And what is BK day? For those of you who are confused, it is not an old English festival day, nor is it some arcane Cambridge tradition that we've dredged up from the depths of the UL archives. Nor is it a celebration of the Wimpy burger, Wimpy being the old name for Burger King in this part of the world, back when Snickers was called Marathon.
Three summers ago, before I became the jaded and gloomy PhD student that I am now, I spent two months out in the Siberian taiga collecting data for a biodiversity survey to promote preservation of the taiga before it got chopped up to make paper for my PhD. With me were 6 other students from Cambridge, three wildlife enthusiasts from the UK, and experts and students from Tomsk University in Siberia.
Before anyone asks, it was very hot. +30 degrees Celsius, and it was a cooler summer than usual. We were wrapped up to reduce the amount of blood loss to the hordes of mosquitos and midges, making it even hotter.
We wanted to collect data mainly from old, relatively untouched, stands of trees, and set off each day from camp on foot to find such stands. Kevin, one of the wildlife enthusiasts, told us that he had passed an old stand of conifer forest and drew us a map, directing us to turn off from a village close by and past certain 'landmarks'. Unfortunately, what we hadn't realised was that the 'streams' marked on the map were actually ephemeral features, only there previously due to a thunderstorm a few days previously. As it had been sunny for three days, there was no sign that they ever existed. We were also told to look for 'trees with blue tape'. They were EVERYWHERE! It turned out that the blue tape was used by taiga rangers to mark out territories, and was not, as we had naively assumed, put up especially by Kevin to act as a marker for us. The other landmarks were equally elusive or misleading.
In the end, we spent a very hot three hours looking for the stand, and after giving it up as a bad job, several unfulfilling hours working in stands that were substandard (for our purposes) as it was too late to trek to a different part of the forest. The day only got worse. We decided to have another quick search for the old stand on our way back to camp as we passed through the village. After 40 minutes of more walking we retreated hastily as we found ourselves on the trail of a mother and baby bear who had left VERY fresh tracks on the ground. This was an encounter we would rather not make. Then, due to tiredness and shaken nerves, someone had an accident with a camping knife. By this point we were thoroughly fed up, sunbeaten from tramping along unshaded tracks for several hours, and very shaken by our proximity to animals whose paw prints were many times the size of our hands.
So that is how 'Bloody Kevin day' (or BK day for short) came into being. Each year in late July we try and meet up somewhere and, using a map drawn by our esteemed student leader with directions such as 'get the first bus at the first bus stop where people are waiting' and 'carry on walking until you reach a postbox', we try to get ourselves lost. And thus the spirit of BK day lives on.
This year was in Cambridge, which was fun. But in terms of following our map we didn't do too well. It was a bit hard to get lost and go randomly when we knew exactly where we were. Hannah, as usual, still managed to lose us before she even got to the meeting point, and so we had yet another BK day without her. Maybe next year.
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