So this one time, at Orangutan Camp...

Quick preface: as I write this, it is 4:30am. I sit in the middle of the rainforest, belly full of coffee,  under a tree inhabited by a mother and baby orangutan. There's a faint hint of sunrays on the horizon, casting just enough light to let me see the colorless silhouttes of leaves and branches above. The mother-infant pair are already up, as I hear the leaves shaking overhead and fruits landing here, there, and everywhere around me. 

It's a strange thing, living here. Time is an artifact that just exists to know when to wake up, when to eat, when to go to bed... There's no schedule to keep, no appointments to go to so what day it is doesn't really matter. As a result, the days seem to blend together. I don't remember what I did my first morning after I arrived. At least not any specifics. I just remember the general feeling of being here for the first time.

 I was very surprised by the conditions at camp. I had been told that the project had lost access to the lab and dorm building that had been built by the project, and  that everyone had been living in tents for the past year. So I was picturing an assortment of tents randomly scattered across the jungle floor, researchers reduced to sitting around in the mud while they ate breakfast and dinner from a little camp propane stove, only because they refused to put some roots down and settle in because surely they would soon regain access to the lab buildings. 

Instead, my first thought upon seeing what camp was like was "wow, this place is legit". It almost didn't matter that we weren't living in buildings, as the setup they had for the tents was virtually like being indoors. There were nine tents all aligned in row, a bed repurposed as extra sitting space and another as a storage area, a long dining table with enough room for 10 people, a workdesk, and even a fully equipped kitchen with all of the utensils any cook would need. All this was under a huge blue tarp held up over the entire encampment by a makeshift skeleton of branches and cord. Maybe it felt more roomy than it actually was....I mean, this place was made to hold around 20 people, and there were only 7 of us here at the time.

But really, what I was most looking forward to, and the real reason I came all the way out here, was to explore the rainforest. I couldn't wait to get out there.   In fact, for the two weeks, I was barely even at camp. There wore more orangutan sightings and follows that we knew what to do with or had the number of people to deal with. It was an exciting time. Which I'll tell you about next time.

It's a small world after all, but this ain't no disney ride.

Like I wrote last week, it took an epic 8-hour river canoe journey from a small village into the center of the rainforest. It was a great experince, and a very blunt way of communicating just how remote a place I will be living in for the next year. 

That's one of the biggest things that slaps you in the face after you've been here a few days: you're very removed from civilization and have to adapt accordingly.  Most of us take it for granted just how easy it is to communicate with people nowadays. That's really the innovatiom of the 21st century...all of our infrastructure: the internet, texting, Skype, WhatsApp, Google, Wikipedia,  is designed for communicating and sharing information with people halfway across the world in seconds. Here, we're at the very least set back to the 90s (but really, that crappy 52k modem that made dubstep sounds and connected me to America Online back in the day was probably faster than the cellphone connection I'm using now). 

The fact that I can write this in the rainforest and you are able to see it is pretty special and shows just how far humanity has come in its attempts to tame the wild. Of course, the wild is never truly tamed. All it takes is a rogue cloud or a bit of interference from the trees, and my ability to communicate with the outisde world is gone in a second. That's what makes this place so special: it's a window into what the world was like before humans started changing it with buildings, roads, and technology. We've managed to make this 21st century version of Earth feel very small with our communications and transportation technology.

But here, you feel small. Walking just a mile in any direction is an ordeal, and you won't see anyone else around except the same handful of faces you see every day. If I lived in this very spot 300 years ago and was naive to the fact that there is an entire planet filled with all sorts if different places outside of the borders of this rainforest, my world view would be dramatically different. It's not that crazy to think that if you were uncontacted by the outside world in a place like this, you might think the rainforest you live is all that exists, and maybe you'll only ever meet 25 people in your entire lifetime. While I come from a time and place where this isn't the case, being here gives me a small taste of this world view, and is proof that we are just a small part of the world, and ultimately always at the mercy of nature. 

It's a small world after all, but this ain't no disney ride.

Like I wrote last week, it took an epic 8-hour river canoe journey from a small village into the center of the rainforest. It was a great experince, and a very blunt way of communicating just how remote a place I will be living in for the next year. 

That's one of the biggest things that slaps you in the face after you've been here a few days: you're very removed from civilization and have to adapt accordingly.  Most of us take it for granted just how easy it is to communicate with people nowadays. That's really the innovatiom of the 21st century...all of our infrastructure: the internet, texting, Skype, WhatsApp, Google, Wikipedia,  is designed for communicating and sharing information with people halfway across the world in seconds. Here, we're at the very least set back to the 90s (but really, that crappy 52k modem that made dubstep sounds and connected me to America Online back in the day was probably faster than the cellphone connection I'm using now). 

The fact that I can write this in the rainforest and you are able to see it is pretty special and shows just how far humanity has come in its attempts to tame the wild. Of course, the wild is never truly tamed. All it takes is a rogue cloud or a bit of interference from the trees, and my ability to communicate with the outisde world is gone in a second. That's what makes this place so special: it's a window into what the world was like before humans started changing it with buildings, roads, and technology. We've managed to make this 21st century version of Earth feel very small with our communications and transportation technology.

But here, you feel small. Walking just a mile in any direction is an ordeal, and you won't see anyone else around except the same handful of faces you see every day. If I lived in this very spot 300 years ago and was naive to the fact that there is an entire planet filled with all sorts if different places outside of the borders of this rainforest, my world view would be dramatically different. It's not that crazy to think that if you were uncontacted by the outside world in a place like this, you might think the rainforest you live is all that exists, and maybe you'll only ever meet 25 people in your entire lifetime. While I come from a time and place where this isn't the case, being here gives me a small taste of this world view, and is proof that we are just a small part of the world, and ultimately always at the mercy of nature. 

River Ride to the Rainforest

The sun hadn’t yet risen, and I was already lurking around my temporary home in Ketapang, a small town in Western Borneo. It was 4am, and I could already hear the Ramadan dawn prayer chants resonating throughout the town. In just one hour, I needed to be ready to load my few belongings into the truck that would drop our group of five at the small village where we would begin our 8-hour river journey into the rainforest. After a quick breakfast and a few goodbyes over the internet, I headed out the door to meet up with my companions for the trip: BU Anthropology professor Cheryl Knott, National Geographic photographer Tim Laman, and their children Russell and Jessica. As I loaded myself into the truck, a fact hit me: it would be my last time in civilization for at least a few months.

The road to the village was long, but the change in scenery as I left the city of Ketapang was as striking as it was pleasant. The cities in Indonesia aren’t very keen on including much green in their city planning, and it was nice to see trees and grass around me for once. We were driving on a narrow road that tried but clearly failed to accommodate the two lanes it was supposed to have, as we had to sway to the side every time a car or a motorcycle came in the opposite direction. The residents here live a simple life in fragile-looking shacks with moss-covered planks and aluminum roofs. A lot of people were just sitting on their porch, enjoying the fresh morning air. As we made it further into our journey, the houses became fewer and farther between, until they were completely replaced by flatlands and rice-paddies. By mid-morning, we had made it to the village. We stopped at the house of a man named Udin. We had hired some of his sons to paddle us upriver in sampans, all the way into the heart of the rainforest of Gunung Palung National Park. We had a problem however: the four sampans were too small and too few to take both ourselves and all of our baggage. We decided to leave some of our less important bags behind, which would be paddled upriver in a few days. After a bit of organizing, we boarded the small and shaky canoe-like boats.

We were off. After paddling through the rest of the village and being greeted by some river by- standers, our river guides turned on some very loud home-rigged motors strapped onto the back of the boats. The increase in pace from paddle-speed to motor-speed however, justified having such a loud device constantly broadcasting its mechanical noises throughout the river. We made our way through various changes of scenery: secondary forest, logged forest, rice paddies, and swamps. On the way, I saw strange new fruits, birds, butterflies, and even some macaques up in the trees. After a few hours, we made it to the thick cover of jungle, which was a nice relief from the powerful and burning sun we were exposed to for large part of our trip. After a nice dip in the water and a quick lunch of dried blocks of indomie (the Indonesian version of ramen-noodles), we continued through the thick forest on the narrow and winding stream between the green, luscious, collection of trees. We were forced to get off the boat and push on a few parts of our trip, as the water levels were too low on some parts of the stream for the sampan to get through unassisted by pushing from human hands, and I discovered that there are little fishes that nibble at your feet while you’re in the water...which is a nice alternative to the dozens of spiders that get on you every time your face smacks into leaves and branches hanging over the river.

I had heard stories from Tim and Cheryl earlier about instances where they had barely made it halfway to the research station before having to get out and push the boats. If something like this occurred, it might mean making it to the end sometime in the early AM, or perhaps even after sunrise. Luckily, the water levels were as nice as they get, and minimal pushing was needed. We ended up making really great time. We had been previously told by Udin that we would make it to the station by 9pm, but at our current pace we were set to get there around 6:30pm. Sure enough, by 6pm we were getting closer to our jungle home. Cheryl pointed out some trees with red trunks to me: a sign that we were close. I began to see a light flickering in the distance. As it moved closer, my eyes began to construct an image of Cabang Panti: 15 feet above the river and stretching from river-bank to river-bank, was a wooden suspension bridge...the kind that you might see in an Indiana Jones movies (you know, the kind that stretches over a huge precipice with hungry alligators waiting for bad-guy meat in the river below). Beneath it, and poking out into the water, was a small dock held in place by a set of wooden stairs that led up to the riverbank. There, covered by the shadows and silhouettes of the nearby trees, was the lab bulding: a two-story structure suspended on a series of stilts that sunk into the exposed patch of dirt beneath it.

We had made it. Upon arrival, we were greeted by the only people around: camp-manager Jenn, BU grad-student Caitlin, and a French researcher named Sylvain. Since the usual Cabang Panti staff were on their vacation for Idolfitri, they had planned to make dinner for us by the time we got there. We had surprised them by our early appearance at camp though, but dinner was soon underway a few minutes after our disembarkment. As you might imagine, a block of indomie doesn’t cut it for a full day river journey into the jungle, and I was starving.

After a refreshing bath in the river to offset the typical hot and humid jungle weather, and to remove the jungle-funk I had accumulated during my sweaty full-day boat ride, I settled into my tent with a belly full of food and a heart full of adventure.

Day one in the Jungle: Check.

Busy times at Cabang Panti

So it's been two weeks since I arrived to Cabang Panti research station (FYI: the Indonesian 'C' sounds like the /ch/ sound in English. So it's actually pronounced "Chabang Panti"). 

Before I get into details, a sidenote: As any rational person might predict, rainforests don't come equipped with wi-fi (except maybe a particular fancy-schmancy research station in Ecuador...ahem, Tiputini). Given this technical limitation induced by living in the middle of nowhere, I am left no option but to write any blog updates on my phone, and email them to the blog page sans pictures. So if there's a reason I haven't done any updates in the last couple weeks, that's a big one.

The other big reason? I've been out in the field following orangutans almost every waking hour. The small remainder of my non-orangutan-following time has been spent doing domestic chores around camp. It's been particularly busy for us because it's a special time of year in Indonesia. Typically, there are Indonesian assistants that do most of the Orangutan following and camp chores like cooking and cleaning. But they have been away the past couple weeks because they were on Idolfitri, their end-of-ramadan vacation (Indonesia is the country with the 4th largest muslim populatiom in the world). This is basically like christmas break for them. Given our shortage of man-power, all of the responsibilities have fallen on a handul of western researcher, including myself. Which means virtually zero time for things like posting updates.

But Idolfitri is over, and camp is back to normal. So here I am. The last two weeks have been crazy, but I've seen some amazing things that I will enjoy sharing very much, now that I have time to write about it. Lots of updates coming soon.