New adventures

I wrote this web log almost a week ago, but because of failing internet connections and a murdering travel schedule with days from 5.00 am – 20.00 pm we were not able to post it up to now.

We have said the island farewell and are now in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. We have had a nice last week in which we finished our exercises for assistant instructor and spent a wonderful weekend diving with the volunteers on Koh Tang, a small island 3,5 hours by boat from our own island. The visibility was incredible. During our deep dive, which started at 32 m, we were still able to see the surface. That's a slight difference compared to our normal visibility of 5 m, or 8 m on a good day. We saw a lot of different coral patches and some small fish, but unfortunately the overfishing seems as bad as on our own island which means no big fish. Wonderful Christmas tree worms in 20 different colors though (it is a worm which attaches itself to a rock and looks like a garland in the form of a triangle, hence the name).

We did see a school of small barracuda and some fish we rarely see near our island. We will upload the pictures later. For the night, we put up 15 hammocks on the boat and mattresses on all elevated areas which turned the boat into a nice jungle of hammocks. It was a good way to finish our dive time in Cambodia. After we have send in the paperwork we're official assistant instructors!

We have started out travels with looking at the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime, by paying a visit to one of the killings fields. Because Pol Pot's regime ended in 1979, there are still survivors left and they told their own stories on the audio guide which made it even more horrid. In almost four years the regime managed to kill 3 million people out of a population of 8 million. After that we visited Tuol Sleng, or S-21; a school converted in torture and killing center in Phnom Penh. Most of the 20.000 people who died here have there own picture on a board. It was good to see this bad part of history in Cambodia, but we ended our day with much happier seeings; a visit the the Royal Palace and the silver pagoda. Built only in 1866, the buildings still looked beautiful as you will be able to see in the pictures later on. In the twilight we paid a visit to the Wat Ouna Lom, the epi centre of Cambodian Buddhism. In a nearby temple, the monks were so happy that we visited that the flashing lights went on immediately and he insisted that he took our picture in front of it.

Cambodians love flashy lights, so you see them everywhere were they can afford them. On billboards, buildings, as part of their karaoke show (yes, they love karaoke as does the rest of Asia) and apparently on their Buddhist shrines. But the thing they love most is our purpose of the next few days: Angkor Wat. We already noticed on our island that Angkor Wat is part of your everyday life: one of the 2 beer brands you could buy is called Angkor and the cutlery we used had Angkor Wat engraved in its design, and of course Angkor Wat is on the Cambodian flag which every small fishing boat has.

Next blog will be from Siem Reap and after that, diving in the Philippines!

Visit to Kampot and Kep

We uploaded the pictures of our visit to Kampot and Kep a few weeks ago, but didn't get to the part of telling what we did. 

We had a wonderful long weekend and started visiting Bokor National park by moped. A lot of Cambodians use mopeds, so we thought it would be nice to follow the local custom and explore the park on our own. We did not have enough time to walk a lot in the park, but the long ride to the top of the mountain was beautiful. Unfortunately, Chinese developers build a big hotel and casino on the top of the hill, in the middle of the park. The pictures of the remains of the concrete building was the old casino. Apparently it has been popular for a long time to build casino's in protected nature areas. Kampot is a lovely small city with a lot of old French colonial houses. The atmosphere was much more relaxed compared to the buzz in Sihanoukville.

Next day we drove with the mopeds to Kep. A second project site of Marine Conservation Cambodia will start here in March. The owner of the project has build an aquarium and wants to see if he can increase the seahorse population by breeding them. It gave us a nice opportunity to take some good pictures of the different seahorses living in the aquarium. On a small island 1 hour from the mainland, the new project site is build. The water is more shallow here, which prevents trawlers to come in and the municipality wants to be a green and sustainable municipality which makes protecting the reef much easier than on our island. There is even a marine police who patrols the area for illegal fishing. The aquarium offers a nice opportunity for environmental education, although it is yet the early stage of the project.

Both Dolf and me are training at the moment to become an assistant instructor and we are one of the few people who are experienced enough to take other volunteers out for diving. This results in 3-4 dives each day and a nice mix in doing a survey, learn volunteers about the seahorses and the substrates they live on, learning them the different fish species and invertebrates (like sea stars, sea cucumbers and sea urchins), helping the dive instructor with training volunteers in their open water dive certification and doing course dives. This means we only focus on diving and reading the course books for becoming assistant instructor at the moment. Dolf has also taken an interest in repairing dive equipment and by now he has learned himself to repair regulators and dive tanks. We are enjoying ourselves, but still miss the conservation part of the project a bit.

By now we have seen a lot of seahorses. Annelies had her lucky day last week and spotted 10 seahorses in 3 dives on one day. Apparently we are in the right season at the moment, because we see more seahorses than 2 months ago, including a lot of juveniles (or just have been better in spotting them).  

Happy new year!

Happy new year to everybody! We hope you all have had wonderful Christmas days and have eaten a lot of nice things. For us it was very strange to celebrate Christmas in 30 degrees. No rain, no snow and no real Christmas tree. Of course we tried to simulate Christmas a litle bit. We had pancakes for breakfast with fresh fruits and prepared our own meal. Usually we have the Khmer cooking staff, but this is the one day in the year that we cook our own European meal. It was simple, but delicious, especially because we are used to eating rice three times a day. We bought cheese (very expensive) and made our own mashed potatoes. On only a charcoal stove and no fridge it was a bit of improvising.

Some volunteers found a tropical tree with a slight resemblance to a Christmas tree and painted the tree because we did not have any decorations. Another volunteer had brought an inflatable Rudolf the rednosed reindeer. We even had a present for everybody and played secret Santa (you had a buy a present for 1 person and he didn't know who got him the present). I got a new shirt and Dolf some coffee.

We celebrated new years eve with a dinner in a new restaurant on the island. The food was good with crab, swordfish and mushroom risotto, but after dinner was finally served after two hours everybody run of to finish the evening somewhere else. Not the best start of the restaurant. We ended the evening in our standard bar with a lot of alcohol. They serve a teapot, which consists of a bottle of Khmer whiskey, a few cans of Thai red bull (apparently red bull originated in Thailand and this version is even sweeter and stronger in caffeine) and a few can of cokes. This is all mixed in a teapot and served in small glasses. If you drink this in between your beers your evening improves considerably, even with bad music. Psi (the Korean dude with gangnam style) is very popular here...

The weather has improved and we have had a flat sea for the last few days. That means the seahorse surveys can continue and we do 2 seahorse surveys a day. Unfortunately, there is a lot of current in the afternoon on the bottom which makes it impossible to continue the research, but then you can do nice drift dives. You drift along with the current without doing anything, or drift upside down and do some acrobatic tricks. The weather improvements also means no wind and an increase in temperature. It can be very hot when you are not diving as we noticed yesterday. We made a nice boat trip through a mangrove forest and a small walk through the jungle to a small fishing village where we had lunch consisting of fresh fish caught in the river earlier in the morning. We will add some extra pictures on line next time we are on the mainland.

The village on our island

Rudolf, the prsents and our Christmas tree

Christmas breakfast with pancakes and champagne

The dog felt vey wet and lonely since he was not allowed to swim to mainland in the territory of our dogs

Our trip through the mangroves

Working days

The seahorse research consists of getting to know the substrates the seahorses live on, like sponges, sea urchins, hydrozoans and sea pens. Since sea horses are only a couple of cm, you have to look well to see one. Because of the fishing activities, the number of seahorses have greatly diminished and so far we have not even seen one. Others have, so it's just a question of continuing and being lucky.

Six years ago you would see several sea horses during one survey, now we see 1 sea horse on every 2-3 surveys. The survey consists of a transect in the water of 50 m. With a group of 5 people you put two ropes of 50 in the water and 2 people zigzag along one rope looking for seahorses and substrates, 2 people zigzag a transect along the second rope and the fifth person reels in the rope again.

In a morning or afternoon we do transects on 2 different locations. The other part of the day you can join in on some land based activities. These activities are mostly beach cleanings. In Sihanoukville and the surrounding islands the sewers lead directly into the sea (you can even see the sand getting dark brown in some spots of all the nutrients of the excrements) and garbage is thrown everywhere on the ground and in the see. That means that, depending on the wind, the coast can be full with plastic, rope, bottles, etc. Other activities include a snorkel survey were we look for invertebrates and snorkeling to clean garbage in the sea like fishing nets which are attached to rocks or coral.

As ecologists we do have some issues concerning the land based activities. We are only cleaning other peoples garbage, which is fine, but unfortunately the organisation we work for does not do anything to protect the reef or take preventive measures against the garbage thrown everywhere, also because the municipality and the people are not very cooperative. Because the project might move to another place in a couple of months (where the municipality is making an effort to be a clean city), we are a bit reluctant to set up our own activities because they will probably not carried out for long. Dolf is going to try to build a weather station which will measure wind direction, and force, temperature, air pressure and humidity. We have bought some equipment and downloaded some articles to start building.

The village has 1 small school, but 3 Dutch teachers just arrived and are going to teach the school children and teachers for 1 year, so Annelies still has to see if she can do something with environmental education. Khmer is a difficult language to learn so that will be a challenge. At the moment we have 1 Cambodian general manager who speaks English and 1 English manager who speaks Khmer, so communication is sometimes interesting.

On Friday you can choose to go to the mainland or to Koh Rong. If you stay on the island, you do a fun dive in the afternoon, while the others take the bout to their destinations. The visibility is not really great and because of the overfishing there are not always much fish swimming around. The interesting part of this is that you look at the smaller things you normally overlook, like invertebrates and nudibranches.

The Cambodians are very friendly people, but because we are with so many volunteers and do not speak Khmer, we mostly hang out with the volunteers. The temperature is increasing and each day is over 30 degrees, rising to 40 in April. Because we live next to the see, we almost always have a cool breeze. That means we will probably adjust our travel plans and make some short trips in extended weekends. Cambodia is not a really big country which makes it relatively easy to travel around. There are more than enough busses to each destination. Visiting Angkor Wat in over 40 degrees might not be a good idea. We will probably spend Christmas on the island, since everybody is travelling at that time.

Living on Koh Rong Samlem

Finally a message from us. The internet connection is not good enough to post blogs.  Last weekend we were on neighbouring island Koh Rong,  but the internet connection of the whole island was off.
We have had a good time up to now.  Dolf is in training to become a dive master and Annelies has joined the survey team to investigate seahorses and their habitat. The first week the weather was sometimes too bad for diving, with high waves, wind and choppy water but it has definitely improved by now. The climate change is noticed here as well, because from November onwards the sea is supposed to be flat.
We live in very basic conditions. We share a small two room bungalow with four people in bunk beds. The second room is our shower which consists of a big ton of cold water. The living room is under a big roof with big tarps as walls.  They are usually open to let the breeze in.We will add some pictures in our next blog to give you a better idea.
We live together with a group of volunteers that varies in size. We started with 30 and are now down to 20.
Some volunteers stay two weeks, while others stay for several months. Most are European but there are also people from the states, Canada and Australia. The food is actually pretty good, but is of course always accompanied with rice. On the mainland you can buy lots of different fruits and there are many western restaurants. In sihanoukville you can find food from every European country because a lot of Western people started their own restaurant. We just bought a kilo of rambutans, comparable with lychee. Dragonflies are also really good. Search for a picture on the internet, both inside and outside, because they look pretty weird.

We live next to a small village of fisherman. Unfortunately, bigger trawlers from Thailand and Vietnam have largely depleted the local fish population, which means we are mainly measuring the recovery of the reef. The local kids catch squid using lines from their small foam boats and the village fishermen have only long boats. There is a 300m sustainable fishing zone around the island but unfortunately the patrol team is undermanned and paid extra by the big companies to close their eyes when a trawler comes along. However, the marine life is still abundant and interesting to discover. Tomorrow we will post a blog which describes our work more in detail.

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