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.

Practicals are almost done

At the moment 3 of the 4 schools have done their practical field day. Up to now, almost everything went well and we think it was a great success. The morning started with an introduction and a 2 1/2 hour walk trough the forest with explanation about primary and secondary rainforest, medicinal plants and nice facts about the plants and animals that live there. After lunch, the students designed a poster of a medicinal plant in small groups. The posters will be presented at the schools in an exhibition and the parents are invited as well.
It didn’t start good though. The first school decided not to show up. We were in San Miguel waiting for the boats and were a  bit surprised when there were no students in the boat. It turned out that it had rained all night in Rurre and some families didn’t want their children to go on a boat trip because of the rain. Unfortunately, they only mentioned this the morning the students were going. Everything was ready, but no children… For a moment we thought this would be the end of the project, because it’s fairly hard to predict a week before the date of the practical if it will rain on that day, but the guides, boats and food have to be arranged and cannot be canceled. We visited the director of the school and she assured us that she would talk with the parents. Good start of our first day. We immediately talked with the directors of the other schools and they said the weather would not pose a problem. Phew, we were happy to hear that.
With the other 3 schools everything went fine. It was nice to see that each individual guide had a slightly different approach and different information to explain to the students. Some are natural teachers, while other guides have a lot of information to tell to the students.
Students are a bit more timid compared to Dutch students and do not ask a lot of questions, but they enjoyed the day and worked hard. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they work fast, but everything goes at a slower pace in this country. The end result of the posters were quite nice. Each group of students was supposed to pick a medicinal plant which they found interesting and design a poster with a drawing of the plant, some morphological characteristics (form of the leave, structure of the veins etc.) and the medicinal use. We added some information from different plant books, including the scientific name and sometimes pictures and additional information.
Some students can draw really well, but we found out that they are very dependant on the teachers and need a lot of help (also because they just don’t read what they need to do and I think that is a universal bad habit of students). 
The San Miguel students were a lot younger, because they only have the first two classes of the secondary school and we designed the practical for the 5th grade. We noticed the difference, because at one point almost all the teachers of San Miguel were working on the posters of the students and the students were watching. After kindly reminding them that these were the student’s posters, the students went back to work. Apparently a good final result is more important than the fact that it this the student’s work. That’s a big difference compared to the Dutch school system. These students did however have a lot of knowledge of medicinal plants, because they live near the forest. Even the pouring rain didn’t diminish their enthusiasm. We did change the contents though. Poster in the morning, walk in the afternoon. You can only do so much when it’s raining really hard. At the end of the afternoon Annelies went back to Rurre (Dolf was still in Rurre to arrange a meeting with the schools). The water level of the river had risen considerably and whole trees were floating in the water, which made it an interesting boat trip back. It wasn’t really dangerous because they know what they are doing but we had somebody in front shoving big logs away from the boat and giving directions. By now the water level is normal, because the sun is shining really good and it is very hot. That makes the ice cream sellers happy and gives us a good excuse to buy an ice cream every now and then.
The practical gave us a good insight in the Bolivian educational system. Tomorrow the final school will go. We have visited them three days in a row to make sure they wouldn’t cancel. After that it is time for evaluation and writing our final report.
Yesterday we booked a ticket for our next trip. It seems impossible for us to book a ticket online in a correct way. We booked the ticket to Vietnam, but received a reply a day later that something went wrong with the payment. The good part of this story is that we were informed this time that it went wrong. The difficult part was that it costs us almost 15 euros of telephone costs to call Visa, the Brazilian office (we fly from Sao Paolo) and eventually the Dutch KLM office. It turned out that the authorization code of our Visa had disappeared somewhere along the line between sending the information from NL to Brazil by KLM so we had to book a new ticket on the phone (with additional charging of course, but they were small). But hey, we have a flight to Vietnam, and it is not even that expensive, considering the late time of booking and the fact that we fly to the other side of the world! We will be in Vietnam from Nov 26- Apr 13, although the last 5 weeks we are probably traveling around and diving in various countries. What a bad life we have!

New pictures online

Hey all, we have some new pictures online. Some I put below, the rest you can see on https://plus.google.com/photos/115837808651205760395/albums/5926179484845030881?authkey=COP4--XmwdjV_wE

The first few are from a trip walking up to a viewpoint just outside Rurrenabaque. It is a small hill just outside with a big cross on it, and a viewpoint. Another viewpoint is on the next peak just below it. It really gives nice views. A lot of the locals go up there on their saturday afternoon, and so did we.

The pictures after that are from San Miguel del Bala when we went there to prepare the field practical that we have been organizing for the kids of the local schools. We really enjoy having the option of choosing between Rurrenabaque and San Miguel. One having all the facilities and food and stuff you would want, the other being very quiet, calm, relaxed and with beautiful nature right outside your front door. Not a bad life at all. 

We also have pictures in our webalbum from the first three field practicals, but I did not put them down here just yet, because Annelies is writing a blogpost about that at the moment, and will put some pictures in that post. Have fun looking at them.

our hotel (the blue one) as seen from the viewpoint

It was just a baby. Not that big at all :)

Busy, busy, busy

If you look at the amount of work we’re doing at the moment, it looks like we’re back in Holland. We are really busy to get everything organized. Only difference is that when we decide to take a day off, it’s not going to happen. We were looking forward last week to our visit to a biological field station, but it turned out the road was closed. We should have known, because the evening before the rain was pouring like crazy. We forgot to bring our jackets and after about 20 minutes the gutter of the restaurant overflowed at several places. That’s all very normal, you just move your chair and go sit someplace where it is dry.Which brings me to another nice anecdote.
In our hotel they have just constructed a nice palm leave roof over the patio with hammocks, tables and chairs underneath. They have put in some pipes for drainage and a gutter, but they forget to put a canal in the concrete to the drain, which means that every time it is raining hard the whole patio overflows. The water sometimes even runs into the hallway of the hotel. When they were constructing the whole thing we already had some doubts when we looked at the builders who had already difficulties hammering nails straight into the wood. Our doubts were confirmed last week when visitors from San Miguel said that the roof was put together really bad. But we don’t complain, we live in the second floor so we don’t have water running into our room and when it is not raining we can read a book while lying in a hammock. 

Back to what we’re doing at the moment. Last week we trained the guides of San Miguel. We explained the practical work, tested their biological knowledge and gave them some tips and tricks how to cope with students. It went fairly well. Of course we started an hour later as planned and we did not manage to tell them all the information we wanted to, but it was a good day. Part of the guides guides have had an extensive 3 month field course taught by Conservation International in which they worked together with a herpetologist, zoologist and entomologist, which means that they know a lot about ecology.
At the moment we have our final preparations for our field practicum which is from Wednesday-Friday and Monday next week.  We also planned a first meeting with a work group. We thought it would be good to set up a work group with teachers from every school, guides from San Miguel and some other people to prepare a field course for next year. A work group turned out to be a whole new concept for the Bolivian participants, but several people agreed to come. We were expecting to be with 5-12 people but ended up with 3. The teachers forgot to mention that they had a meeting about examination regulations, because when asked earlier the time and date were fine. Too bad, no meeting. Next option at the end beginning of November. Apparently it is very common to forget appointments and people need to be remembered several times. We hope to meet 1 or 2 times with the group before we leave for Vietnam.
Next message will take a while since we will be in San Miguel for several days.

Quite some more pictures online

We have uploaded quite a lot of pictures again. You can see them all on https://plus.google.com/photos/115837808651205760395/albums/5926179484845030881?authkey=COP4--XmwdjV_wE.

Here are a few nice ones already:

Why don't you park it there.

View of Rurrenabaque from the other side of the river (San Buenaventura)

Our office (or balcony of our hotel room)

Those cicadas make a hell of a noise! 

Nice moth!

This drunk guy kept insisting on danceing with Annelies and an english tourist.

The music continued the next morning in San Miguel del Bala

And of course Dolf needed to dance as well.

Quite but shy kids posing for our camera at San Miguel del Bala party.

At the end of the party people make resolutions for the next year, and ask the blessing of San Miguel.

Nice little toad (I think) in the forest.