The Adventure Begins

The bags are packed, farewells said and we leave for a flight to Cape Town in 30 minutes. It's taken meticulous planning to get everything I'm likely to need for the next 9 or 10 months for a botanical survey of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean.  One of the world's most isolated inhabited islands. 

I've just spent the last couple hours hoovering clothes velcro, pockets and rucksacks (after washing)  to make sure I'm not importing any British plant seeds into South Africa and Tristan da Cunha.  It would be pretty bad if I made the problem of invasive species worse than it already is.  The survey is a baseline systematic survey to allow an assessment of the impacts of climate change and the spread of non-native species. Here we go...