We're in Cambodia

We've arrived in Cambodia after an exhausting flight. Since we were travelling forward in time during the night, the night was really very short and since the plane from Amsterdam to Bangkok was full, sleeping was hard. Quite a contrast with the plane from Sao Paulo to Amsterdam a day and a half earlier. There we could take three seats per person so sleeping was a lot more comfortable. I guess sometimes your lucky and sometimes you aren't.
It  was also great to see a few people during our stopover (quite a few more then we expected, a nice surprise), and I am also happy and proud my grandparents made the train trip back and forth to schiphol (at about 85 years old) , although my grandma did not escape from the escalator unscathed. I don't think (hope) it will be anything longlasting though.
And Auke with his plans! Great! A lot of happiness to you and Joli!

But  after this exhausting flight which went very smooth, we arrived in Phnom Penh. We did not know what to expect. Chaos, dirt, beautiful temples, great food? Many "Happy endings"?
Well it turns out to be a little of all of that. But the sentiment that is most prominent is one of utter happiness after the absolutely delicious meal we had! Man, that was good! But we must say, the Thai restaurant in Wageningen also really does a very good job.

Phnom Penh is certainly a traffic chaos with the tuk-tuks (we finally rode them!) and cars and pedestrians. But it is a rather pleasant  chaos. The atmosphere is very friendly with enormous amounts of restaurants from really modern European style clubs on rooftops to small Street side food stalls full with people. Many of the buildings are old and not too well maintained but there are still a lot of old style colonial buildings lining the road that give it a nice atmosphere. All in all a city worth spending some time in, which  we aren't going to do, since we already booked our bus ticket for tomorrow morning to sihanoukville.
But all in all we are really rather happy, especially since we can go to sleep now.

Getting ready for Cambodia

Huh, Cambodia? People who knew our trip planning will be a bit surprised. We have changed the plans and go to Cambodia instead of Vietnam. Instead of research in the rainforest we will be doing biological research under water and we will spend 4 months diving in Cambodia. For those of you who would like to know more of the project, have a look at www.marineconservationcambodia.org. In the end, we decided that this project would probably be more interesting.

We had a great time in Madidi national park and made indeed some nice pictures. Unfortunately, we didn’t bring the camera during our night walk, so we have no pictures of the different frogs we encountered. We saw a lot of birds, a howler monkey with young clung to her back and various insects, frogs and lizards. We visited a cliff one early morning with a beautiful view over the rainforest, and more important, a good view on the aras and loros who were nestling in holes in the cliff and sitting on tree branches. We have taken some incredibly good pictures and enjoyed every minute watching them with our binoculars. Sometimes they were getting so close that the binoculars were not even necessary. We had visited the same cliff in 2002, so we knew we would like to return here.

Last night we had a nice bbq with live music with the people of San Miguel, to celebrate that they won a football tournament between different indigenous villages the days before. Some of the guys played actually really well, considering the fact that the field wasn’t level and had quite some holes and the grass was only partially grass with little plants which makes it difficult for the ball to roll. Each time San Miguel scored, a fire cracker was lit. The tournament was in another village across the river from San Miguel, so even the people who were not watching could hear when San Miguel scored a goal. After the tournament the village looked liked the Heineken music hall after a concert, waste lying everywhere on the ground.
At the end of the bbq we saw some big lights coming down. It turned out that some people wanted to get their kayak out of the river, but their cars got stuck in the mud. It took a digger quite some time to get the 3 cars out of the mud, because the rope to which the car was attached broke several times. That was an interesting process to watch. Even the army came by to help.

Now it’s time to pack and finish the final things. We will spend a few days in La Paz, which will help to survive the temperature during our stopover in Holland, since the temperature drops down to 4 degrees during the night, while in Rurre we sleep most of the time with the ventilator on during the night.

Dolf with a spider monkey at biological station Jaguarette

This is a 'tejon' in Spanish

In Madidi the trees were a lot bigger compafred to San Miguel

San Miguel players in action during  football tournament

Best friends

  

Showering with water overflowing the roofs in Rurre during heavy downpour

Finishing up

Well, it seems that the story about difficulties with booking tickets isn’t over yet. After booking a new ticket on the phone with KLM, we thought everything was settled. We kept an eye on our credit card and found out that the money was still not taken of our credit card. Time for another phone call (of 8 euros). It seemed that KLM had made a mistake, the ticket was booked but they had forgotten to put the order to Visa. After booking a third ticket we can finally fly with KLM without any trouble. We also wanted to book our ticket from La Paz to Sao Paulo. That didn’t work either. We got a reply that everything was ok, followed by a sign that something went wrong. After three times booking a ticket this way, we received a mail from Visa that they had blocked our account. After calling them we found out that they blocked our card because the transaction was suspicious. Supposedly you cannot book a ticket in Bolivia on a Bolivian website. After noting that we would probably book some more obscure tickets we could use our credit card again. Why is it so difficult to book an e-ticket?

We would have been in the rainforest today, but after 4 days of sunshine it rained again all morning, so there were no boats leaving today. We will try to leave again tomorrow morning. Unfortunately we have planned a meeting on Saturday, so we have to shorten our holiday. We hope to be proper biologists for at least 3 days. We bring our binoculars, bird guide and borrowed plant guide with us and will be out in nature all day. After this trip, we will probably have some nice pictures to post.

We more or less finished the project for now. Last week we had an evaluation meeting with directors and teachers of the different schools. They were enthusiastic but we have to adjust several things. We were glad to notice that most of the people weren’t shy to give comments about negative points as well. The students were really enthusiastic. Each time they see us in or out school they wave and call, so we’re quite popular at the moment it seems. 
We have already made some plans for next year. We adjust our practical and add some theoretical classes about ecology. We hope to include workshops given by local people about topics like agro forestry and sustainable tourism. If we have enough time we will develop some lessons about waste as well for the lower classes. Unfortunately, most people have the habit to throw just everything on the ground and schools would like to change this as well. And then we have to develop a training for the guides and a training for the teachers. The amount of plans is no problem, to put everything in 2 months will be.