South America

Me in the centre of an ancient ritual.

In hot climates you have to drink a lot.

At some point, when I was in the Royal Navy, I volunteered for 6 weeks as a test subject at The Psychological Research Unit at Cambridge University. Successful candidates got extra pay for 6 weeks and a weeks' extra leave, but you never knew what the tests and trials would be until you arrived. I was part of a 6 week practical study to find the effects of rum on sailors. We were given copious ammounts of rum to drink at various intervals in order to measure metabolic rates and concentration. We should have taken it seriously because a couple of years later the rum issue for the Royal Navy was abolished. The midday drunken haze of hundreds of years of crampt conditions at sea was to be replaced by a new formica factory-hen existence of the modern navy. As we left Cambridge we saw them building the steam enclosures for the next batch of tests. The effects of heat on sailors over 4 hour shifts. In hot conditions you have to drink a lot.