The waiting game

So the fieldwork is all over and here I am back in Yaounde, waiting again in this familiar hotel for the Prof to give me a visit, to sort out various things that need sorting, as usual.

The last trip went by unbelievably fast. Lise, the Cameroonian student I'm working with, was even more work-crazed than she normally is, desperate to finish so she could get back to Yaounde in time for a reunion. I was happy for her to leave early, but the Prof (who was in Yaounde but often on the phone to Lise) decreed that we must return together, and it seems his word is sacred. So we were working in the plots from 7-5 each day, not counting travelling time, with a grudging 10 minutes for lunch, and on the last day we had to put in 3 hours from 6:30 to 9:30am, before tackling the 10 hour drive back to Yaounde. We got back on Tuesday night and as you can imagine all I did yesterday was sleep!

Talking about sacred, religion seems to play a huge role in people's lives here, none more so than for Lise and the Prof. Every year they celebrate Lent in what seemed to me a surprisingly Islamic way, by fasting until 6pm each day. With the tough physical work in the forest I have no idea how they can do it. They also get up at 4am each morning to spend an hour reading the bible. As I said, religion is important to them!

The relationship between Lise and the Prof seems much closer to father-daughter than supervisor-student. She is treated just like a member of the family. I admit I am slightly envious. But they are alike in many ways, other than their religiosity and dedication to their work. They are both very no-nonsense, seemingly hard people. I was surprised at the abruptness of their bargaining style - just demanding a price and very rarely accepting any other offer. (I found it fitting that the French translation of 'to ask' is 'demander'). But the Prof has the air of a patron, while Lise makes it very clear she doesn't approve of me.

I came to feel that their no-nonsense approach garners a lot more respect than my attempted friendliness. To be honest I've found it a lot harder than usual to deal with the inequalities of wealth between myself and most people here - especially as I have been in charge of paying some of the guys working for us and deciding how much they should get. This is a process fraught with difficulty, especially when you pay someone and they declare that it is not enough and they deserve more. At this point Lise normally steps in to quell the dissent.

After the first trip I felt guilty that I been too stingy and not appreciated the guides work. So I determined to be more generous next time, but then it was pretty clear they were trying to take advantage of me, which didn't feel good. This third time I think I got it right at last.

The second and third trips were in the Anglophone region of Cameroon, and I was really looking forward to being able to communicate properly and take a full part in conversations. But while the French spoken in the Francophone region seems grammatically perfect, in the Anglophone region the main lingua franca is actually Pidgin, which is so different to English I can't understand it any better than French or Spanish. One phrase I remember because I understood it completely and it shows the different approach to tenses: "No pass here morning time." The guys could mostly understand me but their fluency in standard English was very variable - often they were better at French. Plus of course they would speak one or two native dialects as well, putting me to shame as usual.

One thing I've enjoyed here - the music is way better than in Bolivia. Having to listen to the same two CD's repeating again and again on a series of long journeys is enough to put you off any style of music (the shitty romantic covers sent me mad in Bolivia), but here I actually liked one of them so much I went out and bought some CD's in Yaounde. Even the cheesy pop music has an attraction. One of my favourite tracks has these classic lyrics in the chorus:

'Somebody say ooh girl...ooh girl...

You are my African Queen,

The girl of my dream

Take me where I've never been

Make my heart go ding-a-ling-a-ling.'

In terms of the political atmosphere here it's also a huge change from Bolivia. That was a very restive democracy, where if you wanted something done you organised a week-long road blockade to protest about it. Here it's a long-standing autocracy. The events in North Africa are on the news here but don't seem to resonate at all with the population. The next Presidential elections are due in October and already preparations by the ruling party are going full steam ahead. On our first trip we witnessed a staged event with a group of women from the village wearing dresses bearing the President's portrait and singing songs urging people to vote for him. On the second trip we could barely find a room to stay in because they were all taken up by a group of local chiefs that were in town for a meeting with an important minister. The snazziest buildings I've seen in Yaounde belong to the Office of the Prime Minister. And two other monstrosities stand half-finished because the politician who was building them (I think his title was Secretary-General to the Presidency) got jailed for corruption first. One time as we drove past I noticed a women hanging out washing in one of the unglazed first-floor windows.

Hailstorm Yaounde

I’ve seen a few things that been perfectly characteristic of Africa, like the little boy marching along diligently carrying a broken piece of polystyrene on his head, in preparation for heavier loads. But this hailstorm was not one of them. Yes that's right, I thought I was prepared for any extremes of weather the tropics could throw at me, but chunks of ice over 1cm across? It just seemed so out of place...

Other than realising how easy it is to be stranded the wrong side of the road for 15 minutes or so by a tropical ice storm, here's a few more things I've learned here so far, in no particular order.

1) There's no such thing as simply 'tropical forest.' If I didn't know it already, the Dja showed me very clearly how variable these forests can be. The plots were arranged in three pairs, the two plots in each pair a few hundred metres apart. One of each pair was a mixed forest, full of weird and wacky trees, tangled lianas, and treefall gaps bursting with very spiny palms and shrubs, a nightmare to get through. The other member of each pair was a monodominant stand, where 90% of trees belonged to the same species, undergrowth was very limited, and all in all they couldn't have been easier to survey, although that did make them a bit boring. As for why forests so close together should be so different, well that's a good question.

2) It’s not only women that go to the toilet in groups. I’m using the word toilet in a very loose sense here, but really in Britain you wouldn’t expect to see three men walk off together to empty their bowels. Maybe it was the machetes they were carrying to dig the holes to shit in that made the task suitably manly? Or maybe it was just a convenient time and there was no particular reason for them not to go together?

3) Ideas about family composition vary hugely. I think the biggest laugh I got from the guys was for my response to hearing about Sagam’s 11 children – “Avec 11 enfants on ne peut pas dormir!” Sagam didn’t seem to find this a problem, indeed he wants one more, his wife only wanted 8 though. But what the others were really shocked by was the fact that in these 11 children, he has a pair of twins.

4) It’s possible to create a transport system using only yellow taxis. That’s not completely accurate because I have seen buses here in Yaounde, but they’re so rare as to be practically irrelevant. Most countries I’ve travelled to, I’ve found the public transport to be very efficient, even if initially confusing. But here instead of the usual packed minibuses, almost 90% of the traffic on the streets is these yellow share taxis. They never put up destination signs on the dashboard because this depends on who they happen to pick up. So if you want to go anywhere you just have to stop every taxi that passes and name your destination – if they drive straight off they weren’t heading in that direction, if they stop you can get in. Since each taxi can only take 5 passengers there’s a lot of traffic congestion...

5) Some people have incredible faith in the power of medicine. At least in comparison to me that is. This might take a little bit of explaining, but for a day or so I managed to convince myself that I’d contracted Hepatitis (watch out Gavin, you’ve got competition for the title of family hypochondriac supreme). The next day I felt perfectly fine, and whatever it was has definitely gone now. But anyway that night I’d consulted my medical bible and come up with Hepatitis as fitting the bill. We decided it was best for me to rest and take a day off. But Lise was also determined to give me medicine. Before giving me a chance to refuse she presented me with a cup of dissolved generic-copy soluble paracetemol. I tried to explain that as a painkiller this wouldn’t actually cure the illness. Since I was going to rest the next day a bit of pain wouldn’t be too much of a problem, indeed its presence or absence could tell me whether or not there was still anything to worry about. Plus if it really was hepatitis then both the medical book and the leaflet from the paracetemol pack strongly warned against taking any medicine that could further damage the liver. But Lise is not a person to back down easily. She knows what’s best and she makes it happen. She was so insistent that in the end the only way I could refuse her remedy was to say goodnight and go straight to my tent.

Crossing the divide

I'm sitting here in Cochabamba, Bolivia's third city, famous for the 'water wars' 10 years ago, when an IMF-imposed privatisation handed the city's water network over to an international consortium. It wasn't just the municipal water network they gained rights over, but also rural irrigation systems that communities had often built themselves, and even rain falling on roofs. Immediately after the privatisation, prices doubled or tripled, and a big protest movement began. Incredibly, this led to the successful de-privatisation of the network, and prices returned to prior levels. Problems remain, as there are still barrios without running water, but this is a rare achievement.

I arrived here this morning on the bus from Santa Cruz. I went to sleep sweating as usual in my shorts and t-shirt, but awoke shocked by the cold temperatures as we neared our destination. I had expected it to be cold on the Altiplano, but Cochabamba is in a fertile valley at what for the Bolivian Andes is a relatively low altitude. I suppose I should have realised that 2600m is not low.

Bolivia seems to be becoming increasingly divided between the highlands (whose people are known as colla) and the lowlands (home of the camba). Until today I've been in the lowlands the whole time. Evo Morales, Bolivia's indigenous, socialist-leaning President, is a colla and he is definitely not popular in the lowlands. Virtually everyone I've spoken to so far has had a very low opinion of him, telling me stories of corruption, poor judgement, and prejudice against the mostly wealthier, non-indigenous camba. Perhaps here I'll get a different viewpoint.

Santa Cruz, the main city of the lowlands and with a booming economy based on oil, gas, cattle and soya, is the centre of a vociferous 'Autonomia' movement. I've heard that the government of Santa Cruz Department may have hired a small terrorist cell from the former Yugoslavia to fight their cause. When these terrorists were captured a video was uncovered, explaining how they took their orders from a contact in the local government, who took orders from the Governor of Santa Cruz Department, who took orders from the American Ambassador (who had been the American Ambassador to Yugoslavia immediately before the the wars there). In Santa Cruz the local media and government declared this was all fabricated by the national government, to undermine them. Both options are hard to credit, but it gives you a picture of the politics over here!

Back to my travels, I had a wonderful time in the savannas of Beni with Octavio, Kathrin and Paolo. We were helping Kathrin with her research on bats, but that's only possible in the evenings, so the rest of the time we were free to explore (or to sleep). There may be more wildlife in the rainforest but it's far easier to spot in the savannas!

It's a strange ecosystem, with vast swathes of marshy grassland interspersed with forest islands. Some of the forests follow rivers, where water is guaranteed throughout the dry season, but others are harder to explain. They may be related to former water courses, or they may have been affected by the civilisation thought to have thrived here in pre-Colombian times. Little is known about these people, but it's thought that they built a huge network of mounds and dykes, with year-round irrigation allowing agriculture to support a large population. They were never discovered by the Spaniards, probably because imported diseases killed 99% of the population before missionaries ever made it that far downriver.

We spent many hours in these savannas, searching for frogs and toads, and finding every type of bird from hummingbirds to vultures, from macaws to strange primitive ducks, pink spoonbills and very aggresive lapwings. Octavio caught a few snakes and spent days setting up photos of each one - I had to threaten this small green non-venomous tree snake so it would open it's mouth in a classic defensive posture, but unfortunately it soon grew tired of our games and refused to open it's mouth for the camera.

A highlight was when we found a porcupine climbing in the bamboo one night - I never realised they had such long fleshy tails! Although I must admit I got tired of standing there getting slaughtered by the mozzies after about 20 minutes of avid photographing by Octavio and Kathrin. Yes the mozzies were insane. For the bat work we couldn't use repellent. We wore head nets, gloves and 2 layers of clothes, but still they would manage to find a way in. Thank God they don't carry malaria.

But my happiest moment was when I fell off a horse. I admit, I must be a bit crazy. I think it was the adrenaline. We had three beautiful horses to ride, the only complication being that mine didn't like to stay on the track. Instead it would fearlessly plough through swamps and ponds, with me struggling to control it. We were galloping through the grass and as we turned the whole saddle came off, taking me with it. I fell into the mud and my t-shirt was white no longer.

Bolivia in a (Brazil) nut shell

Well, the 5 weeks of fieldwork are over and here I am, feeling like I have so much more still to learn. To put it bluntly, there´s a shitload of trees out there and if you show me one, chances are despite all Abel, Victor and Antonio´s patiet tutoring, I still won`t have a clue even what family it comes from, let alone genera or species.

Another big problem is my Spanish. Yes, it´s certainly improved. But I still find it very hard to follow most conversations, and even harder to talk myself. That put up a real communication barrier between me and the rest of the fieldwork team. Of course, non-verbal communication is always possible and never before has my back been slapped so frequently, or with such gusto.

As for learning materials, I had access to a quality piece of Peruvian literature, "El cojo y el loco" (The madman and the cripple). The book opens with the unforgetable line "El cojo no nació cojo, nació jodido. (The cripple was not born a cripple, he was born fucked). You can see I learned lots of useful vocabulary this way.

We´ve been working in two different locations - La Chonta in Santa Cruz Department, in the east of Bolivia, and Mabet, in Pando Department in the far north of Bolivia. The first thing I noticed when we arrived in Mabet was the colour of the forest. The prevalent tone was a much darker shade of green than in La Chonta. La Chonta is on the very fringe of the rainforest zone, a few dozen kilometres from drier seasonal forests, but Pando is a true Amazonian heartland.

This is Brazil nut territory - or castaña as it´s known here. 70% of the world´s Brazil nuts come from Bolivia and their collection and processing is the biggest industry round here. It´s highly sustainable, unlike other major industries such as logging, cattle ranching, soya or sunflower production, or in nearby parts of Peru gold panning. According to a local paper, 10,000 families here get a livelihood from castaña, certainly without it there would be little hope for the forest.

The season for collecting Brazil nuts has just begun. At one camp we were joined by a big group of castañeros; on a rare day off I had great fun playing with a couple of the kids. Some of the games might not be to everybody´s liking though. We started off catching the stupendulously abundant butterflies, but that was too easy so the boys moved up the food chain to the lizards that feed on the butterflies. The older boy was a maestro on the sligshot so I´m glad the lizard population seemed healthy enough.

Yes, we may be here to preserve biodiversity but when it comes down to it, that often goes out the window. When you get bitten by 10-40 ticks a day (thankfully disease-free) and constantly molested by sweat-feeding bees, you lose qualms about killing insects. Then there´s the clearing of trails through the forest and the collection of samples for species ID, plus general trampling.

Luckily there was only one site that we had to make an entirely new trail for. I say we, but Rene did all the work with the machete. At the end of the day he took off his wellies and out poured a small torrent of water. I thought he must have fallen in the stream but no, it was all sweat. It was 3km from the road to the plot and it had taken us 5 hours.

The campsite where we were joined by the castañeros was next to a medium sized river. The daily swim was my moment of bliss, after the day´s fieldwork was complete and we had an hour or so to relax and wash before eating dinner and starting to prepare the samples we´d collected that day.

It certainly wasn´t easy work. I may or may not get the chance to visit Potosí´s famous and terrifying mines, but i read that the miners there don´t take food underground. Instead they rely on a cocktail of coca leaves, pure alcohol and raw tobacco, while the kids working in the mines get by on sweets and fizzy drinks. I can proudly say that I´ve now partaken of all these substances, yes even the raw tobacco. Of the three by far the most innocent are the coca leaves. These are chewed with raw or powdered liana and bicarbonate of soda, and provide a welcome boost on the long days of fieldwork. Roel told me the powdered liana was cocaine and I believed him for a good week or so, despite the paltry scale of it´s effects.

Generally though, our sustenance was provided mostly by a myriad of variations on rice and meat. If we were lucky (in my view at least), there might also be some beans, potatoes, pasta or yucca, or tomato and onion salad. Everyone was very amused by my yearnings for veg, but when some guys went into town on a resupply mission, I begged for vegetables. They came back with everything on the list apart from the carrots I´d asked for - supposedly there were no decent carrots to be found in the whole market - and this is in Riberalta, a city with a population of 100,000.

As for wildlife, in La Chonta we saw a group of aggressive and utterly fearless black spider monkeys right above the trail several days running. We also heard the eerie calls of howler monkeys, and saw numerous agouti (large rodents that act as the dispersors for castaña), big fat game birds, macaws, toucans and birds of prey. The snakes are abundant, but nothing comes close to the insects in terms of sheer persistance. Thankfully, Mabet had less bees than La Chonta, and virtually no ticks.

After finishing the fieldwork I spent several days in Riberalta arranging onward transport. Riberalta has a pretty setting at the confluence of the vast Rio Beni and Rio Madre de Dios. The town is abundantly green, gently dilapidated, and absolutely heaving with motorbikes. The favourite activity of youngsters here is to ride round and round the plaza principal all day, showing off their bikes and eyeing up the talent. I have now fully experienced the joys of "ida y vuelta" and I can tell you it gets boring pretty quickly.

Now I´m back in the wilds, on a ranch far from the nearest road, helping friends with their research on bats. This place also has by far the best internet connection I´ve seen so far. But I´ve writen enough. It´s time to go look at the snake Octavio caught.

Much love xxxx

Joey

the end is nigh

Well this is it, I fly home tonight and this whole trip will soon be a distant memory. But there's a lot to remember!

Taiwan has been the perfect destination for me. The landscapes are mindblowingly stunning, there's good food everywhere, the people are friendly, costs are far lower than in Japan, and it's very easy to get everywhere because there's a good transport network and distances are small.

So to make things a bit harder for myself, I decided to go to the most distant place there is in Taiwan: Orchid Island, a tiny Pacific island home to the Thao tribe, with just 2 roads, fantastic reefs, semi-underground houses, and an untouched feeling, except that is for the nuclear waste stored at its southern tip. After a 5 hour train journey from Taipei to Taitung, I was hoping to get the ferry, but learned that the next boat was in 3 days time. So instead I took a 19-seater Cessna for the 25 minute flight. At the airport I was met by the hostel owner, a very warm man who thought me and the guys I was with at the time couldn't possibly swim without a guide for safety, and got very worried when we got back late one night because he thought we might not have eaten dinner.

The next stop was Taroko National Park, near Hualien. Shin Yi calls Hualien paradise, and I can see why. Taroko Gorge is made of marble, several hundred metres high and totally stunning. Then there's the Cingshuei cliffs, where the mountains meet the sea, which the single road heading north from Hualien has to make its way across (although mostly in new tunnels now). Further inland are 3500m peaks stretching in all directions.

There's a hot spring deep in the gorge, where scorching sulphurous water flows into little pools on the river's edge. The police have closed it because of rockfall risk, but the locals still get in and the police seem to turn a blind eye. To get there you have to climb over a couple of barriers, open a locked gate in a tunnel, cross a suspension bridge, and use a rope to make your way down some steep, worn steps built in the side of the gorge. But it's definitely worth it!

I've certainly had my share of problems too in Taiwan. I managed to pick up fleas a few days ago, probably from some cat I stroked. By the time I realised I was infested, they were in all my clothes, and I was in Taroko without even any insect repellent (I left most of my stuff in Hualien). With little opportunity to wash my clothes it was hard to get rid of them. Finally I washed nearly all my clothes in the hostel in Hualien, but the washing machine broke down, there was no dryer, and it was raining. So after getting the train the next morning I ended up wearing wet clothes, carrying a big bag full of wet clothes, walking round Taipei desperately looking for nonexistent hostels.

I'd better go now, I'll put up some photos on Facebook soon.

The land of cute

Sorry it`s been so long since my last post! I`ve been in Japan for about 10 days now. The country is very different to China, or to anywhere else I`ve been through for that matter. Of course there`s the whole politeness thing. Whenever I walked into the 7-11 convenience store near Akinobu`s house, any staff within earshot would say "aregato gotsaimas" (thank you very much), every minute or so. And after I bought something and was about to leave, all the staff would say it in unison, bowing slightly. I was also surprised when I came across a line of people queueing for the bus. In China, it`s always a mad scramble to the doors, to try to get a seat, or at least a decent place to stand. So when I saw people queueing patiently it seemed a bit ridiculous, and I was sorely tempted to just push my way to the front, until I realised with a shock that I would naturally have joined the queue in Britain.

Meals in restaurants are always presented beautifully, with several dishes in a selection of small bowls, which are sometimes handmade. But one of the first things I noticed was how unbelievably cute the automated train and bus announcements were, when they were in a female voice. It has to be heard to be believed! Another thing about Japan is how fashionable everyone is. They were fashionable in Russia and China, but the Japanese really have style. I`ve heard fashions here change every couple of months. At moment it`s all the rage for girls to wear their hair in a ponytail which is towards the side of their head, instead of being directly at the back.

I spent a week in Kyoto. It`s a beautiful city, surrounded by forested mountains on three sides. Wherever the mountains meet the city there are temples and shrines galore. Kyoto is said to have a 1000 temples, and I can well believe it. Most of them have lovely gardens, as well as many Buddhist and Shinto gateways and huge wooden halls. I found my favourite shrine on my last day in Kyoto. A small shrine up in a wooded stream valley in the hills, it doesn`t have the grandeur of other places, but feels much more intimate and close to nature. The bunches of freshly cut flowers show it`s still cared for. And what really drew me in was the waterfall clearly meant for bathing in. Of course, I had to strip off and give it a go.

On the nomads' trail

This will be the last post for a couple of weeks because I've been told that blogspot and Facebook are blocked in China. I've also had problems accessing hotmail recently, so I may be totally incommunicado!

For the last 5 days we've been on a trip to a nomadic family with Ger to Ger, a really good community based tour company. We met the founder of the company and he was so enthusiastic about their work, he couldn't stop talking about it! We started off by getting the bus to Darkhan, a town a few hours north of Ulan Bator. When we got to the Indian restaurant, all we could see out the window was empty plains, and we thought we were on the edge of town. Later we found out that we were in the main shopping centre of the new district of Mongolia's second city! Darkhan is a 'Peace City,' built in the 60s with assistance from various Communist nations. It mainly consists of Soviet-style blocks and factories, but also has Mongolia's first suspension bridge (rather pointlessly going over the main road between 2 statues) and what used to be Mongolia's tallest building (a dilapidated but more architecturally unusual block). A German Buddhist couple was also starting a tour at the same time as us, and we were together on the first day in Darkhan. The woman was very keen to see what the local nightclub was like, and she turned out to be a fantastic dancer!

The next morning we set out for the ger where we would spend the next 3 days, with a nomadic family of horse and cattle herders in the beautiful Orkhon Valley. It was such a privilege to able to stay with the family and experience the traditional culture. They were very friendly and welcoming, and the kids were so happy and mature, and great fun to play with! We swam in the river, rode by horse to a ruined monastery (my horse knew exactly where to go and I was so happy when it finally broke into a canter on the way home), climbed a mountain, and played games with ankle bones and geometric puzzles. We milked cows, and tried and failed to milk a mare. These people are not poor, as shown by the brand new, top of the range jeep parked outside the ger. They live this way because this is the way they want to live (although when we asked what the children would do when they grew up, the father proudly said that they would work in the city).

There are all sorts of cultural rules you have to follow, which could be very difficult at times! For a start it is rude not to eat the food you are offered. The first afternoon I was still feeling the after effects of the vodka from the night before, and couldn't eat much. But it was much worse for Maria. The diet is totally dominated by meat. The night we arrived, a goat was slaughtered and dinner consisted of a big bowl full of assorted offal. This would be hard to stomach for any Westerner, let alone someone who is normally a vegetarian! Later they made an effort to give us vegetables, but their 'vegetable soup' still contained large quantities of meat. Apart from meat, the other main type of food is dairy products, including endless milk tea, cheese, dried curds, and an alcoholic drink made from fermented mare's milk.

It seems that often, the only thing you can do is submit. Firstly to the flies, that only multiply when you try to shake them off. But mainly to the hospitality, which doesn't just consist of constant force-feeding. When we were riding back from the monastery, Maria was finding the saddle very uncomfortable and wanted to walk for a bit. They refused to let her, and in the end made her get in the jeep and drove her back to the ger.

But despite all the hardships, or maybe because of them, this has certainly been the highlight of the trip so far for me.