11 Sep 08

I've just had a brainwave that probably should have occurred some time ago - just because there's no internet in the jungle doesn't mean I can’t write a little update in advance of finding an internet café, hence saving time and Ringgits on the occasion that we do find ourselves in town! Don’t know why I didn’t think of that before.

So it’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote anything and we’ve been continuing our background research before starting our project. We’ll be working with data from the Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project in November, so we still have a little while to get up to speed with everything before we crack on with our project. Between now and then we’ve got some trail maintenance work to get on with, plus a visa renewal trip. It’s all very exciting, as we’ve decided to go to Vietnam, where hopefully I’ll be able to meet up with Karen and Naomi from Dorset. We haven’t quite worked out the logistics yet, but we’re sat around the travel guides each evening slowly forming a plan. Next time we’re in Sandakan (which is probably today if this has found its way onto the internet), we’ll try to find something like ‘Apocalypse Now’ or ‘Platoon’ to watch before we go.

There’s been a group of people studying elephants with the Scientific Exploration Society around off and on for the last week. It’s a very mixed bunch of characters from Australia and Britain, but most of them seem very nice. It felt a bit strange playing the host, but I suppose we’ve been here for long enough now! There were a couple of writers in the group who were interesting to talk to, including a lady called Anna Nicholson who wrote ‘A Lizard in My Luggage’, which rings a bell. She’s exceptionally bubbly and talkative, so it wasn’t all that surprising to find that she works for a billion different publications, but she wasn’t at all patronising and was very complimentary about our field station news letter, the ‘Jungle Times’! Helen and I started it during the field course, commenting on the funniest things to happen during the day, but Benoit (my boss), has asked me to continue with it throughout the year. So although it’s had to become a little more sensible, the Jungle Times has evolved into a fortnightly newsletter for the field centre. As well as that, he’s got me writing press releases for interesting things involving the field centre, so I’m nice and busy at the moment.