Brazil - primeiro dia

Oi my dears!

I'm now arrived to Brazil. The trip was good and kind of interesting. Imagine you see a very very drunk guy in the gate, before leaving and you hardly hope that he will not sit next to you. Now guess, what happens. Yes, he surely sits next to you!

Fortunately  he was kind (to me, not to the stewardess), but he stunk sooooo much of alcool, that I finally changed of place!

Then I  met a completely crazy brazilian woman and I finally reached Rio de Janeiro  after 14 hrs of travel. This city looks great! I had just to pass through it by car, to reach the other airport in the center for my flight to Brasilia. But the view  from the taxi was extraordinary!!

Then I had to check in for my flight to Brasilia, which had to leave at 9.35. It was 6.30 when I reached the airport. I tried to ask for a seat next to the window and Lucia, the woman of the desk said  there were  no seats anymore.. Great! Then she started to run. After 5 min she got back, telling me, that she's trying to get me a seat. I asked her, if she was looking for the right flight, at 9.35... She started to run again... After other 5 min she came back and told me that  she was trying to get me a place on the next flight at 7.30. I told her that I wasn't in a rush. Well, it seems that she was kind of in hurry, as she suddenly started to run AGAIN. After a while she got back AGAIN, telling me that I had to run with her now, as we were trying to catch the next flight.

It was very nice of her, to give her best to get me in the  next  flight, which I finally got. But I think she did it much more for her self than  for me: she was looking like a female James Bond, running holding  her boobs  with her hands, ready to save the planet! It was a great start in Brazil! ;-)

The weather is great! 30 degrees and sunny.

My apartment is nice, there are other 5 people living there. As I'm the last one arrived, I've got the crapiest room: a small room without windows. But, it's all for me.. So, hamna shida! And: I have a private bathroom!

That's really it, I have to check my legs now, as I feel how something is trying to eat me up! 

The "kafkanian" metamorphosis

In Tanzania, I used to take Mephaquin against a possible Malaria.

It's known that this drug may have strong psychophysic effects... However, for the first Month when I was there, I had no troubles at all. I was almost convinced by the time that I'll not have any side effects... Until that night.

It was the day after we came back from Tanga, the city were we bought food for the next two weeks and a mirror (, which we didn't had, and which I thought may be nice to have, as we were 4 girls there). The travel was kind of adventurous (I'll report it in another post) and very long. Probably I forgot to drink enough water, which is very important when you have to take this pill, which happens once a week.

However, that day at the Hotel, I saw a guy with a very strange face. He had a huge head and a very strange face, so that I was very impressed.

When we finally arrived a home, I was sooo tired and I was looking forward to sleep. But, for some reason, when I was lying in my bed, I started to have the feeling that my room was full of people starring at me, and one of them was this guy. I knew that this was not possible, so I took the torch to see through the mosquito net. I started to read my book, trying to ignore this feeling of people in my room. Then I started to really have the feeling to actually see that guy. I told to my self that it was just an hallucination, so switched off the light and tried to sleep. As I was lying in my bed in the dark, I suddenly started to feel the skin of my face shrugging. I was convinced that I was BECOMING that guy, and that I was going to kill Judith and myself. I was scared to hell from MYSELF. It was horrible! I never had such a fear!

As a good rational person, as I am, I told to myself to go to the bathroom and have a look in the mirror, to reassure myself that I was still the same person. I was really grateful to have thought to buy a mirror!!!

In the bathroom I was almost scared of my image: I was looking weird, and my pupils were very wide. But at least, it was still me!

I went back to my room and kept on reading my book the whole night, ignoring the guy in my room and waiting for the first sunshines.

When I went to breakfast, Judith asked me. "Did you sleep well?"

I just answered: "Not, really, I had fear to kill you...".

Tanzania - Impressions and Hamna Shida

It’s really a beautiful place; I loved the clime and the food. Actually we had a cook which cooked for us! Well, I have to admit that slowly I was getting tired of pasta, rice, beans and lentils, but at least they are very nutritive.. :-)

Unfortunately my swahili was and remains very bad, so that I couldn't communicate with the people there. They seem very nice, but as a white person you really feel how everybody is looking at you. You feel that for many you are just another of these white people that go to Africa for a safari. Then when they hear that we are working here, they become friendlier. But this idea that white people can pay for everything and have not to look for money is still impressed in their mind and sometimes it makes life difficult. But in general people are very nice and very curious to know what we were doing, etc.

The first day we were in Dar es Salam to walk a bit around and buy our chicken wire needed for our experiments. It’s a nice city, but you really see that poverty is still a big problem there. I noticed this once more when I went into a shop to buy some food.

Most of the chips, cakes or whatever were expired since January 2008 (I was there on June 2009). But I got used to it. I mean, I lived in a house where we kept giraffe dung and food in the same fridge.. 
As they say there: hamna shida, which means “there is no problem”. Actually I think hamna shida is the thing that people there say the most often! I mean there are soooo many problems that should be resolved that you just have to smile and say, hamna shida.. Otherwise you would go crazy. 
I think the biggest problem for us girls was that people here don’t use to think. They really don’t organize anything or think about consequences. This brought us in some troubles: we had to buy food every 2 weeks and bring it from the north to the south of the park, were most people were most of the time. Well, the cook just left most of the food in the north, so that we had not enough in the south and, when Jud and I went back to the north we could throw away most of the fruits and vegetables we bought.

Another example is the fact that in the north we didn’t had any water for almost two weeks. So we had to take water out from the reserve under the house. We thought that there should be a possibility to pump this water into the house, but no one could explain us how. So we used to fill bottles and tanks to bring them in the house. Well, a guy finally explained us how to do that and told us that our cook knows how it works. However, when we told Benjamin, the cook, that we didn’t had water, he just sayd “oohhh”... So, we had always to tell them everything and ask for everything, because they would never come to the idea to say “by the way...”. But, as I said... hamna shida. :-)

Tanzania - First Highlights

1) In one of my experiments I needed fresh giraffe dung, so that when we saw giraffes in the park we had to go out of the car and look if they just left us a little gift. There was one giraffe, a male, which was normally alone.

Unlike the other giraffes, this one didn’t run away when we got out of the car. Actually once he made some steps toward me. It was amazing to see such a big animal just a few meters from me!

2) Another time, when we were out to collect fresh dung, a herd of 20 giraffes just crossed the road. We went into the field and by walking back I chose the way used by the giraffes, as I thought “there will be no snake, where giraffes run through just 5 min ago!”. Well, obviously my thought was completely wrong.

Suddenly I saw a big green tail escaping in front of me. I was just 2 m from the road and I didn’t see the snake go over it, or turn.. So I stayed still, hoping that the snake goes away and that I really saw a green snake ad not a grey black mamba... Since then I was much more careful. But in fact we had to walk through grasses which sometimes were as high as we are, so I don’t know how much a stick helped me to protect me from a snake... At least after a while John, a guy from the village which helped us to put cages in the field (made up from the big amount of steel and chicken wire mentioned), had shown us a tree, from which we could use the bark against the poison of, he said, all snakes.

3) I’ve got chased by a monkey. Yep, I really had to run away! It was crazy, this little thing putted itself on two legs, with its arms in the air, making strange noises and started to run towards me. And no, it was surely not looking for a big hug... it had a look that reminded me the movie “the exorcist”!

4) I’ve been attacked by wasps... John made fun of me for the rest of my stay, because I was jumping around and screaming like a little girl.. I will do the same again, if another wasp just gets in my shirt and picks me everywhere!

Well, I hope this will not be the case!!!!

5) I killed 225 dung beetles. Let me explain... For another experiment I had to put dung beetles in pots to see how fast dung decomposition goes with varying dung beetles densities and how this may affect nutrient mineralization in the understanding soil. Anyway, fact is that we collected 225 dung beetles; I made up pots of plastic bottles and putted inside the dung beetles with dung... The next morning some of them were really not in a good shape; unless beetles use to stay on their back, but I don’t think so... I tried to water them (yes I know they are not flowers, but water is essential for all living organisms..) but they finally all died. :-(

Field work - how not easy life is sometimes

Our field work was going pretty well, even if we had all kind of possible problems with our car: the rack we used to transport our materials (200kg of steel, plus 200 of chicken wire.. you can imagine!) crashed on the roof of the car; one morning a wheel was flat and the reserve wheel was really looking weird (but it worked..) and on one day we just smelt something strange.. We got out of the car and got a look on the motor... the cooling water was boiling! Apparently, we had three holes in our cool-water-tank (or however this thing is called, maybe cooler?), which a very drunk fundi repaired using superglue, cement and a bag of tea... it seems that the very drunk fundi knew what he did, as no water was licking anymore, but the motor still got very hot! For this reason we had to go to Tanga (where we usually went to buy our food every two weeks) and brought the car to the mechanic.

Africa - Tanzania - Daily Life

For my second practical work, I had the possibility to go to Tanzania, to do research about nutrien cycling in a national park together with Judith, my PhD-student and supervisor.

The park where I had to work, the Saadani National Park, is really beautiful, although I had not seen leopards, as the two girls of the other research group that came from Switzerland with us.

But Judith and I were experiencing the real Africa: we had to travel up and down the park twice a week for our researches. In the house in the North, called Mkwaja ranch, often we didn’t had any water and sometimes also electricity was missing... So bucked showers became more and more the norm! Melanie and Annette, the two other researchers, stayed the whole time in the South, in a guest house (where Jud and me had to sleep on the floor in alternation in the beginning), which is quite ugly, but at least they normally have water and electricity and near to it there is an amazing hotel where we all go to have a drink sometimes after field work. One of the managers invited us to go on a safari with a boat. We joined a fresh married couple and we saw a lot of hippos, crocodiles and king fishes. It was really nice!

Goodbye Colombia

My stay in Tunja came to its end. 

The time there was great, the people were lovely, funny, crazy and some of them really became good friends of mine. I still miss them! I’ll always miss the lifestyle, the music, the food… but most of all; I’ll miss the colours, of the houses, of nature, of the life there.


So many things happened at the end, that I really don’t know where to start. I can summarize the whole last weeks in mainly one word: partyyyy...
Jaime, my supervisor in Colombia, had a pratica with most of the students that helped me in my fieldwork once. He asked me if I would like to go with him. After some thinking I said yes, and it was the best decision ever: I had one of my best days in Colombia! The practices there are crazy: listen for a few hours to the prof, afterwards going to eat in a nice restaurant and at the end going to the beach to make party, finishing with dancing in the bus and finally in “Mobile”, a disco bar in Tunja! Why are our practices not like that?!??? Really funny!!!

Some girls going in the really

 cold water (crazy chicks!)

Me and the whole group of students.

 Dancing in the bus, together with the Prof! :-)

In my last week, I finally had the time to go to the beach. I secretly went (this means that SHE has no idea!) to Santa Marta, or more exactly, Taganga! I met great people, I was out all nights dancing, I made my PADI-diving licence and I drunk so many fruit juices that I’m wondering that I’m not yet mutated into a fruit!

Taganga was really like a paradise! The first day I thought that it’s nothing special, as the beaches are not the best ones… But on the evening I encountered the real charm of the place and I couldn’t leave! The place is really overfilled of Israelis, so that even the menus are written in Hebraic! But the tourists of Taganga are generally backpackers, so the ambience between the different people is just great! All was so easy and funny! A great way to finish my stay in Colombia!

It was very hard in the beginning, with the whole problems with HER.. But all the people I met, the students of Jaime, the people in Tunja and at the end in Taganga were just so lovely, so generous to me, that I still miss my time in Colombia. I hope one day I can go back, maybe by first jumping shortly in Mexico to say hello to other great people.. 

That’s it, I could write an entire book about all parties, about all characters I met, but at the end, the most important thing, is that they will always stay in my memory, in my hart being a part of me.

Santi el bravo

Intoduction: Santi (Santiago) is the 9 years old Son of the host-family and he's very attacched to Laura, my friend and his cousin.

I came back home one night, after I went out with Laura and I suddenly felt something strange by opening my closet.. There was some kind of cream on the grip.. Well, could be that’s some special treatment I didn’t noticed before for the metal.. who knows.. I went to the bath and brushed my teeth with a fucking toothbrush full of perfume. So I went to Santi and asked him what the hell was going on. He said: "I wasn’t it, I swear"! I just replied “yeah, of course, the angels were!”. And now, look on this: the angels went THAT day at 20.30! Exactly then he did that stuff… Incredible, no?! J I thought we now would need an exorcist, as the angels were not protecting us anymore and some bad kid took possession of Santi.

As I went to my bed I discovered salt and rice, wax on the bed and on the bottom… Then I really got mad! I went to Santi’s room and screamed to him “levantate y limpiame el quarto! Rapido!!!”, which means something like “get up and clean my room”! He still said that he wasn’t the one doing that.. At the end the whole family finished in my room, the parents shocked, the big brother laughing and Laura just wanting to sleep! Why he did that? I think he was jealous that Laura was going out with me and spending more time with me than with him.. And so I was there, with only 5 hours to sleep before the alarm had to ring, with this awful perfume in my mouth, my hands stinking of this cream and I really don't want to know what he used and were.

Fortunately, something like this happened only once! ;-)

San Gil - Paragliding

Once I had a few days of freedom,  Laura, a good friend of mine, proposed to me to go to San Gil to do paragliding. I was totally for it!

So after a night in a very nice hostel, with Laura, her lover from Chile and me laughing and talking in the night, we organized our paragliding adventure the next day. They told us to be ready at 12.00, so we had only the time to go to a place called “pozo azul”. The name remembered me the nice agua azul in Mexico, were the water was so transparent and beautiful! Well, the pozo, was only a pozo but definitively not azul. Anyway I enjoyed the cold water in the heat, the cascade massaging my shoulders and my back and the company of Laura and Max, the Chilean guy. 

At 12.00 we were ready.. The people of the paragliding followed the Colombian time, so we were able to go around 14.30 to the place. Once there I could shoot myself to not have taken the camera with me: incredible view on the canyon and all these people in the air! Wow, I couldn’t wait!!!

If some of you are still asking them selves what the hell paragliding is, well in Italian it’s “parapendio”. You have to imagine the sport, were people normally have to run down a hill with a very big umbrella on the top to finally slide in the air like a bird. I’m really afraid about heights, and in the first two second in the air, I was really asking my self why I’m so stupid to do something so crazy! But as we were in the air, oh dears… You cannot imagine! I felt sooooo free, so light, so full of happiness, adrenaline and desire of more! Jaime, the 19 years old guy I had behind me, asked me if I would like to take a “vuelta” and I said, “claro”. Oh my bloody hell, the guy was crazy! We turned, we made big curves in the air, we went to the soil to give the hand to a friend of him, we did pirouettes and even if from time to time I really thought, that’s tooo much for my stomach; I couldn’t stop to smile! J

Here are just a few pictures I was able to take with my phone-camera, before the battery died.

The arrival of the angels

Little introduction: in Colombia religion is still very present in daily life. In particular the mom of my house was very religious.

On a Saturday evening at 20.30 four angels came at our house. It sounds strange? Well my dears, to be here was even stranger, believe me! Let me explain to you.. 

The day before, the mom of the house told me about these angels, that apparently would arrive to our house for 5 days  to be with us and protect us. The first thing I thought: oh my gosh, she’s so going to let strangers in the house which will surely steal everything with a value.. this means all my stuff!!!! But no, they were "real" angels.. So on that Saturday night she got a call that the angels were waiting in the front of our house (the call came from a woman which had them in her house before.. she knew they left because she had to eat an apple… I swear, it’s all true!). We had to join all to welcome them and present us.. I couldn’t not laugh! It was kind of absurd! Anyway, we showed them our home, the different rooms and the place were they could stay, an altar which she build up for them:

At the altar we also had a small cerimony to thank the angels for their coming.

Apparently they were most of the time at home or with one of the two kids. But a few times, they went to the school, together with the mom. Actually, I thought there was less space in the car, at that time! ;-)

The rebellion and the big box

After three weeks of hard work, I really could have killed my supervisor that remained in Zurich. But, after a fight with blood and tears, I won and she suddenly became human!

Thus, step after step...

I started to work in the field on my first Sunday there, after have worked from the first day of my arriving. I went with Pablo to check the meteorological station. So far, so nice! (Well, we went there at 7 am... but, compared to the following days, it was like holidays!)

On Monday the stress begun: every day I wake up at 5.30 or earlier to go to la Hoya, for my field experiment. In the evening I was in the lab until late (like 8pm) because of the preparation of the following experiment and so on.. I had days of almost 14 hours of work! I was going crazy! I wrote to HER (my supervisor) to ask for a reduction of the experiments, but SHE thought that it's only a problem of organization..

Well, at this point I had three choices: 1) go back to Switzerland and kill her, 2) work every day like this for the next two months, feeling like an imported Swiss slave, 3) ask for help.

Even if the first choice was very attracting to me, I opted for the third one and wrote to (now you have to imagine the sound of trumpet, as when a national held is regressing from a war) Balti, my professor and study advisor for my master direction ecology and evolution. He wrote to HER a very strict email. First she thought she has to talk with him about that, but as she felt the pressure from me, Jaime, my tutor here in Colombia and Balti, she give up and resigned.  I think that the fact that also her Prof. was finally involved helped a lot.

Final Balance: from 5 experiments which she wanted me to do in the beginning, now I’ve had to do only two of them!

I still had to work really a lot, but I then also had some time for living Colombia, to see some places, to have social contacts!

Still an open question was, why had I to take with me this big box (just to remember you: 104cm x 55 cm x 60 cm… my little baby!) with the fog collectors. Already in Switzerland I asked HER if they are really necessary, and she said YES!

Well, as you can imagine: no one there needed them! Incredible! Probably they are still in the box, now.... :-)

The very early morning and the student card

The place where I was staying was really lovely. I was hosted by a family, who already hosted other students who worked with my my supervisor (called SHE) and had the same nice experiences... ;-) 

The first day after my arrival, I had to go to school, to present myself, make a student card, prepare my work, ...

I'm really not a morning person. No, actually, I'm not AT ALL, a morning person.

Well, the first day I had to wake up at 5.45 am. This because the mom of the house had to go to the hairstylist, before going to work (this was the case twice a week. Most woman do that, as hairstylists and beauticians in general, are soooo cheap there!) ..  I hoped that this would be an exception! It was: normally I had to wake up even earlier...

So, after have been to the hairstylist, we finally reached my school, where the mom was working as an accountant. As I told you, I had to make my student cart. While doing all the procedures, the woman of the office told me about a crazy woman that went there for a month. As they couldn't register her as a doctorand, but only as a student (because the to be registered as a PhD-student she would need be employed by the school), she got very very very mad. So in each place I had to go for my student cart, they told me about this story... At the end of the whole procedures, I told about my supervisor to the office-woman, and she screamed, "Oh my God, that's the same gir"l! Incredible!!! This means that SHE was already known in the whole university! The good thing was, that they were all trying to help me as much as they could, as they know what kind of a dictator SHE is. :-)

My bedroom and the living room in the hosts's house. 

 (And Micél, the king of the house)

Colombia - A stressful start and a big box

For my master in biology, I had to do two practical works of three months each.

As I always was very interested in tropical ecosystems, I really wanted to do these works outside from CH, in a region near to the equator.

For my first work, I had the possibility to go to Colombia to study pesticide drift into the environment. I was so exited and full of hopes for a great work.

Well, I can just give you an advice at this point: before you accept a work, always check that the people you'll work with are good people, and not some slave-driver...

In fact, as this was my first practical work of this kind, I had no clue what role a Ph.D-student has. Now I know that a Ph.D-student (and supervisor) should follow his student and not let him do his own work for free. It should be a collaboration, as these small projects the students have to do, are parts of the doctor's research.

However, at that time I really felt like a little slave. I tried to explain to my supervisor that it was far too much work for the small amount of time I had at disposal. But it was impossible to talk to her.

Then, she also had the great idea that I had to transport from Zurich to Colombia a box full of fog collectors. As there were already 3 fog collectors in Colombia, I asked her if they were really necessary, as the box was very big (104x55x60 cm !!) and I was all alone, without a car to transport all that stuff. She said yes.

Fortunately, the guy who made these fog collectors was so kind to give me a ride with his car, so that I could transport the box to my home and my parents finally gave me a ride to the airport.

After some troubles at the check-in because the box was too big to transport it, so that we had to buy a new bag and shrink the box in the airport, I could go in the plane.

18 hours of travelling later, I finally reached Bogotá with my two big hand baggages, a big bag, the new smaller bag and my nice box with the fog collectors.

Now imagine, a girl with all that stuff, trying to put everything on a single luggage trolley, unsuccessfully, and trying to pass unnoticed through the customs.. I think the guys at the customs had pity on me. They wanted to scan the box, but as it was too big to pass thought the scan, they just let me go. I probably was really looking exauhsted! :-)

Fortunately I hadn't to take a bus (all this stuff would never ever had place on the small buses that are circulating there)!  Pablo, a student who had to pick me up at the airport, arrived with his small and already filled car to take me and all my things. It was a tight ride, but this guy gave me the best welcome present in the world: he let me feel at home right away!

Cuba

After 5 weeks of travelling around in Mexico and Guatemala, I was really looking forward to explore Cuba, with all its history, the cars and.. Che Guevara. But when I arrived, I really had a bad first impression: all this insisting guys on the streets and this culture of getting money from the tourists in all possibles ways. Well, fortunately not everywhere in Cuba it's like that: in the South it was great! Santiago de Cuba is really a place where I could imagine to live: all this music, dancing, fruits, culture and life! And then Baracoa, just beautiful with its nature and this beaches! In fact near to Baracoa, there is a beach called 'playa Duaba'. Probably the most amazing place I saw after Tulum, a beautiful beach in Mexico. Playa Duaba is said to be the beach where Colombo approaded as you can see the big mountain "el Yunke" as he described in his journal. However, even if it's historically so important, there are no tourists: 6 km of black sand beach with only some fishers, my friends and me. It was great! 

Tulum, Mexico

Xpujil

After my round trip in Guatemala, I took a very crappy bus and an even crappier boat back to Mexico, to be able to visit the ruins around Xpujil. Xpujil is not very known, or at least not very visited, as difficult to reach. From Chetumal it takes 3 hours of bus, if I remember well, to reach the village of Xpujil. Then you have still to organize how to get to the three different archeological sites. Here I descibe how I did that... 
;-)

Shortly said, the visit was amazing: I was alone in all the sites! I took the bus in the early morning from Chetumal, to reach Xpujil. There they told me that I had to take a taxi for 200 pesos to be able to visit the three sites. As I had to get up very early and my mind was not working so well, I totally forgot to take enough money with me, to pay, for example, the needed taxi! Fortunately, the bus driver who got me there, had a little stop, so that I was able to reach him just in time, when he was getting back on the bus, to ask him for a free ride. He had to go to Campeche, so that the ruins where on the road. I asked him to bring me to Chicanna, the farest away of the three sites I wanted to visit. As my Spanish was really awful, I always asked if I had to go out as soon as the bus stopped (In Mexico, and in general in Latin America, the buses stop as soon as someone wants to get in or out. People have just to wave with their hands from the street to get in the bus.). He tried to explain me some things, but I really had no clue what he was talking about! After a while he asked me how I wanted to go back, and I said "camminando" (walking). All the passengers of the first rows, for which I became an attraction, started to laugh. The taxi driver explained me, that it was way too far! So I said, that I would simply hitch-hicke back. He got worried and insisted to give me 20 pesos, to be able to pay a taxi at least to Xpujil. So nice!!!

The visits were great! However, it was more difficult than I thought to get a ride back. I had to walk a long time from Chicanna to Becan, the second ruin, before I got a ride on a truck. It was midday, and no cloud or tree provided me shadow.. I saw how the sun was getting the last drops of water from the asphalt, and I really started to ask my self if I'm gonna be lost in the middle of nowhere. I bound my jacket around my head to avoid a headache later one, and this probably didn't help me to get a ride from the few cars that just passed by. But finally this guy with his truck stopped. It was great to be inside there, as it was the first time that I had the possibility to be in a such a huge truck!

After my tour in Becan, I was able to find a short ride on a small truck that was transporting chickens. So I finally reached Xpujil again, and after my tour in the ruins, I was ready to take the bus back to Chetumal.

You remember the thing about waving your hands to stop a bus? Well, obviously at that moment, I didn't. I saw the bus coming, and as a typical swiss girl, I waited on the border of the street for the bus to stop. Well, of course, it didn't! Fortunately, right after the bus driver ignored my existence, a guy with a car, who probably just caught my frustration telepathically, stopped to ask me if I needed a ride. I told him that I actually had to catch the bus that just passed by... I jumped in the car and the guy started to run, like James Bond in a wild chase, to reach the bus! Luckily the bus picked up some people not far from us, so that I was able to get in too. This guy was, together with the bus driver from the morning, my hero that day. :-)