21 DEC 09

The Lead-Up To Christmas 2009

I've neglected the blog for too long. I blame it on an overload of coursework and the fact that there's snow in the UK; we're not very good at dealing with inclement weather. Fancy the Channel Tunnel coming to a standstill the other day. Anyone would think the freezing temperatures were unexpected, but we live in Europe, not Asia, so there's no excuse! The 'Chunnel' breakdown particularly worries me because I really don't like tunnels, and the thought of being stuck in an especially long one underneath the sea really doesn't appeal very much.

Amongst all of the bad weather reports up and down the country, and the true Brits in us must be overjoyed at some real weather news(!),I have the opposite to grumble about. I've missed all the snow!!! Last year I had an excuse: I was in Malaysia. This year I'm back in the UK and there's snow EVERYWHERE, except for Dorset.

My friend, Hannah, signed off her email with a note saying she was just off out sledging in Durham, Shelley's car was converted into a giant, stationary, snowball in Kent, Lisa had to crawl back through the snow from Exeter and even Cardiff had a centimetre of lying snow this morning. Here in Dorset it's been lurking at two degrees Celcius and raining for several days with not a snowman in sight!

The lack of festive snow, coupled with complicated coursework and the fact that I'm several Christmas presents short of a completed Christmas shopping mission should, by most standards, render one fairly miserable, but I've been enjoying catching up with everyone at home and am looking forward to Christmas more than ever this year.

I'm going skiing in January. If there's no snow then I'll be really peeved...

13 DEC 09

Sunday

It’s been quite hard to accept, but it turns out that I am the ultimate Blagging Failure. I can cope with the little things (vouchers, universal freebies, student discounts), but when it comes to the real, skilful art of blagging, I’ve finally found my position at the bottom of the pile. As I spend my Sunday afternoon trying to blag writing this feature however, I realise that I have had a useful insight into the Blagger’s World, from which I’ve drawn the following conclusions:

1. Blagging should be spontaneous. Pre-planned, thoroughly thought-out blagging not only takes the fun out of it, but also verges on the borders of organised crime.
2. The victim shouldn’t be aware of The Blag. The lady at the bar almost gave over a free drink, but her manager wasn’t sympathetic to my quest. All I acquired through honesty in this respect was a safety pin from a pitying friend.
3. Blaggers need to blend in OR have the ‘gift of the gab’. If you come across as a blithering idiot dressed as a pirate you won’t get anywhere in life. Unless you’re on a pirate ship.

12 DEC 09

Saturday: The last full day of blagging.

I caught the train into London. The teenager next to me looked as if she was ready to stab/shoot/eat the next person who dared to look at her, so I refrained from divulging my new life-story, which is a shame as I’d just got a job as a trapeze artist in a travelling circus.

A group of school friends were waiting outside Pizza Hut on Oxford Street. It was a birthday, and having most definitely seen candles in a fudge cake at such an establishment before, it was time for a mild blag. I sneaked off to ‘the toilet’ and tracked down our waitress. She informed me that they had no candles and no lighter but gave me directions to the nearest supermarket. Dejected, but still hoping to make the birthday meal at least a little special, I ran off to the shop and managed to get back with candles and party hats before the drinks had arrived. It turns out that this wasn’t a huge achievement as the service was so unbelievably slow that I could have easily walked to the River Thames with a bucket, designed, built and operated my own water filtration system in the time it took to get a drink. It inexplicably took three hours to order and eat lunch but at least, I thought, there would be candles on the fudge cake.

A sorry lump of dessert did eventually arrive, with one measly, pathetic candle carelessly placed off-centre at a peculiar angle. Less than impressed, I asked if we could have the rest of the candles back, to which I was informed that the rest had been thrown away. Pizza Hut blagged my candles! I took comfort in the fact that I could potentially write and complain in the hopes of getting free pizza next time.
The afternoon was spent looking for blagging opportunities, which don’t present themselves readily on a Saturday afternoon in central London on the lead-up to Christmas, and utterly defeated I waited for the Megabus at Victoria Coach Station. The prospect of a three hour coach journey back to Cardiff tempted me into Subway and I ordered the £1.99 six inch ham ‘Sub of the Day’.
“Foot long chicken and bacon with drink, yes?” the man confirmed.
I repeated that I’d just like the Sub of the Day, if that was alright. The man nodded and prepared my order; I waved my arm in the general direction of the vegetable collection and wearily wondered what on Earth I was going to write about for this blagging article. I reached the till and found myself faced with a foot long chicken and bacon meal which consumed every last penny of loose change in my possession. I spent the coach journey pondering my lack of blagging abilities in silence.

11 DEC 09

Friday

I decided it was time to take the blagging on tour, first stop Reading. There wasn’t much blagging to be done on the train, but I tried out the ‘trick or deception’ criteria for a bit of harmless practice. The poor woman sat next to me now thinks she travelled to Reading with a trumpet-playing pet shop assistant who couldn’t think of one real pet shop in Cardiff to claim a link to. I blagged nothing from the conversation. I suppose I could really clutch at straws and say I blagged a glass of water at my brother’s house, but the fact that it was offered in a shot glass, as the only drinking receptacle without things growing in it, almost certainly nullifies any positive blag-points.

We were due to join a pirate pub crawl in the evening, but a friend of my brother had misplaced her ID card somewhere. I was just mulling over the blagging possibilities this presented for the evening, when I noticed that my brother had disappeared. Ten minutes later and he appeared at the doorway having knocked on various doors in the street and blagged a passport from a deluded and/or insane stranger a few houses down the road. He managed to do this dressed as a pirate. Amazing.

Misplacing forms of identification seemed to be one of the girl’s favoured hobbies and having rescued the passport from the floor of several bars I eventually pocketed it for safe keeping as a sort of second-hand blag.

I had a lovely chat with the girl behind one bar who agreed that I was proving to be a pretty poor blagger and offered to give me a lime and soda water. The retail price was only 15p, but beggars can’t be choosers. Sadly, the manager overheard and told me to go away. Another fail. I cheered myself up by blagging a drink from my brother, who probably owes me several anyway, and taking today’s newspaper with me. It didn’t appear to belong to anybody, and on the grounds that you can’t steal from nobody I figured it might be morally acceptable.

Our final destination was a quirky little club underneath a railway bridge. Determined to avoid the entry fee, I informed the bouncer that I’d just popped out and that the other guy said it would be fine to re-enter. It could have worked; I don’t have a particularly memorable face. It was another fail, probably not helped by the fact that the place was almost deserted on arrival, I was wielding a newspaper and dressed as a pirate.

10 DEC 09

Thursday

I confided to a friend about fears of my blagging inadequacies over a (fully paid for) coffee this afternoon. She cheered me up no end by reminding me of travelling blags we’d shared together over the years. The most successful being an evening at the Singapore Hard Rock Café. We’d only popped in to look at the guitars, but several hours later and the four of us had consumed the equivalent of over a hundred pounds worth of free drinks, and I’d sung my favourite U2 song on stage with the band that happened to be playing. The drinks came about after the bar staff discovered we could speak Bahasa Malaysia with them. The singing came about after the discovery that we weren’t paying for our drinks. Sadly, speaking Malay probably won’t help my blagging this week.

The postman delivered two small parcels whilst I was out. The first was a pretty dull, free, book entitled ‘Britain without the European Union’. The second was a waterproof book courtesy of another online offer, and is far more entertaining than the first. The author’s descriptive powers kept me amused for the rest of the afternoon. A quick example:
“I turned into a buxom nurse from a Benny Hill sketch. My breasts became two tethered zeppelins. My belly, a giant jellyfish”, Kathy Lette, ‘All Steamed Up’.
Priceless.

09 DEC 09

Wednesday

I didn’t feel like blagging today. My confidence remained shot from yesterday’s failures. I did, however, seriously need a coffee after my nine o’clock lecture and whilst locating my reward card realised that I’d previously consumed enough caffeine to claim a free hot drink. Further clarification with the coffee-man revealed that despite having always purchased the least costly option on the menu, I could in fact have any drink as my reward. I walked away with a super-mega-large hot chocolate with marshmallows, a mountain of whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles. They wouldn’t let me drink it in the library.

08 DEC 09

Tuesday
I got up unnecessarily early for lectures this morning and logged onto Studentbeans.com. Orders for free (albeit somewhat useless) objects were in place and the day’s blagging pressure was significantly reduced.
I thought it might be worth asking the lady in the post office to reduce the cost of my stamps for a parcel to Germany, but it wasn’t. I did manage to acquire a free Cadbury’s Flake from someone dressed as a chocolate bar in the St. David’s Centre though.

The time had come to test the part of the blagging definition that mentions deception. This was not something I felt completely comfortable with, but figured that if push came to shove then any guilt could be slyly passed from my conscience to gair rhydd. Unfortunately I was sadly lacking in inspiration, and walking up and down Queen Street too often just makes you more susceptible to being pounced on to donate £2 a month to well-meaning charities, which would be somewhat counter-productive today. I then spotted a man, whom everyone seemed to be deliberately avoiding, holding a collection of books. I composed my blagging motives and adopted nerves of steel. I approached. I talked with him about the Hare Krishna movement and managed not to buy a book. I listened to his pleas to help the homeless. I still managed not to buy a book. I started looking for an escape route, but none was forthcoming. I gave him my small change to help out his community projects and sloped off home to come to terms with my first Anti-blag. Exchanging an e-voucher for a free loaf of bread at Co-op did little to improve my mood.

06 DEC 09

It's been over a month since I last posted, and for that I can only apologise and offer excuses of too much work at the end of term, etc!

I thought this feature written for gair rhydd would be of a little interest - my week of blagging. It's in this week's issue, so if you're around Cardiff University, don't forget to pick up your copy!

Installment 1:
The Art of Blagging

To blag: “A means of obtaining something by trick or deception, to obtain something for free” (Wiktionary.org).

Monday
I have one week to test the blagging limits of this fine city. As I stepped out of the Union into the rain I felt strangely confident in my mission, and quietly smug at the prospect of a week of getting something for nothing. Well, not that quietly, I was whistling. I bumped into a fellow student on Cathays Terrace, explained my objective, and came away with a safety pin. Sometimes you have to start small.

03 NOV 09

Cancer Research Centre is Launched in Cardiff


A new Cancer Research UK Centre has been launched in Cardiff. The centre will focus on understanding the biology of leukaemia, urological cancers, breast cancer and bowel cancer to improve prevention, treatment and early detection of cancers.

The partnership between Cardiff University, Cancer Research UK, Velindre NHS Trust and Cardiff and Vale University Health Board hopes to better understand the variations in cancers found in patients and develop suitable treatments for individual cases. The centre will also work with the University to expand existing PhD programmes for training clinical and non-clinical postgraduates.

Local research in cancer biology is already supported by Cancer Research UK, the leading funder of cancer research in the UK, and the establishment of this centre brings an extra £2 million to the work in Cardiff over the next three years. The centres of excellence are part of a prioritised initiative by Cancer Research UK to provide a better understanding of the diseases.

The launch of the centre was announced in the same week as researchers in Cardiff University’s Department of Primary Health Care and Public Health are to be involved in a new five year programme to improve cancer diagnosis. The DISCOVERY programme, which will begin in January 2010, stems from a £1.94 million grant from the National Institute for Health Research. The grant will fund six projects, the findings of which have the potential to directly affect clinical practice and health policy. The projects range from issues at patient and GP level, such as reporting symptoms and referral practices, to a wider economic and societal review of the diagnostic system.

The expertise of researchers at Cardiff University will be drawn on as one of four universities working on the project led by Bristol University, alongside Durham, Cambridge and Oxford, as well as NHS Bristol.

01 NOV 09

I've just been flicking through my housemate's newspaper and found a piece about a study of divorces in the UK.

Apparently, marriages are significantly less likely to end in divorce when the man is at least five years older than the woman and the woman is more intelligent than the man.

So the message here seems to be for men to go for intelligent young women and women to look for stupid old men. Marvellous.

20 Oct 09

A piece I wrote for gair rhydd, the student newspaper, whichwas unfortunately returned as they'd already printed one a few weeks ago. That'll teach me to not read our student publications!!!

Maldives Under Water! (Well, the Government Anyway...)

The Maldives government have held the first underwater cabinet meeting in order to raise awareness about global warming. With the majority of its land being only 3 ft above sea level the Maldives is the lowest lying country in the world, making it one of the most susceptible to the effects of imminent rising sea levels.

The meeting took place to the north of the capital city, Male, with all members submerged at a depth of 20 ft. Extensive training was undertaken during the two months preceding the event, and each cabinet minister was accompanied by a diving instructor and a military minder to ensure health and safety measures were met. Of the fourteen cabinet members only two were not granted permission due to health issues. Communication problems were overcome with the use of hand signals and white-boards and a document was signed calling all nations to dramatically reduce their carbon emissions.

A United Nations conference to address the challenges of climate change is scheduled to take place in Copenhagen this December, with hopes of updating the 1997 Kyoto carbon emissions agreement which is due to expire in 2012. Scientific models have predicted that the country could become uninhabitable in less than a hundred years. At a follow-up press conference, also held in the water, President Mohamed Nasheed said that if no action is taken “we are going to die”.

Autographed wetsuits by each minister are to be auctioned online at www.protectthemaldives.com to raise money for coral reef protection programmes.

11 OCT 09

Goldcliff Wetlands, South Wales

An American in Cardiff

I've had (nocturnal) Rachel staying with me in Cardiff this week. She's been learning things at the university (which is more than can be said for a lot of the Freshers I've bumped into this week, but that's another story) and I took the opportunity to show her around Cardiff. True to form nothing goes to plan and these, I believe, will be the most memorable moments of her trip:

1. Shortly after arriving we encountered a middle-aged lady wearing a washing basket on her head.

2. Dismembered pigeon wings on the pavement.

3. Hoards of screaming, drunk students littering the streets.

4. Having to call an ambulance to assist a man with a bleeding head after being bottled after a football match on Thursday evening.

5. Witnessing a passer-by ask a homeless man for 'change for a fiver' and proceeding to walk off when the homeless man pointed out that he somewhat lacked spare change.

So I apologise firstly to Rachel for such a strange visit to Cardiff, and also to Wales, for not giving our cross-Atlantic friends a very good impression of what I consider a fine, fine city!

01 OCT 09

The summer may be over but the sun's still shining in Cardiff, *touch wood*, and therefore I haven't quite missed the boat for an update of the warmer months!

The Great Dorset Steam Fair, which takes place near Blandford each year, was just as busy and steamy as ever. An endless supply of engines, tractors, horses, cider, cars, fair rides and every variety of dog known to man made for an interesting week with the addition of 'Steam Sounds', the latest attempt to occupy trouble-makers in the evenings and provide the eccentric enthusiasts with some light entertainment. Of course, in reality, the enthusiasts were probably still up to their knees in coal throughout the night, but the rest of us witnessed some musical wonders including 'Winston the Singing Farmer'. Ingenious. Also playing (at every available opportunity) was my little brother 'Ant'.


I don't think it's possible to see everything in the five days but you can certainly start to tire of trudging around in the mud, and a highlight for me was taking time out to watch the falconry display.


But naturally, given that it bears the proud title of STEAM fair, the main attraction is the enormous number of steam engines that accumulate in the quiet fields of Dorset each September. I would be surprised to find anything quite like it anywhere else in the world; 200,000 visitors took the steam pilgrimmage to the 41st event. Agricultural machinery, Showmans' engines and the heavy haulage engines all draw large audiences, but my personal favourites will always be the beautiful machines that power the old fairground rides...

16 AUG 09

I've been back for almost a month, although it doesn't seem possible! The jungle feels like it happened in a different lifetime, which it did to some extent I suppose.

It's been a bit of a rollercoaster month at home. Catching up with friends and family, dealing with the loss of Gran and the final stages of her debilitating dementia, work experience at the local newspaper, getting back in the musical loop with Camp Bestival at Lulworth Castle and the general adaptations to English life have pretty much taken it out of me in the last few weeks but, weirdly, I've enjoyed most of it.

This weekend in particular has been fantastic. I promised myself to do some touristy things this summer to reacquaint myself with the wonders of our little island, so I did.
I decided at seven o'clock yesterday morning that I would make the most of the summer deal with South West Trains. By the time Big Ben struck eleven o'clock I was stood underneath it with Lisa and Dom. A quick walk around Westminster and a tube ride to Camden Town led us to meet another school friend, Hannah. Lisa and Dom fit the loosely defined term 'artfag' remarkably well. This means they like to bury their heads in books, listen to music that nobody's ever heard of and take an interest in obscure but intriguing things. With these two at the reigns we ended up standing inside the Roundhouse Theatre looking at an installation by David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame). It goes by the name of 'Playing the Building' and consists of a small electric organ wired up to the metal pipes keeping the roof up. As a result of pressing various keys a series of clunks, whistles and rumbles can be heard from corresponding pipes and 'hey presto', you're 'playing the building'. It is, in all honesty, weird, but quite a good way to waste some time if you're an ex-popstar with some spare cash and a slightly addled brain. It also gave us something to do before lunch! And lunch in Camden Market meant that I could have NOODLES, which I've missed!!!

Today I drove school-friend-3, Karen, from Wareham to Glastonbury where we met up with my parents. We drank lots of tea, tried on capes of many colours, browsed bookshops full of second-hand spell guides and eventually climbed up the Tor to visit St.Michael's Tower and see the view over Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire.

I've pretty much adjusted to being back now. The only time it feels a bit weird is when I wake up at night and can't hear any insects, although I still check under my pillow for centipedes. Other things it's hard to get used to include not being able to order a Tiger Beer at a bar, getting strange looks for bidding people 'jumpan' instead of a 'see you later' and mistaking a grey squirrel rustling leaves for a long-tailed macaque. Mistakes anyone could make, I'm sure.

Love to all on the other side of the planet!
Rachel x

15 JUL 09

Rachel, Milena and I at the water-cooler

I can't believe how the time has flown in the last few weeks. It seems like yesterday we were counting down the weeks until 'home-time', and tomorrow we'll be heading towards the airport in just a couple of hours.

The fieldcourse was still in full-swing when we left the jungle yesterday. I'd been helping with the 5am and 5pm primate surveys, along with various other bits and bobs. Our last day was over-ridden by an unshiftable sense of anticipation. It's hard to know what to do when you know you're leaving the next day... walk in the jungle? Help the students? Hang around with the staff? Pack? Finish the newsletter? Drink copious amounts of the addictive Milo drink? In the end I flitted between all of the aforementioned and didn't really get a lot done. I had a brilliant day though. I'd heard a flanged male orangtuan calling in one of the botanical plots and was determined to find him, having not seen an orangutan for nearly three weeks. Unfortunately the forest was flooded and I hadn't believed our lecturer when he said the water was waist-deep at some points. I found that out for myself as the ground fell away beneath the water and I ended up submerging both my camera and my phone. Remarkably, both suvived! I couldn't quite get to the orangutan site, so I about-turned and ran the long way along the circular trail to get back to the same place. As I was running, which is never the best idea in a jungle, I tried my best to absorb the jungle-ness around me, not really minding that I wouldn't see much wildlife at high-speeds. So I was a little taken aback when I came face-to-tail with a King Cobra! This magnificent snake is massive, and although this one was probably no thicker than my wrists, it was about four metres long. I watched it slither across the path and followed it until it reached the hollow of a nearby tree and disappeared inside. I didn't find the orangutan but I certainly can't complain about that!!!

We then took a boat-ride to Batu Puteh with Zainal to say goodbye. The last day has been constant 'Jumpa lagi's (see you again) and the like. I'm pretty knackered, but will be home in a couple of days, where I plan to re-aquaint myself with the sofa and cheese-sandwiches.

It's been a long year that has passed exceptionally quickly. It's been far too long since I've seen people at home, yet time has flown, and I honestly can't believe I won't be here in forty-eight hours time!

Saya akan rindu Sabah. I'll miss Sabah.

07 JUL 09

Hello again!

It's a very busy week. The Cardiff students have arrived for this year's field course, and there are about 34 people milling about the centre today. So far it's gone very well, with the major drama being partly my fault. I lent a butterfly net to some colleagues in Sukau, not realising that it was, infact, our only net. I was happily listening to a talk about butterfly catching when it dawned on me that nobody would be catching any butterflies at all if we didn't get the net back. Unfortunately this only occured to me at ten o'clock at night! Frantic phonecalls ensued and eventually we managed to locate the net and arrange for it to be picked up the next day. I hopped on the boat to pick it up at Batu Puteh after finishing our 5.30am monkey-survey!

I've been allocated to the primate surveys, which means that we start very early and finish quite late, but have most of the day off in between. This is just as well as we still have a mountain of work to get done before we depart the jungle next week. As a result I'm quite sleepy and minorly panicking about getting everything finished but otherwise fine. It's nice to have some excited, new faces to talk to at mealtimes.

I'll write more when I get the chance.
Much love,
Rachel x

21 JUN 09

Earlier in the week we had some unexpected visitors. I accompanied a guest on an evening boat ride, in the hopes that I would be able to answer his questions and point out interesting wildlife. Although I've come a long way from similar activities seven months ago, where a "What's that?!" would be answered with "I don't know... a bird?", my job was made an awful lot easier when we encountered a group of elephants. We knew they would be somewhere in the area, making their way down the riverbanks, but since their last visit to 'our jungle' in October, we've not seen them around. We spent a warm sunset watching them chilling out by the edge of the river, their large heads visible above the aptly named elephant grass. Soon it became dark and we made our way back to the field centre.

The following afternoon we set out on a mission to find the elephants again. I kept my fingers crossed, not least because Chloe and Rachel weren't with us yesterday. I'd remembered for once to put on my sunglasses as winged insects seem to have believe that my eyes are in their designated flight-paths, and thrown on my spare pair of flip-flops after the others had spontaneously fallen apart the day before. I was just negotiating my way down from the rickety jetty into the boat when my sunglasses fell off of my face! Salen, our boat-driver for the afternoon, tried his hardest to fish them out, but they were probably already resting on the nose of a crocodile further downriver.
This small niggle aside, we tried to locate the elephants, but our efforts were in vain. We weren't the only people trying to find them, as Datuk Michelle Yeoh was also in the area trying to film them. She'd been staying in Sukau whilst we were there, but even if we'd bumped into each other I wouldn't have realised it as I'm notoriously bad for recognising people. I really should have twigged with this one though as she's played a Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies and was also in Memoirs of a Geisha. We returned home slightly disappointed at having missed the elephants, but still chuckling at getting a wave from a filmstar on a jungle river.
No sooner had we arrived back than we received information from a shady character that infact the elephants were now with the film crew. Salen resigned himself to a second attempt and started the engine. I jumped into the boat with such force that I broke another flip-flop. Naturally I'd broken the same one (the left, or the 'flip') so I now have two right shoes and no left ones.
We managed to catch the elephants before it got dark, and despite the presence of film crew and equipment it was a very enjoyable evening. A highlight was watching the camera-man fall down the river bank after jumping at a particularly loud 'trumpeting'. I'll try my hardest to get the video clip on here when I can work out how to remove it from my camera!

Rachel

16 JUN 09

Before heading back to the jungle from Kota Kinabalu we took a slight detour to bid farewell to our friends in Sukau. It was our last visit to the village for the foreseable future, certainly for this stay in Malaysia.
Whilst there we sorted out our data/computer issues with Mislin, visited some old friends in a village further downriver and were able to spend some time with the family at the homestay. We also took another trip to the study site where the orangutan-staff were following Jenny and her baby Mallotus. They were particularly 'un-bovvered', munching on leaves in a particularly tall tree, but it was a nice way to spend a day and say goodbye to the field-staff, for the time-being at least!

Of course, there's still a month to go, and a busy one at that. There are lots of jungle visitors scheduled in for the next four weeks, as well as the 2009 field course coming out from Cardiff... I have a feeling it's going to be a hectic time!

More soon,
Rachel

15 JUN 09

This may seem slightly irrelevant to jungle life, and I promise to write something more jungly soon, but Chloe has just brought this video clip to my attention and I have to share it with you...

Enjoy!

07 JUN 09

It's been a crazy few days in Kota Kinabalu. We left the jungle to go to Farina's wedding which took place today. It was a lovely day and really nice to see Farina in the beautiful wedding outfit, with her new husband in military uniform. We spent a couple of hours there, where we witnessed the couple's arrival and followed them into a house where friends and family were able to take photographs and congratulate them in the traditional way. This involved sprinkling things over the bride and grooms' hands, although I'm yet to research what or why!

Yesterday was the boss' birthday and so we went bowling with him and some mutual friends before going for a meal in town. Again, it was a busy day with some musical activity in the morning and running around trying to do highly exciting things like finding the office for Royal Brunei Airlines and stopping to chat to the driver of a 1927 Austin 7 which took me by surprise by pulling up next to me at the bank!

From here we go to Sukau for a couple of days to work with Mislin and show her what little knowledge we have of using Microsoft Office. Hopefully we'll be of some use...! Then it's back to the jungle for the final leg of jungley goodness before heading home to the U.K..

30 MAY 09

We spent a week doing hardcore, statistical computerisation with our supervisor who flew out from the United Kingdom. It was a busy week at the centre, with our boss, the orangutan man and a friend from Kota Kinabalu also being present, as well as two zoo keepers from America! Despite my fear of numbers I surprised myself by surviving the intensive few days, and came away with what I hope to be an understanding of how to go about working with this orangutan data. I have to keep specifying 'orangutan data' to remind me why I'm doing it! Our supervisor is also 'a bird man', which was rather nice as we could spend two mornings netting and ringing birds. We caught several that had been ringed last year on the field course, so it was satisfying to know that at least some of our feathered friends are just as alive and well (and stupid/blind) as they were last year!

We drove the boat to deposit both our supervisor and Joao at Batu Putih. I can't begin to understand where the last three months have gone, but Joao (aka Spoonface, the Portuguese volunteer) has reached the end of his time here with us and has disappeared back to Portugal. Chloe and I had great intentions to pick up some Portuguese whilst he was here, but this sentence is all I can muster:
'Eu gosto de macacos, de vinho e de queijo'
which translates as 'I like monkeys, wine and cheese'.
Although we haven't exactly mastered the language, I feel this is a good start and am now confident that I could go to Lisbon and not go hungry or thirsty, and if I'm lucky I may find someone who also likes monkeys...

20 MAY 09

TARSIER!!!

I went out on a nightwalk with Rachel and Ridzwan again, doing what we call 'point sampling'. On this type of 'monkey mission' we walk to pre-decided points along a transect (straight trail), turn our head-torches off for five minutes, stand silently in the dark, turn on the lights and try to find nocturnal primates.
On this particular walk I'd fully resigned myself to the fact that we rarely encounter slow lorises or western tarsiers and was holding out hopes of catching a glimpse of a civet or an especially large frog. Up until this point we'd mostly found things whilst walking between points, as opposed to whilst at points, and so I'd spent the first three points trying to think of song titles beginning with each letter of the alphabet.
Amazingly, at our fourth surveying point, Rachel spotted a tarsier! They're peculiar creatures, resembling something caught between a gremlin and a teddy bear. The resulting effect is that of a small, evil-looking bundle of fur that doesn't want to be messed with. Rachel managed to get the data she needed and we left 'Samson' to it. This is the third tarsier spotted at the field centre, but for me it was a first and it's a sighting most people interested in primates would kill for!

16 MAY 09

He came back.

After another night of gnawing I wasn't very impressed, so I set out another trap last night. I caught him on the second night after his original capture, kept him in a cage (with food and water) until the following lunchtime and sent him on a boat down the river. The rat is apparently now happy and looking for a new home far, far away.

Thank goodness for that.

15 MAY 09

We returned from Cambodia safely, albeit tiredly, last week. It didn’t help that on arrival at Kota Kinabalu International Airport we decided to wait for the bus. They come every hour so we wouldn’t have to wait long. Naturally the bus came when Chloe was in the toilet, and the security guards took great pleasure in telling us that there wouldn’t be another one for at least two hours. Eventually we gave in and took a taxi into town. We spent Saturday in town eating and shopping with Francoise, LiYing and Yu Li before heading back to the jungle on the tedious six hour bus journey.
During the last week I’ve been occupying myself with three main tasks:
1. Getting my work sorted before our supervisor arrives
2. The occasional night walk with Rachel and Ridzwan or helping Joao with his trapping
3. Rat Protection

Although my interests lie in conservation it’s not protection of the rat that I’m concerned with at the moment. There’s one particularly evil rat that has now munched its way through two pairs of trousers, two shirts, three bags, a toothbrush and an inflatable kangaroo. And just to torment me a little more he spends all night either running around my room or gnawing at my door.

The first stage of Operation Rat Attack involved merely covering the hole in my door with gaffa tape. This has been successful for some time now, but for some reason the rat is on a real mission to enter my room. Since the tape ceased to be of any use when we returned, and having been severely annoyed at the loss of my monkey bag, I decided it was time for drastic action. Paper, cardboard, tape and wood are obviously no match for my attacker so I set off on a hunt for something metal. If nothing else it’ll give him toothache if he insists on chewing at my door. The only moveable metal item I could find was a water bottle left by Verity after the field course; other options included the sink and the metal pipe running down the outside of the house if I were able to detach them from the wall. A highly technical application of tape and a precise positioning of the bottle to cover the inside of the hole followed by further tape application would, I hoped, stop our rodent friend from entering my room. I took it a step further by attaching a piece of string to the back of my door which could be hooked up to a bungee cord outside my room to keep the door shut. As I don’t have a key for my door, the rat had been entering whilst we were at dinner and causing havoc before the lights even went out. All of this worked wonders. However a new problem arose: by keeping the rat out of my room it then focussed all of its energies on trying to gnaw its way through my defences, resulting in my average sleeping time reducing significantly. My solutions to this problem included throwing things at the door whenever the chewing began and spraying the door with mosquito repellent in the hopes that it also repelled rodents. No such luck.

Eventually I gave in and set a trap. I closed my door and locked it from the inside. Hearing an almighty ‘clunk’ I tried to unlock my door, only to find that the locking mechanism had come unattached from the locky-unlock-knob thing (technical term). So I was now locked inside my room. Fortunately I had my nifty multi-tool to hand and after some fiddling with various implements I managed to dislodge the lock with the pliers. Wondering how I could have such an unlucky door I propped a chair up against it and retired to bed. The rat didn’t wait long and after only seven minutes I heard the trap spring shut. I tried to make him apologise for destroying everything and keeping me awake but he just carried on sniffing around his cell looking slightly confused. At least he had an oil palm kernel to munch on until morning. Morning came and the rat was released a little way from the field centre... I now look forward to a good night’s sleep!
The Prisoner of War


The Rat-Prevention Mechanism: Mark II


My travelling shirt...

07 MAY 2009

I'm sat in the 'Singing Tree Cafe', Siem Reap, Cambodia.
We eventually arrived after spending 10 hours in Kuala Lumpur airport. It's a nice airport but not nice enough for that! We didn't manage to catch any sleep as we had to stay awake to keep an eye on the luggage. After watching the 'Friends' episode where Ross explains the concept of 'Oonagi'(vigilance in self defense, basically), we were in a heightened state of Oonagi all night, not helped by a phone call from my mother warning me not to get locked up in a Cambodian prison. Not that it's on the top of my 'to do' list...! We only had to relocate ourselves once after an Indian gentleman insisted on trying to sustain a conversation at 3am along the lines of 'will your father pay for me to come to England?'. I think I was a little rude to him but it's not the sort of chitchat we really wanted at that time of the morning!

The temples at Angkor are stunningly impressive. We can consider ourselves fully templed-out now, having very much made the most of our three day pass. Ta Prohm, the Tomb Raider temple, was visited twice! Of course we attempted a movie remake, earning us some strange looks from tourists pretending not to have seen the film... I'm sure they weren't all there to discover the intricacies of Khmer architecture though... My language skills were really put to the test on out second visit, with a German couple wanting tourist information and a French group assuming that I was a Swiss artist. My French is far better than my limited German phrases from school but I found trying to establish why they thought I was an artist from Switzerland far harder going than talking to the Germans. It was actually quite fun... I managed to get across what we're doing this year by saying 'I study biology. One year in Malaysia. Many tree. Biology. Apes.'and they seemed delighted to have such an intelligent conversation with someone other than their guide who seemed to be speaking something from another planet. I never did work out what the French were whittling on about but they mentioned mountains more than once.

Yesterday we cycled out to see Tonle Sap lake but didn't fancy paying for the boat ride at the other end. As a result we saw only mud and a police checkpoint. The Slovenian we'd picked up along the way and a guy from the village who knew far too much about Southampton Football Club were interesting company for our cycle back to town though. We then went out to the temples, covering over 50 km in the blistering heat! On the way back I saw something completely unexpected... macaques throwing themselves into the moat surrounding Angkor Wat... really strange!

01 MAY 09

...and then we missed the plane.

Well, not so much missed it as Air Asia kindly moved the departure time forward an hour without telling us! So we're in KK for another night, very, very kindly being looked after by Francoise, and intend to fly out to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow evening! We've managed to move all of our flights over a day as the next available flight doesn't leave until tomorrow morning, half an hour AFTER the connecting flight departs for Siem Reap!

You can imagine how pleased I was at the airport! Especially to be told that they couldn't let us know because I'd given them an international number. Assuming, then, that I'd given a parent's mobile number to counteract any potential 'no signal in the jungle' complications I was a tad irritated to spy on their computers that I had, in fact, given my Malaysian number. So nobody had tried to contact us, hence we arrived at the airport merely 15 minutes after our aeroplane had taken to the night sky.

Fantabulous.

30 APR 09

Hello, sorry for the spasmodic nature of my updates; for some reason the internet connection in the jungle won't allow me to use this website and I can't seem to work out why.

I'm currently in Kota Kinabalu once again in preparation to fly out to Cambodia tomorrow evening. We're flying into Siem Reap for a few days as our last trip out of the country to see the temples at Angkor.

Zainal, the centre manager, raced us to the bridge to catch the bus this morning, but it had already left by the time we arrived! He then, very kindly, made like Neil Hamilton to catch up with the damn thing which had travelled about thirty miles before we managed to flag it down!

It sounds about right for one of our journeys...
...I'll let you know if we ever get to the land of forgotten civilisations, coffee and Tomb Raider.

Rachel

18 April 2009 -3

A snap from one of our night walks earlier in the week...

18 April 2009 -2

18 APR 09
The other Rachel is studying nocturnal primates, and as an amateur primate enthusiast (sounds more important and less weird than 'monkey lover'), I join her when she chooses to go out at sensible times. I made the mistake of getting up at 3am once but it was a bit too tiring...
...that's not to say it wasn't worth it though. It was actually that morning that I saw the slow loris. They're little furry animals that live quite high up in the trees and can be spotted by their 'eye-shine', which is how Rachel saw him/her at the end of our walk. It wasn't quite daylight but it was posssible to make out his shape until he closed his eyes and it was no more likely that we were looking at a loris than a leaf.

The night before last we went out at about 11pm and saw all sorts of frogs, spiders and a small-toothed palm civet. We've seen a couple of different civets, which look a little like cats but are more closely related to mongooses. We've also come across sleeping birds and a snake in a tree.

Rachel and Ridzwan are off on a 2am stroll tonight, but I've decided not to join them this time. It's been raining heavily since last night as we hadn't had any real rain for two days before that. The water was covering the path to our rooms so much tonight that I had to go to dinner wearing welly boots after soaking my trainers getting to the room in the first place.

The generator's going off now so I'll leave it at that for tonight.

18 APR 09

The other Rachel and Ridzwan recording data on a night walk

08 APR 09

We're expecting the arrival of a small group from the U.K. at the centre today. There have been a couple of orangutans in close proximity to the buildings in the last few days, so on Monday I followed Phoebe and her tiny daughter Pisang (banana) until they settled down for the night in a comfortable looking nest made either by her the day before or another orangutan, possibly her other daughter Jane who's never far away. I got up after an hour's sleep (possibly too much coffee replacing the tea I've given up for Lent?) at 5am to station myself under her tree in the rain. She was up by six o'clock and I recorded her behaviour as I followed at a respectful distance.

It was a good choice to follow the one with the baby because she wasn't intent on moving particularly quickly. By my breakfast-time Phoebe had already stopped at three different trees for fruits and leaves and I was feeling rather peckish. It was lucky then that she chose to hang around by one of the buildings for four hours, as an SMS to Chloe and Loris (the other Rachel) meant that I gained a banana and peanut butter sandwich delivery service and also some company for the rest of the day. We were close enough to the main buildings to get a take-away lunch too! I would have been able to keep track of her all day, had it not been for the impassable undergrowth she effortlessly swung over later in the afternoon and the uselessness of the dodgy knife from Laos we inherited from Dave. To cut a long story short: we lost them and had to return in the rain feeling quite defeated and orangutan-less. But it's all a matter of perspective... I don't know where the orangs are to show the group when they arrive, but I have spent 13 hours with some beautiful animals in the last couple of days!

(P.S. My blog won't allow me to access it at the field centre - this has gone a long way round to find its way online, so delays are expected!)

02 APR 09

Would you believe it? This morning I went to look up a word in my lovely new Malay-English dictionary: a word that was necessary to translate to do my work and a word which just so happened to begin with the letter T. I turned to the 'T' section in the appropriate half of the book only to discover that not only had they omitted to print the word in question but they'd left out the whole of the letter T! I don't believe it!

We're back at Danau Girang and I've spent the day working on getting the next newsletter finished and cracking on with the data work. It's getting to the point where I could probably do it in my sleep now and the light still isn't particularly bright at the end of the tunnel so it's full steam ahead until I can stop copying and pasting in Excel spreadsheets! It's great to be back in the jungle though. Each time I return I feel even luckier to be here, if that's possible, and can't quite imagine the day when I have to leave it for real.

31 MAR 09

We're back in the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf to escape the midday sun. Today the internet connection is actually working, unlike last time where I trawled the coffee shops in search of a link to the world wide web before deciding I'd be better off giving up.

We went out for Chloe's birthday last night. The Loft was covered in post-it notes and pink balloons which we blew up in Francoise's car on the way. It was all a bit of a mad rush as Min and I decided to try and make a birthday cake in the afternoon at Francoise's house. Poor Francoise was trying to get some work done so we moved the baking session to Marc's where we attempted to whip cream. Somehow we overwhipped it and ended up with a curdled mess, which Min tried to rescue by adding more fresh cream. Isabelle and Elie walked in as we were staring hopelessly at our yellow lumps floating in runny white goo and my patience with our inability to make a cake from a box was running thin. She suggested we started again with the cream whipping, and we eventually managed to make a passable excuse for a birthday cake! It received mixed reviews, from a polite 'that's very nice' to 'Eew, it's horrible' from Elie. Thanks mate.

It was really nice to see all of our KK friends together, so thanks for turning out last night guys!

We're back to the jungle again tomorrow...

Rachel

P.S. Milena sent me the U2 album in the posta nd it arrived yesterday!!! I'm very excited but not had a chance to listen to it yet! Thanks so much!!!!!

29 MAR 09

We arrived at the school bazaar and set up camp in a classroom. We’d put up the orang-utan bridge between two trees the day before and I’d quickly typed out a sign for it on Saturday morning:

Orangutan Bridges
There are several orangutan bridges in the Kinabatangan. They’re used to link patches of forest that have an obstacle between them, like a river. Orangutans can’t swim and it is hoped that they will use these bridges to move between forest fragments so that they are able to interact with orangutans in other parts of the forest.

The classroom was decorated by our ‘Save the *insert endangered species here*’ posters, focussing on orang-utans, elephants, wild cats and sun bears, and we shuffled over to make room for the scary face-painting team. It was actually quite a relief having someone else do the face-painting as I think we would have resorted to simply painting all the children orange and trying to convince them that they were orang-utans. Instead we focussed on our primate colouring sheets and mask making. João, one of the new students at Danau Girang and Farina were also there manning the darts game outside. João provided us with entertainment just by being quite tall when one of the little girls making a tiger mask said “Wow, you’re so tall, your arms are like an orang-utan! If you reach up really high, birds can make a nest in your hands!” That, on top of us introducing him to everyone with ‘This is João. He’s from Portugal, the capital of Spain!’, must have topped off his week. Overall, the bazaar went very well and it was good to work with the guys from Sukau and get to know them a bit better.

Last night was ‘Earth Hour’: Sixty minutes where people were encouraged to turn off the electricity to give our planet’s resources a well-earned break. I couldn’t work out how to turn the corridor lights off in the hostel, but I did make everyone sit in the dark until half past nine. Unfortunately we were hoping to go out to The Loft to enjoy a drink in the candlelight but as I couldn’t shower in the dark we missed it! Nevermind. We still had a good evening and I found someone who was willing to buy my rum and coke for me, which was rather nice.

Today we’ve been helping Farina get her wedding outfits made. I’m getting really excited about it now that we’ve found out we can come out to Kota Kinabalu for it! This evening we’ll meet up with Benoit after him and João have finished playing ‘futsal’ with the WWF guys and at some point I’ll carry on fiddling with orang-utan data. At the moment I’m just enjoying the sea view from The Coffee Bean. I came in here just to check emails and put this thing on the internet, only to find that the internet connection is down, which is annoying as I didn’t really fancy a coffee in the first place. The saving grace is that it’s a Sunday, so I get to drink tea today (which I’ve given up for lent) and there’s plenty of time to find somewhere else with connection to the www at some point!

27 MAR 09

Hello again! Sorry about that, an influx of children prevented me finishing my post.

We're no longer in Sukau. Whilst there we invaded a wedding, amongst other things, which was really very interesting. It seemed like the entire village had turned out in force and somehow all the hungry mouths were fed. Imagine having to cook rice, chicken, beef, prawns and vegetables for a whole village at your child's wedding... I would guess people would stop having kids but that's not the case as the average family size here is much larger than in the U.K.. Our cook at Danau Girang for example has 15 brothers and sisters! I remember our family being chaotic enough at times with two!
The bride and groom were dressed in lilac, silky outifts and turned up after having made their vows at the mosque. They then made their way onto a bench on stage where family members would bring blessings for maybe two hours.

I'm currently sat having lunch in Kota Kinabalu, having travelled here yesterday with the KOCP team. There's a bazaare at the International School tomorrow and we're helping to translate some posters about elephants and orangutans. We've also agreed to do face-painting. Poor kids. Before we can start to panic about transforming five-year-olds into tigers though we have sixty animal masks to cut around, so I'll get back to that now.

Apparently Stephen Fry was sat in a restaurant two door down from us last night, but we didn't realise because we're not 'Twitter-addicts', whatever that means. Anyone who can shed light on this new internet phenomenon - feel free to leave a comment or something!

Rachel x

22 MAR 08

It's been a busy few weeks.

I'm currently sat in Sukau in an internet cafe; I can't believe it! I don't know when it opened, but it's definitely here now. It's amazing what people are using it for though. From my seat I can see two ten year olds, both on Youtube. One is watching a video about waxing and hair removal tips, the other is watching a Barbie massacre.

Damnit, there's a school group coming in and I have to leave... basically my pig is dead (Quasimodo), we have three new people at the centre, all of whom are very nice and it's Chloe's birthday today!

Laters,
Rachel

12 MAR 09

Hello again, terribly sorry for the lack of communication recently; we've had a few technical glitches that need ironing out, but all is well in the jungle!

We've had a busy time of it recently, zipping back and forth between Danau Girang, Kota Kinabalu and Sukau for various reasons. It's been quite a while since the parents returned home now and we're back in full swing getting our work done and 'being jungle'.

I tried to follow an orangutan for a coupe of days this week but to no real avail. My attempts at recording behavioural information failed miserably but I had to have a go! He was spotted one afternoon on a brief jungle walk, so I followed him until he built his nest for the night which was about four hours after he was first seen. The next morning I was up at half five to catch him before he left for breakfast and at first I thought it was all going rather well. I managed to keep up with his fruit-eating-rampage until he seemed likely to stay put for a while and I strung up a hammock to sit in whilst he ate. He was feeding for over an hour and I was just replying to a text message (amazed that I had any signal at all!) from my brother, wishing him all the very best for his show, when I looked up and found that 'Dunstan' had gone! I struggled to get the hammock down and searched for over an hour but he was obviously hiding and I was quite hungry by this point. I was just contemplating going to find some breakfast (it was about 10am by this time) when I heard an unusual bird approaching at an alarming rate. It turned out to be Chloe calling to me in the style of our friends in Sukau who make 'natural type noises' to find each other when they're in the field. She'd brought a food parcel from the field centre after reading my note!

Yesterday I was sat out on the steps of our studio (little house thing) playing guitar and wondering how I could possibly have lost a bright orange orangutan amongst a green forest when a familiar cracking of branches nearby caught my attention. I looked up to see Dunstan suspended between two trees, giving me exactly the same 'don't you dare follow me' look I'd been given on that first afternoon when I found him in the forest. As I wasn't wearing any shoes at the time he was in luck, but it's good to know he's still in the area and I'll have another search for him tomorrow. I'm sure he likes me really...

This morning Chloe and I went to Sandakan to collect a parcel that's been waiting for us for over a month. We arrived, signed the appropriate documents and ran back to the car with our precious packages... only to open them and find that we'd each received a blue holdall from Reader's Digest. We were both a little confused as the only link we have to this particular magazine is the online daily draw my Mum has tried to force me to enter every day for the last two years in a bid to win a huge amount of cash. This didn't explain our curious parcels and it was only when I turned the packaging over that I realised that we were in possession of two holdalls belonging to a Mr Huing Wan Hung and a Mr Richard Gibley. Returning to the Post Office I tried to explain that my name wasn't Richard and that Chloe certainly wasn't Mr Hung, and only suceeded in convincing the clerk by explaining that 'Mr' is a term for a male and we were most definitely female. Unfortunately my Malay is still pretty dire and so the best I could do translated as "I girl, Mr Gibley boy. I not Richard, I Rachel. I no have Reader's Digest. I want letter mine." He got the picture and after reluctant searching brought out three parcels, all with 'Reader's Digest' printed on the outside and addressed to a 'Mr G.Smythe', 'Mr Chung' and another name I forget now but did not include the words 'Rachel' or 'Chloe'. Some further exasperating conversation and waving of my driving licence convinced him that I wasn't going to accept any of the identical blue holdalls and really did want my mysterious parcel. Miraculously he managed to find both and Chloe now has her Marks and Sparks ingredients for a Christmas dinner (non-perishables...) sent by her Mum in time for (next) Christmas and I have a make-your-own monkey door hanger for my birthday! When we return to the jungle I think we'll have to have a Christmas pud and craft session...

08 MAR 09

Against all odds the jungle is now connected to the internet! Of course, I have no idea how long this will last for, but at least it's been here for long enough to sort out some boring admin things and send an email or two. It's also given me a moment to peruse the 'stat-counter' thing that records how many people read this blog, and I've got to say I'm impressed! In the last week there have been visitors from Kuala Lumpur, Germany, America, France and even Russia

(Edited 12 MAR 09: The internet died as I was typing the next sentence and I've forgotten what I was intending to write about, so this post has been abandoned and a new one embarked upon. Sorry about that - these things are temperamental out here!)

24 FEB 08

Mum and Dad should be a considerable way towards London now. I was a little concerned that we weren't going to catch our own flight yesterday evening. We'd been ushered into the departures lounge where a soundproof, glass wall separates those waiting to board and those lurking in the corridor, like my parents. For some reason we thought it would be possible to continue our conversation through the wall using a combination of mobile phone screens, waving arms about and mouthing words at each other. We were so carried away trying to work out what they were saying that a glance behind us showed an empty departure lounge, so we made a dash for the plane before they decided we'd taken too long!

We spent the last couple of days of their trip in Singapore. We visited Chinatown and Little India, the zoo and the night safari and the Hard Rock Cafe.

The night safari was brilliant; it's like going to the zoo after hours when the animals are generally unaware of your presence. Of course, this depends on whether you're being loud and annoying or not, which rather a lot of visitors didn't quite seem to grasp. When we managed to lose the noisy people we saw the most interesting things, our favourites of which were the flying squirrel 'flying' from tree to tree in its enclosure and the beautiful clouded leopard. The leopard was nowhere to be seen, but a little patience and an absense of shouting tourists led to watching him stalk around his dimly lit enclosure.The Hard Rock Cafe was also a place to be remembered. The first visit was only intended so that I could visit the gift shop in search of a particular U2 t-shirt and have a browse of the memorabilia inside. It resulted in us staying all evening to watch a live band perform classic rock covers. 'Thanks' to Chloe and Dad I ended up singing a U2 song with them, which was a lot of fun but very strange as the band were so professional sounding and I felt like a real stage invader! Anyway, the manager seemed quite happy with it and our drinks were on the house!
Now we're back in Sabah to concentrate on the orangutans again...

13 FEB 09

After a tense 48 hours last week wondering whether or not the snow would lift enough for Heathrow to begin operating like a normal airport again, Mum and Dad walked into the Arrivals Lounge of Kota Kinabalu airport.

The last eight days have been so busy that I've not had time to write anything, but I'll highlight a couple of our momentous points before the cafe who's internet we're using closes. It's just taken Dad over an hour to type three emails because he's not used to this laptop and has been repeatedly deleting and re-typing them. At least it's nice and warm outside; I imagine that sitting outside a shop at midnight typing an email in England is the last thing most people would be doing in the current weather situation.

Today we visited Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre. For me this was the third trip in seven months, but orangutans never get old. Well, they obviously get old but not 'old'. Mum and Dad loved it (I think), and we watched several orangutans feeding on the specially built platform.
There was a young orangutan who seemed intent on winding up the adults in any way he could. This started with a mild pestering of his mother when he'd had his fill of bananas . Not getting anywhere he opted for swinging away from the platform along the rope, designed to protect the nearby saplings from the hungry mob twice a day, and bounding back onto the platform to stand over 'Mum' expectantly. Seeing that 'Mum' was still engrossed in her fruit-feast he chanced a tug at her fur, which resulted in an unimpressed look and Mum turning to face the other direction. The little one then turned to face Dad who was concentrating on a particularly juicy looking piece of lunch and climbed on top of him. Dad shook him off and gave him a very definite 'Do that again and I'll clock you one' stare. He went back to hang around on the rope for a while before getting fed up and swinging over to wind up a family of macaques who were patiently waiting for any leftovers from the great ape feeding session.
The next time I saw him swing into view he was holding a branch twice as long as he was tall in his left foot and trying to maneuvre back to the platform with his prize. I'm convinced he wasn't trying to be awkward, but like so many small children his intentions went misunderstood, and hitting his mother on the head with it whilst trying to drag it onto level ground didn't go down very well. She grabbed him by the arm and wrenched him back to a behaving, sitting position. Sulkily he snatched an entire bunch of bananas and retreated to the rope with the bunch grasped in his feet.
The 'eyes-bigger-than-stomach syndrome' soon set in though and he flumped down next to Dad in search of attention. None came his way, so he started poking his father. This, understandably, was as appreciated as accidentally hitting his mother on the head with a tree branch and resulted in a wrestling match with Dad, who must have been at least four times his size and weight. As we left, the little one stood up looking very proud of himself and probably would have been able to walk away with his head held high, but he chanced one last swipe at Dad and the fiasco recommenced, just as the park closed and we were ushered away from the feeding area.

The jungle's been flooded since the day Mum and Dad (human versions) arrived and it's been touch and go as to whether we'll be able to get there or not, but fingers crossed...

02 FEB 09

It's been over six months since I left Britain to come to Sabah. With five and a half left to go and an awful lot of work left uncompleted I'm starting to see my remaining time disappear faster than a chocolate bar in an ants nest. It doesn't seem possible that in the time I've been out here one friend has moved to work in Geneva, Christmas has come and gone without any mince pie consumption, friends are applying for 'proper jobs' and panicking about being an authentic grown-up and my little brother will have finished his first year at university before I so much as touch down at Heathrow Airport...

...however I'm still very much here and enjoying every second of it. Although we haven't spent a lot of time in the jungle recently, we have had time to get to know the charms of Kota Kinabalu. We've become semi regular attendees of Amir Yussof's open-mic evenings at the 'Office Pub' and invaded more than one game of badminton. Playing badminton on a real court rather than outside the field centre using the path as our net, and regularly tripping over tree roots and rocks, has been really good fun and I'm confident that less shuttlecocks will end up on the roof of the centre when we return. The fact that we're beaten by two thirteen year olds every time should probably be overlooked, but we're thankful that they let us play in the first place so Ellie and Nathan must get a mention!

After an extended deadline I've finally handed in my primate project from the July fieldcourse and sent off an article for our student newspaper 'gair rhydd'. Not very exciting stuff to tell you I'm afraid, but it's nice to have a sense of completing something without the mad rush that all too often accompanies that feeling back in Cardiff. Maybe it's the place, the lack of other things that 'have to be done' or maybe it's the weather, but had this week occured in Cardiff I would have ended up the coffee-fuelled, stressed-out, sleep-deprived wreck that multiple deadlines on the same day have a habit of creating out of otherwise average students. This time the only similarity is sleep deprivation, but that can be attributed to having the internet and trying to stay in sync with Europe on MSN and Facebook.

Rather bizarrely, on Thursday night I shall be picking up my parents from the airport. It's strange because it seems like a complete parent-child role reversal. Thinking back to all of the guide camps, school trips, cadet expeditions andthat adventure to Madagascar, the amount of times Mum asked whether I'd remembered *Insert useful/useless object here* and Dad quizzed me on drop-off times are uncountable. The last few days have been the complete opposite, with me sending emails to ask whether they've remembered things like a hat and suncream which probably seem ridiculous items to pack if you're sitting with frost on the windows and a cat that refuses to go outside because of the freezing temperatures. And however many times I tell myself when the plane gets in, I still have something in the back of my mind that asks whether I've got the right day/month/year/country. I have visions of Mum and Dad standing in arrivals at Kuala Lumpur airport wondering why I haven't turned up yet...
...but we'll see.

December and January in Pictures

I know it's time to put up some more photographs because I've run out of room on my camera again, so here they are!

This is Zainal laying out our surprise Christmas meal on the 23rd December; we were so surprised because nobody else at the centre celebrates Christmas!

This is the family after our mission to cook Christmas dinner in the kitchen of the Sunset Hostel in Sandakan... Below is the beach on Koh Lipe: a very welcome sight after the travelling to get there!Amazingly, and not through any planning of our own, the owner of our bungalow also ran the 'Monkey Bar'. Some things are just meant to be...This is just a shot for anyone who wishes it wasn't quite as cold in Britain right now... hehe!
I know this is stating the obvious, but it's amazing to think that wherever you are in the world, if you look out to sea it's the same piece of water that everyone else can see, if they also happen to be looking at the sea. That was a very long-winded way of writing something very simple.
New Year's Eve saw lots of lanterns being let off on the beach. It also saw a fair few flop into the sea and one man dramatically drop to one knee in front of his girlfriend as the fireworks went off, all of which was quite interesting...

Back in the jungle I discovered that Santa Claus had brought me a hammock. Eager to try it out I attempted to put it up in the studio, but predictably the table leg wasn't strong enough and all I suceeded in doing was lying on the floor. I actually managed to sleep in it last night outside my boss' house in Kota Kinabalu. Well, I say 'sleep', what I really mean is 'suceeded in not falling out until daybreak', but either way it stayed up all night so my knotting ability has far surpassed my expectations.

These are a few examples of our other boss' sword collection and a boat in the background. You'd be forgiven for thinking that there was one less Pirate in the Caribbean.

One Sunday morning Haji took me to the market at Kota Belud along with her friend Min. Here we met a travelling Canadian who not only made for interesting conversation but also came in very handy when we went to push Benoit's dead car out of the driveway later that morning.

This is Mount Kinabalu. Chloe and I are intending to climb it before we come home in July. I think it may be more a case of her hauling me up the mountainside, but we'll see.

And lastly some fish...

Rachel x

24 JAN 09

I've been in Kota Kinabalu for a little while now, a city in the north of Sabah. We've got deadlines and things looming, so we're here to use other people's internet connections, laptops and houses, although there was a little confusion about that to begin with.

On arrival in KK we were met by our friend Farina who's been keeping an eye on Boss Benoit's house over Christmas. Chloe and I could become joint Queen of 'The Land of Confusion and Misunderstanding', because we'd asked if we could stay with Farina, who we thought was staying at our Boss' house. She wasn't. So we ended up living there on our own. Naturally, Benoit was a little surprised to find this out, but he kindly let us stay and water the plants anyway. Just as well really as I'm not up to date with current squatters' rights in Malaysia.

Since then we've swapped houses, been to the jungle, returned to the city and swapped houses again, but it's not worth going into details! For the last couple of days however, someone has trusted me enough to drive their pick-up truck when we need to. To be honest I'm quite amazed, but very grateful as the house we're in is a little way out of town. There are, of course, several differences between driving a 2006/7 Toyota Hilux 4x4 in Sabah and driving a 1965 Austin A35 van-conversion in Dorset, and I'll try my best to summarise them...

1. Morphology (to use a biological term). The Austin is simple. I know where the handbrake and indicator switch are - they're in the right place; on the right and in the centre of the dashboard respectively. The Toyota prefers to conform to modern social ideals with a handbrake on the left and the indicator switch on a stick. A stick which I've been known to confuse with the windscreen wiper controls so that the wipers go into overdrive when all I really want to do is turn left.
2. Size. Ozzie the Austin is small. He's a van, so larger than his saloon counterparts, but he's small all the same, and that's marvellous for fitting into tight parking spots in Bournemouth. The Toyota is not small. Driving the Toyota feels like driving a tank, although I'm assuming that the Hilux is easier to maneuvre than a Challenger II. The saving grace is that the roads themselves also seem to be wider and longer, so relatively speaking I suppose there's no difference.
3. Other drivers. There are bad drivers everywhere in the world. The thing to adapt to is the different types of bad driving. In Vietnam it's the 'stop for nothing and no-one approach' that worries me. They swerve around obstacles forcing the person behind to swerve around them, which forces the person behind to swerve around them and... you get the picture; it's one big swerving mess. In the U.K. it's the combination of impatient drivers and those with such a lack of common sense that I'm sure if somebody were to remind them that they were in a moving vehicle they'd probably take the central reservation out in surprise. Here, and this is a generalisation based on my journeys to date, there seems to be confusion over the purpose of indicators. I'd been under the impression from a very young age that indicators were there to indicate, or signal, to let other drivers know what you're about to do. It's an ingenious concept which has the potential to stop people from crashing into each other when changing lanes, overtaking, leaving roundabouts and joining a main road to name but a few. Yesterday I was amazed to find that not only do a lot of people ignore the little sticky-out thingy that produces orange, flashing lights on the side of their car, but some go as far as to put the bloody things on after the event. We were forced to screech to a halt on a dual carriageway by a car with one headlight making a U-Turn into the fast lane we were travelling along. The daredevil Perodua in question very nearly entered in a puff of smoke with a loud 'bang' as accompaniment, but another plus point for the Toyota is that it has very good brakes. Anyway, the point is that this guy only decided to indicate once he'd joined the flow of moving traffic and I'd recovered from my semi heart attack.

The fact that I don't know the city very well hasn't caused too much of a problem. We've had a few hiccups, like a 12 mile diversion to Tuaran and back and driving around the block three times to find entrances to places, but other than that it's not been too bad, thanks to Google Earth which is always consulted before setting out. Last night I was on the verge of being lost (or at the very least confused) when I drove through a tunnel that we certainly hadn't encountered on the way out. 'Ah well, tiada masaala, pas de probleme, no worries!' I thought as I joined a queue of very slow moving traffic. I always think too soon.

A gaggle of policemen were pulling over cars of their choice into a little coned-off area at the side of the road, and of course they chose me. 'Okay, calm, I have my licence, insurance documents and a small amount of Malay to work with, just don't panic!' I muttered to myself, or Chloe, whoever was listening. I rolled to a standstill next to a slight but intimidating man in a blue uniform and wound down the window. Except that there's another difference between and A35 and a Hilux - the Hilux has electric windows and the switches are all next to each other. And it was dark... so the driver's side rear window opened perfectly and the wall of glass betwen me and the unamused policeman remained firmly in place. I smiled apologetically and pressed the other switch. I still wasn't able to talk to the policeman, but there was a nice breeze of fresh air flowing through the newly created thoroughfare between the rear windows. Oh dear. I eventually found the correct switch and handed over my documents. Not entirely sure what they were looking for, and trying to salvage what I could from the situation I thought I'd ask for directions for a particular road. The policeman looked confused, said 'yes' and waved me on. I don't think he could be bothered with the stupid tourists anymore...

...I'd only gone and asked him for directions to the road we were travelling on!

A Jungle Joke

Not Borneo-related, but still in the wildlife vein...

One day in the jungle a chimpanzee invented some tools to eat his dinner. One tool was a flat stick sharpened along one edge, this he used to cut his food.

The other was a stick with four smaller sticks attached to the end each sharpened to a point. He used to spear his food and place it in his mouth.

The chimp was very proud of his inventions which he called his one point tool and his four point tool. One day he awoke to find that the four point tool was missing. The chimp was distraught. He ran around the jungle trying to find his precious tool.

First he came upon the lion. "Lion, Lion!" he cried, "Have you seen my four point tool?"

"No." Replied the lion, "I have not seen your four point tool."

Then the chimp came upon the gorilla. "Gorilla, Gorilla!" he cried, "Have you seen my four point tool?"

"No." Replied the gorilla, "I have not seen your four point tool."

Then the chimp came upon the jaguar. "Jaguar, Jaguar!" he cried, "Have you seen my four point tool?"

"Yup!" replied the jaguar, "I've seen your four point tool."

"Well where is it?" inquired the chimp.

"I ate it." Said the jaguar, smugly.

"Why would you do that?" Cried the chimp.

"Because," replied the big cat, "I'm a four point tool eater jaguar!"

You have to laugh...

The Twelve Days of Christmas (part 2)

On the first day of Christmas...we left Sabah in search of the Thai border in order to renew our visas. We left Sandakan at 8am and by midnight we were still travelling North, having flown to Kuala Lumpur and found a coach to take us to Aloe Setar where we hoped to catch a connecting bus to Thailand. We filled the time between arrival and departure on the bus by playing snakes and ladders and chess in Starbucks. A lady on the plane requested my orange peel, which she sniffed until we landed in KL.

On the second day of Christmas...we were still travelling. At 4am we were dumped in Aloe Setar where it became apparent that no connecting buses to Thailand existed. It was here that we joined up with two students from Singapore on a similar mission and caught a taxi to the top of Malaysia, walked across the border and managed to find a minibus that would take Malaysian Ringgitts to get us to Hatyai.

On the third day of Christmas... we lleft Hatyai and moved to the island of Koh Lipe. Conveniently we find a room at the 'Monkey Bar'.

On the fourth day of Christmas... we were offered a kitten in a cafe made from bamboo. Chloe was very tempted but pointing out that crocodiles probably eat cats seemed to do the trick. In her defence it was a very cute kitten. We also met a French man with a handbag who was extremely odd and apparently owns several clothing factories in Bangkok, a middle-aged man from Portsmouth and a group of New Zealanders who were all very interesting characters.

On the fifth day of Christmas...we realised we'd accidentally stolen all of the New Zealanders' money after being asked to look after it, so spent the morning trying to locate them in order to return it. It was thirsty work so we had to buy a fruit juice on the way.

On the sixth day of Christmas... we snorkelled in the rain and swam in the sun! I saw a family of 'Nemo' clown fish before they all disappeared, leaving me to wonder why fish hide in the rain when they're already fairly wet. It was New Year's Eve and not only did I find a bar playing a U2 DVD and so managed to get a quick musical fix before the end of 2008, but we also found a bar with many bongo drums which I commandeered shortly after the midnight fireworks had been set off on the beach.

On the seventh day of Christmas... we woke up two minutes before the taxi boat was due to leave from the beach to get to the floating jetty to catch the speedboat. We grabbed our belongings and ran out into the baking morning sunshine, thrusting our remaining Thai Baht into the bewildered owner's hand before jumping into the first boat we could find. The taxi boat took us to the wrong jetty and by the time we'd communicated that fact the speed boat, which we had to be on in order to catch out fight later, was already in motion. For some reason I found this all quite entertaining and didn't feel at all stressed whilst jumping up and down in the tiny wooden boat, shouting 'STOP! STOP!' and waving my arms about like a lunatic. Amazingly somebody noticed and the boat waited for us to catch up with it. We clambered aboard mid-ocean and made the two hour trip back to mainland Thailand.

The minibus was caught without a hitch and I even managed to find 5 minutes to check my bank balance online after losing my card on the 27th. I only noticed on the sixth day of Christmas when I tried to get some cash out. The minibus took us back to Hatyai to catch a coach, and whilst we were waiting, I had time to ask in the hostel with regards to my card...

"So it's blue and plastic and it's a bank card, but it's no use to anyone because if you don't have it then I'll ring and cancel it straight away..."

"Ah! A Card? Like money card? Ah we no have. Maybe."

"Pardon?"

"See lady cleaner cannot read English. So maybe card in rubbish because writing not in Thai."

"Okay, so you've thrown away my debit card?"

"I do not know. Cleaner does not remember."

And that was all I was getting from the helpful receptionist. Unfortunately, said card could not be cancelled from Thailand due to a mobile phone network problem, but what's another 24 hours when it's been missing for 5 days already?

The coach journey to Kuala Lumpur was almost uneventful, but true to form something had to liven things up. The ten hours of freezing under broken air conditioning on full blast required some form of break, especially seeings as my jumper was left safely at Danau Girang, so the opportunity to stop at the Duty Free shop on the Thai-Malay border was very welcome. The coach driver (we are convinced) said that we had 35 minutes before departing again, so imagine our surprise to find the coach had left the carpark when we came back after 20!!!

We spotted it driving off towards the second border, ran across the carpark and managed to get the French couple who had been sat behind us to stop the coach. Apparently he was just going to leave us there! I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing, but at least we managed to get back onboard before it left the checkpoints!

A further communication complication meant that we didn't arrive in Kuala Lumpur at the ETA of 2200, but 0100, making it completely pointless to go to the hostel we'd previously booked when we had to check into the airport at 0500 to catch our flight back to Sabah. The train stations nearby were closed, but eventually we managed to find a taxi to take us to the central station to catch a coach to the airport! At 0430 we entered Kuala Lumpur airport completely exhausted but early for a change and were able to make a stress-free flight back to Sandakan on the eighth day of Christmas!

On the ninth day of Christmas we were in Kota Kinabalu, which is a six hour coach journey from Sandakan. Farina, our elephant friend, met us at the bus station and we stayed with her for he weekend. The tenth, eleventh and twelth day of Christmas were spent getting some satistics work done for my monkey survey as part of my second year course and exploring KK with Farina. I even found time for a haircut - exciting stuff!

And that was my Twelve Days of Christmas! x