Welcome to the Jungle

I hate this God-forsaken rock and every disgusting creature that roams its miserable surface.

This emerald hued hell-hole is unbearably hot. I speak not of the unpleasant kind of "I'm going to turn on a fan" hot from back home, however. This is the kind of humid, oppressive heat that makes you feel like every inch of skin is covered in a soaking-wet, flaming hot towel made of lead.

Every day begins in mist - a wall of fog so dense that you can't see so much as a trace of the trees a dozen paces from the front of the lab. Then, as the sun (as big around as a serving platter) rises into the sky, the ground-level cloud thins, but only just enough to let the sun's malevolent rays bring the air closest to the ground to a simmer. There is no escape from the saturating damp on this planet.

Of course, just as constant as the damp is the mud. There is no solid land on this planet that isn't either volcanic rock, or burried in forty centimeters of mud. Our lab is built on what is, from what we can determine, the second largest sheet of basaltic bedrock in the northern hemisphere. About 4 meters from the lab in all directions, the basalt comes to a stop. From as far as one can tell from digging in the mud, the rock simply disappears down into the crust, however far down that is. In order to get any work done, we have to slog out into the knee-deep mire, and try in vain to dodge hidden tree roots and the occasional small boulder.

There's a surprising variety of trees flourishing in all of the muck. Under the canopy, t here is some shade, but the cover only turns the forest into an enormous oven. Scores of parasitic plants, most flowering, live on the trees - few are so bold as to attempt a free-standing existence in the ever-shifting mud.

At the moment, we aren't sure of the fauna of the planet. One would think that all the mud would make for tracks galore, however, the surface of the mud lakes are usually just a marbled mess. Chad seems to think the lack of tracks indicates a profusion of nocturnal wildlife, while Darren keeps harping on about ents.

I think that if there ever was intelligent life on this planet, it left.

View from the north-east corner of the lab, mid-day