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..

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...

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.

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!

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...

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.

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!