to be called off because the camera was non-functional and you've guessed it -- bang went our day off and the bike trip to Daintree. 

Queensland and the Gold Coast are big tourist locations in Australia, but must be one of the most frustrating places in the world. Cairns has everything for the tourist: beautiful location, good hotels, nightlife, sun, nice restaurants, ocean vistas, shops and tons of other tourist attractions. It also has a huge open air swimming pool right by the beach overlooking the sea. But from what I can see, the place only has such a great pool because the sea itself is too dangerous to swim in for much of the year and I'm not sure that I could live with that on vacation! Even so, if you like the sun, and if you enjoy scuba diving it's a place not to be missed. 

Outback

By Dr. Mike on July 14, 2009 11:16 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment

Australia is a big and varied country. If it hadn't been classified as a continent it would be the biggest island in the world, so it goes without saying that it's a very diverse place. But the iconic Australia is undoubtedly the Outback. Having travelled to Australia many times before I was really excited about visiting the arid interior; a part of the country I had never explored before.

One of the first problems I had to overcome when I arrived in the outback was an uninvited parasite that I had picked up in Borneo. As temperatures regularly reach 115 degrees dehydration is a big problem in the central deserts of Australia. My parasitic infection exacerbated this by ensuring that I couldn't keep any food or water inside me for longer than five minutes.  After a few days in the Outback I was losing strength fast, and was dogged by nausea, kidney pains, weakness, headaches and stomach pains. It was time for a trip to hospital to get sorted out. It turned out that I had picked up two intestinal parasites. The first, Cryptosporidium, is a well-known single-celled intestinal parasite which can cause debilitating diarrhoea. It was several weeks before my second antagonist was found. Cyclospora is also a microscopic gut parasite, but far less common, and can cause a recurring illness which can last for weeks. Much as I am fascinated by parasites there are times when they are less than welcome especially when I didn't contract them deliberately. I ended up being ill for nearly eight weeks, having to visit the toilet up to twenty times a day. This really isn't fun when filming and travelling long distances, the only bonus being that I lost a little weight.

I had heard that flies could be a nuisance in the outback, but really wasn't prepared for the sheer numbers. They flew into our mouths, noses and eyes making life miserable at times, especially as I couldn't brush them off when being filmed just in case I messed up a take. But the flies were very pertinent because we were doing a story on dung beetles. The theory went that cattle dung attracted flies and gave them a place to breed, so by using dung beetles to get rid of the dung, you would also get rid of the flies. Very early during our time in the Outback we found some dung beetles, but we wouldn't have time to film the story for quite a while because other stories, contacts and locations had been arranged, so Michelle (our medic) offered to 'look after' them. This involved keeping the beetles in her hotel room, and going out each day to some local paddocks to collect 'food' for them. I can only guess what the locals thought of a woman climbing into their fields and pinching horse muck each day, and although I never went there I can only imagine what the atmosphere in her hotel room was like. Now there's commitment!        

Our driver, Grant, knew that I loved my bikes and cars, and thanks to him I was lucky enough to be able to borrow a dirt bike from a local mechanic called Mark while in the Outback. It wasn't just any dirt bike either. The thing I was leant had been fully prepared to race in the Finke desert race, the Southern Hemisphere's version of the Baja 1000 or Dakar rallies, and had finished 70th out of 500! Sadly I had to ride very carefully. I only had walking boots rather than motocross boots, an open face helmet, rather than a helmet with a chin guard and no body armour, so big wheelies, jumps and other stunts were out of the question. Even so, once I had got used to the very high first gear and could pull away without stalling (the bike had been geared to cruise at around 100mph) riding around the vast open spaces of the outback was a revelation.  It was so much fun that I almost forgot about my gut problems. I can only imagine what the health and safety people back at the office would have thought as I jumped across drainage ditches and weaved between the thorn covered shrubs.

I make no secret of being a country boy and as towns go I liked Alice Springs.  Even so, it's hard to comprehend that the nearest good sized town is around 900 miles away. The place is unique. Alice is small, dry, hot and with great tourist facilities, but the area also has a dark side. Since white men came to the area the indigenous aboriginal people have lost their traditional explanatory frameworks as the dominant culture has become predominantly white. The aborigines see huge numbers of wealthy people passing through the town, and in the space of a couple of generations large proportions of the community have become addicted to the white man's poison -- alcohol.  Poverty, crime, violence and poor sanitation mean aborigines are far more likely to be injured, assaulted or to fall ill than their white neighbours and tension between the two communities in very evident. And it's not only alcohol that causes problems here; Alice Springs even has its own brew of car fuel which is of the 'non-sniff' variety. But for all of its difficulties I loved my time in the Outback and would recommend a visit to anyone looking for adventure, natural beauty and isolation.

Vietnam

By Dr. Mike on July 7, 2009 10:49 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments

South East Asia is a stunning area, and I was very keen to get stuck into filming when we first arrived in Vietnam. The country is very diverse, with rugged mountains, green plains of paddy fields, stunning karst mountains and outcrops and a beautiful coastline. It stretches about one thousand miles North to South, which is broadly similar to California and Oregon combined, so you can imagine Vietnam has a climate at least as diverse as its scenery.  Add the intriguing history and fascinating culture to Vietnam's natural beauty and it makes a great place to visit. 

There are some languages that I can get by with. I speak a spattering of French, German, Spanish, Bahasa Malay and Indonesian. That's not to say that I can take part in a proper conversation, but I can feed myself, find my way around, and basically be courteous, but language is one area that causes me major problems in this region of the World. I find tonal Asian languages a nightmare, and even though I've spent time in Vietnam before I only managed to say 'hello', 'goodbye', 'sorry', 'excuse me' and 'thank you' with any real chance of being understood while on the shoot. When I tried anything else this simply resulted in quizzical looks. That said, the ability to greet and thank people in the local tongue remains one of my golden rules when it comes to foreign travel.

My other major problem was with a creature that I hadn't really thought about that much before. The giant Vietnamese centipede is potentially a killer, but by no means as venomous as many creatures. Snakes don't really bother me, at least not as much as many people. Likewise, although I have a healthy respect for spiders, I'm not freaked out by them. But the centipede was another matter. It was very quick, incredibly strong and almost impossible to handle. It seemed to have an aggression that I haven't seen in many animals.  Each time that I tried to handle it the thing would manage to grip my gloves and make for flesh. It's true that given a choice centipedes will always run, but once they're cornered they don't back down, and can inflict a painful bite. It has to be said that director Giles was not impressed by my lack of backbone, but I'm happy to stand up and be counted. Centipedes give me the shivers!

Sometimes it's the most common creatures, rather than the most exotic, that can prove most difficult to film. In Vietnam it was the rats and mosquitoes that caused me most grief.

We wanted to catch and film rats to illustrate a sequence about the plague, that most medieval of diseases, which is still a modern day threat in countries such as Vietnam. Although bacterial and viral illnesses fascinate me, they are undeniably difficult to show on TV without very expensive computer generated animations.  'Bite Me' is very much a spontaneous 'as it happens' sort of show, and carrying around a huge microscope, or using loads of computer images isn't really what I'm about, so to talk about the plague we were going to have to find rats. This shouldn't have been too much of a problem because in Hanoi they are everywhere, but what we didn't bargain for was the passionate hatred the Vietnamese felt for the animals. On one occasion we were literally driven from a residential area by the locals while trying to catch and film rats, so we eventually had to do it 'undercover'. Another factor we hadn't taken into account was how good at escaping the Vietnamese rats were. We found this out the hard way when a couple escaped in our van and hid behind the instrument panel. We assumed that they had escaped from the vehicle, but when we found that some food that we had left in the van overnight had been nibbled we soon realised that we had company. It seemed a good idea to remove all the food from the vehicle each night, but that simply resulted in the rats changing their diet to seats, seatbelts and carpets instead, and over the following week we slowly watched as our van was digested one piece at a time by our hungry rodent guests.      

Another unhelpful bunch were the local mosquitoes, which resolutely refused to bite, or even react properly to the carbon dioxide in my breath. As I'm not great at working out which mozzies are male and which are females, I blamed the lack of success on our mosquitoes all being males - because only females bite!

I'm often asked what is the most dangerous animal is that I've worked with, and the answer is simple: Human beings! In Vietnam it's got to be human beings in (or on) motor vehicles. The traffic in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) is ferocious, and when I have travelled there before I have been reliably informed that about twelve motorcyclists a day die in the city. When we arrived in Hanoi the traffic was just as bad, but I couldn't resist going for a ride. It was one of the most terrifying motoring experiences in my life!