Sorry I haven’t been in touch since arriving – it’s a three hour trek to get to internet on a TERRIBLE road in kind of sketchy vans, so I’m not going to be coming in every week any more. It’s a bit too tiring to spend my only day off a week 6 hours in a hot scary van. Sorrry!!! I’ll probably come back one more time before I leave Buton, and I’m just going to try to type up things as they happen every week so that I can still keep you all informed, so read the next 2 entries as well (if you want to know how my previous weeks have been)! I also apologize for the long-windedness that I said I did NOT want to do in my blog, but writing this as I go along tends to remove the fluidity and preciseness completely. But I just found out that one of the places where I’ll be doing some monkey stuff has mobile reception, so I’ll bring my phone with me whenever I go there, which might be once or twice a week (no reception in the village I’m at). If you want my indonesian number, maybe just email one my parents (or even Richard I guess!) as they have it, I don’t really want to publically post it and I won’t be online for another 2 or 3 weeks in order to respond to your email to give you my number!…
Anywho, just started with the dissertation students this week. There are 5 of them, but one is doing something totally different where he just waits in a farm until the monkeys arrive, or until its time to go home, whichever may come first, so I’m not dealing with that at all. The 4 students I am going out with are doing behavioural studies comparing 2 of the 3 macaque troops (which I explain in the post before this). I have been going out one day with 2 students in the forest, then 2 in the farms and alternating between the two in case they need any help or have any questions with their project methods. So far, its been quite long days, that I think I have been realllly lucky in avoiding up til now. Somehow I’ve managed to find sites where it usually is only a half day, or you go back for lunch (or you sit in a boat for a couple hours a day), so the 10 hour days are an adjustment. First group to leave the village and normally last ones to get back. But it’s been an interesting adventure thus far! Tomorrow I head out to La Pago – to the forest camp, where it looks like I’ll only be there for one week instead of the 2 I was expecting. Hopefully when I’m out there I’ll get the chance to join other projects going on occasionally, as I believe I will only be with the dissertation students for the first few days since having 3 people with the monkeys at that site is actually (probably) a bit too much.
The interesting thing of the week for the macaques: the same troop at the farm site is observed every year for the summer period, but in the last few days we have had observation of another troop that is entering the fields as well. So there has been some fighting and chasing and its been all very entertaining to watch. So it will be interesting to see how this unfolds!
Really not a lot more has been happening here. I am so tired by 7 that I make my way to bed and am asleep normally around 8ish. But I am still working very hard on my bahasa Indonesian and I think I have gotten pretty good considering I’ve only been here about 2 weeks, but I feel like I’ve reached my threshold already with how much more I can learn, so I am just going to focus on my long list of things I am still learning and then hopefully I can speed up the learning process once again!
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