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...

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...

The Twelve Days of Christmas (part one)

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
An orangutan in a fig tree.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Two silvered langurs and an orangutan in a fig tree.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Three french men, two silvered langurs and an orangutan in a fig tree.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Four calling gibbons, three french men...

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Five rambutan...

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Six flying hornbills...

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Seven crocs-a-swimming...

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Eight proboscis monkeys...

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Nine giant geckos...

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Ten thousand ants...

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Eleven bleeding leechbites...

On the twelth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:
Twelve million mosquitoes...

(Music: traditional, Revised lyrics: R. Henson)

27 DEC 08

Well Christmas day seems a lifetime ago now, but in reality I suppose it's only been two days. The problem is that we've been up since 8am yesterday (It's now 8pm today!) in order to get ourselves across the Thai border. We finally managed it, after arriving in Kuala Lumpur to find that all train and bus tickets to Thailand had long sold out. We could however get a bus to Alor Setar in Malaysia where we were assured we could catch a connecting bus to Hatyai in Southern Thailand. That was a lie.
After being unceremoniously dumped an hour earlier than scheduled, at 4am, in what could only resemble a ghost town, we then had the challenge of finding any sort of transport to *somewhere* in Thailand... eventually we get a taxi to the border with two students from Singapore on a similar mission. It was only after we'd left Malaysian soil that Chloe and I realised that we'd completely forgotten to get any Thai currency. We'd spent the afternoon wandering the streets of Kuala Lumpur with our backpacks waiting for the 2300 bus, so there really was no excuse. We'd even had time to find a Starbucks and play snakes and ladders for two hours, so we really should have considered currency, but we didn't. It took 3 hours of standing in a queue to cross the sencond border-check into Thailand, and by some miracle we found a minibus that would take Malaysian Ringgitsto get us to Hatyai. Now we appear to be here, and we leave in the morning for the island of Koh Lipe which looks beautiful and much less stressful (one hopes) than the mammoth journey to get here!

Christmas Day itself was rather odd but very nice. We attended a Church service which turned out to be in English and Chinese. Straight translations we could have worked with, but the system was a little more complicated, with people given the option to respond and sing in either language (or both)!
As a result, some prayers and readings were in English, some in Chinese. The sermon was in both and hence took the best part of an hour. Everytime they returned to English we'd forgotten the previous sentence, which wasn't helpful in a particularly heavy-going speech. The most interesting part was the music though with a Christmas-carol-megamix performed by the choir and dancers with tamborines performing at the front of teh Church. The congregational carols were traditional, including 'O Come All Ye Faithful', but even that turned out to be complicated when everyone switched to Chinese in the second verse, leavign Chloe and I caught between bewilderment and hysterics.

Christmas dinner went remarkably well and we managed to cook chicken, rice, veggies and potatoes. The only hitch was getting into our precious bottle of wine without a corkscrew, which no-one could help us with as they'd not seen a cork in a bottle like that before!

In the evening we went ahead with our meal out (we'd assumed lunch would be a disaster!) and went to a hotel to have the weirdest concoction of foods imaginable. As a result I had chicken, lasagne, fried rice, meatballs, vegetables, noodles and a random bit of lamb. It was a buffet-style affair and we thought we should make the most of it!

I hope everyone's well, and I'm sorry I can't sit and write the anecdotes I'd like to share, but maybe another time... Although i shall mention that one slightly strange lady yesterday asked me for a piece of orange peel on the plane yesterday and spent the flight sniffing it before discarding it on the airfield on arrival. Any ideas as to what that was about on a postcard please!

Best wishes,
Rachel x