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

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!