Lost in the Jungle
or
How to use a compass to find the way
Part 1: Trails
Sunday, 22 April, 2007
DON'T FREAK OUT!
First of all, before anyone freaks out, I was only really 'lost' in the jungle for about three hours, and I was never really worried about not finding my way because I had everything that I needed - compass, GPS, headlamp, garden snips, and an understanding of the local trail system. So while (Part two of) this entry is indeed about my first experience being really 'lost' in the jungle, I don't want anyone to think I was particularly foolish for having set out in such circumstances in the first place. Hence the alternative title to this entry: "How to use a compass to find the way," because that, along with an understanding of one's surroundings, is how it's ok to not be worried about really getting lost around here.
Before going into this, I've got to give a bit of the context of the forest and trail system that we deal with here, as well as a basic primer on how we use it. So the majority of this entry would have been simply entitled "Trails", but that just isn't as dramatic, is it? The whole thing is also really long, so I've split it into two Parts. You get the background in this first Part, and my 'Lost' story in Part two.
THE TRAIL SYSTEM
We use the forest primarily for the study of bonobos. The bonobos use the forest to live in and feed in and travel in. So in addition to strictly observing the actual bonobos, we also conduct studies on the components of the forest that the bonobos use - namely their feeding trees and their nest sites. Our standard routine here sees researchers visiting a long roster of feeding trees and nest sites on a regular basis, all throughout the study site. Researchers also try to visit the bonobo group on a daily basis. Over a given period, the bonobo group has a relatively localised range compared to the rest of the forest that we study. Since they travel though, we're always following them off the trail network, whereas for the trees we stick to known routes.
Our camp is situated near the northern limit of the study site, and the bonobos' current range basically defines our southern boundary. The Bompusa river flows northward a bit east of our camp, and a bit east of the current bonobo range. It's really swampy on either side of the Bompusa for quite a ways, there are large swampy areas in the south, and there's plenty of swamp elsewhere, too. There are no bridges or boardwalks; to cross rivers or swamps, we just schlep through and get really wet and muddy.
To get to the bonobos every day, we take a main trail called simply 'B-Trail', which goes approximately SSW from camp. After 6km (3.75mi), it meets the 'Nkuma' trail, which goes ESE. That trail eventually crosses the Bompusa, and meets up with the 'Bompusa' trail after almost 7km (4.3mi). Alternatively, from camp, we can head straight east along the first kilometre or so of the Bompusa trail before it takes a turn to the SSE for 7km or so to finally meet up with the end of the Nkuma trail. So basically, the backbone of the trail network is a big triangle: B going SSW from camp, Bompusa going SSE, and Nkuma going west to east between the southern ends of B and Bompusa. We call the entire 20km triangular hike the 'Grande Tour'.
Lately, the bonobos have been keeping south of the Nkuma trail, so we generally use the 'Meike-5' trail that heads due south starting at the 1100m mark of the Nkuma trail. And at the 1200m point of Meike-5, we've recently cut a new E-W trail that we've named 'Tim' after the so-named researcher who left around the time it was created.
From the main triangular train network then, there are a few spur trails such as Meike-5, although they're not used as much these days because the bonobos aren't in those areas. They are, however, used for the nest control and the bonobo feeding tree (BFT) studies, which are conducted regularly by specific people who do those studies. In general though, since the bonobos have been in the vicinity of Meike-5, the most well-traveled trails right now are 'B', Nkuma for its first few thousand metres, Meike-5, and now Tim. The rest are in various states of overgrown-ness, which is usually fine for the people using them to do their regular studies, but not always sufficient for people (like me!) relying on recognising them for their entire lengths.
In addition to being clearly demarcated by being heavily worn, the trails we use a lot are also marked with flags at 50m intervals. This allows us to describe locations relatively precisely, along the lines of "the bonobos nested in two groups tonight: a big group about 200m west of Meike-5 950, and a smaller group about 50m west of Meike-5 600." The flags are also useful for describing where we observed other things, or even just for keeping track of how much farther we have to walk to get to where we're going.
HOW TO DESCRIBE A LOCATION
With the bonobo tracking, the standard practise is to follow the group during the day, and to keep track, generally, of where you are with respect to the various known trails. In the evening, the bonobos build their nests and go to sleep for the night, and whoever is with them then picks a compass bearing that will lead to the nearest trail and leaves bent branches along that bearing in order to be able to find the nest again in the morning.
So if you know you've been following the bonobos somewhere west of the N-S-bearing Meike-5 trail, and they nest for the night, you pick a bearing due east until you hit the Meike-5 trail, then mark the trail with a branch and a scuff mark across the path, and go north to the first trail tag. You know approximately how far west from the trail the nest is, you know which trail it is, and you know at which distance along that trail to head into the forest. You go back to camp, and your colleagues will understand where to go, for example, when you tell them the bonobos are nested 200m west of Meike-5 950, as well as about how long it will take to get there in the morning (that particular spot would take about two hours, depending how well the 200m nest trail is marked).
STANDARD TIMING
Ok, so now that you understand the context of the trail system and how we use it, I need to mention a bit about the timing we need to work with for our bonobo work.
The bonobos go to bed by building their nests somewhere around 5:30pm, give or take about 15 or 20 minutes. They get up in the morning at around 5:30am, again give or take about 15 minutes. This corresponds, roughly, with dusk and dawn. We try to have someone with the bonobos all day long (although following them during the day is often difficult to impossible), but at the very least we try to nest them and then we greet them again in the morning.
Since the bonobos are nesting in the vicinity of Meike-5 these days, which is already about 1100m down Nkuma, which in turn starts 6km down 'B', this makes for a commute of around 8km each way, not including the off-trail distances. We basically budget about 1.5 hours to make the trek between camp and the start of Meike-5, and add additional time accordingly, depending on how much farther the bonobos are. So on an easy morning, when the bonobos aren't too far down Meike-5, and they've nested within 50m of the trail, departure from camp is 4am. That's about the latest to expect; lately it's often been more like 3:30, and the last few days saw the bonobos nest about 700m off-trail starting at Meike-5 700, so it's been an even longer commute.
Likewise, in the evening, if the bonobos start making their nests around 5:30 or 5:45, it takes a while to get back to camp. The off-trail portion takes much longer in the evening than in the morning because it needs to be marked. This is done by bending branches along its length in order to make it evident in the morning, and by using garden snips to cut vines or other branches that otherwise block the way. The off-trail path is therefore much easier in the morning, as dawn breaks.
A 700m off-trail distance can easily take an hour, followed by the regular commute of 1.5+ hours back to camp, though 700m to a known trail is pretty extreme. Usually it's more like 50 to 200m; it's these longer distances which incite us to create new trails like 'Tim'. A normal time to return to camp, therefore, is usually about 7:30pm. For evenings when the bonobos nest farthest, it's possible that whoever nests them gets back after 8; it can be as late as about 8:30. Beyond 8:30pm, something is probably up.
HOW LATE IS TOO LATE?
The first time this happened since I've been here was a little over a week ago, when Andrew left camp around 6am to go look for bonobos. They hadn't been nested the night before, and actually hadn't even been seen for a couple of days.
When we don't know where the bonobos are, the only way to find them is to just go out there and listen for them. If they vocalize, you take a compass bearing in the direction of the calls, and start heading in that direction. Bonobo vocalizations can be heard from a few hundred metres through the forest; any further than that and, unfortunately, you're not listening from a close enough spot.
So last week Andrew had left early in the morning to pick potential listening spots in the hopes of hearing the bonobos and finding them. Others left later in the day to do the same thing. They were back at around 7:30pm, and had seen neither the bonobos nor Andrew, although they had found a sign Andrew had left on the trail - two large leaves pointing to the direction in which he'd left the trail - on which he had written, "bonobos, 8:30am".
But if it was after 8:30pm, why wasn't Andrew back yet? Surely, even if he had nested them, he would have had time to hack through the jungle for an hour, even to get to Meike-5 2000 or so, and still had time to hike back to camp. So the assumption was made that his flashlight batteries had died, and that he was therefore sitting on the trail awaiting assistance. It's really dark in the forest, and once the sun starts to set it's pretty impossible to see. Plus, it had been pouring rain for most of the afternoon and evening (which is very normal here), so he'd be not only stuck but also cold.
It was decided that two people would go out with some basic provisions and walk the trail to find Andrew. If anything had happened, the least he would have had to do would be to get back to a trail - preferably one of our regular ones. A bag was packed with a thermos of hot chocolate, some biscuits, some water, an ace bandage, some dry socks, a raincoat, two spare flashlights, and a large antelope horn that we blow through like a trumpet that can be heard from about a kilometre away.
Of course Andrew got back just as the rescue mission was about to depart, shortly before 9pm. He scoffed at the preposterousness of it all: "it's not even nine o'clock!", he said. But the experience, or perhaps mostly just the discussions the rest of us were having during the hour or so leading up to his return, somehow got the possibilty into each of our heads that if someone's out in the jungle on their own, it could be that they actually need assistance, and of course it follows that whoever's left in camp will come to their aid. We didn't really discuss it further, and instead just got to the planning of who would be leaving at 3am to go wake up with the bonobos in their distant nest spot. (I also resolved to never head out in the afternoon without a spare flashlight, realising that being stuck in the dark would really immobilise me out there.)
LA GRANDE TOUR
As I mentioned earlier, one of the ongoing studies we conduct here is the bonobo feeding tree (BFT) survey. Throughout our trail system, we've got hundreds of individual trees that are tagged, each with their own record of measurements that have been taken for over five years now. The majority of these trees were the object of a phenological study that lasted five full years, with twice-monthly observations to see which were fruiting, flowering, growing new leaves, losing leaves, being fed on, and so on. That study concluded about a month ago, and now we focus solely on the BFTs, amounting to around 100 individuals of a dozen or so species. Each BFT now gets visited on a monthly basis to have each of the measurements noted.
Last Sunday, I went out on one such BFT excursion. We started out as a group of four: Brigham, who has been at LuiKotal for a while and had done various transects of the study a few times; Andrew, who hadn't done the study here before but had done a similar one for years in Nigeria; Papa Endu, who has lived his whole life in this forest and can spot a particular species from a distance; and me - I had gone out on one BFT excursion already, though not on this particular route. The BFTs on this transect were all located along the Bompusa trail to the east of the Bompusa River, from about 1000m to 4300m along the trail. We left shortly after 8am, schlepped through knee-deep mud and waist-deep water for the first half-hour or so, and spent the next five hours or so doing the BFT survey. Andrew left early to continue down the Bompusa trail to the Nkuma trail and on to Meike-5 in order to do the afternoon habituation shift with the bonobos, and the rest of us finished at Bompusa 4300 sometime around 1:30pm.
At that point, Brigham and Papa Endu sat down to rest and eat biscuits before turning back to hike back to camp on Bompusa, whereas I just continued on. I hadn't walked the Grande Tour for about a month, and wanted to mark the trail on the GPS. I had marked the BFTs' coordinates all morning, and had done several of the other trails already. I told Brigham that I'd aim to be back at camp by around 6pm, which was somewhat realistic for the 16km or so I had ahead of me, especially since I knew the latter 8km very well and knew it would take about 1.5 hours for that stretch.
Since the first 4300m of the Bompusa trail has been walked fairly regularly for the BFT and phenology studies, it was in much better condition than the continuation of the trail that only gets walked when people, for some reason or other, do the Grande Tour. A monkey census had been conducted on a monthly basis for a while, over the entire length of the Grande Tour, and that was the last time (when I went) that the trail had been walked. But as I set out on my own, it was clear that I would need to be fairly careful to not lose the trail.
I decided it would be a good idea to better demarcate the trail wherever it was becoming too overgrown, or where branches had fallen across it. This is a standard habit on all of our trails, but is particularly important on the less-used ones. I used my snips a lot, and I frequently hauled large branches out of the path. For a while, I took the GPS coordinates of every 50m trail marker I came across, which was most of them (some were missing).
I reached the end of the Bompusa trail without incident, confident that I had improved it to a state that could allow anyone to follow it in either direction without risk of getting lost. When I started down the Nkuma trail at its 7000m end, I was confident that the trail was pretty well-defined, and not too worried about losing it. The time was getting late, but I also knew that Andrew and at least one other bonobo researcher would be passing by the Nkuma 1100 and Meike-5 intersection sometime after about 5:45pm, so I figured I just ought to make it there to meet them in order to avoid anyone worrying about my late return to camp. I continued down the Nkuma trail.
I took my first break of the day sometime after 3pm, when I crossed the Wongwei river. It's a very pretty spot, where I sat and ate biscuits looking at the stream and keeping very quiet lest I alert the elephants to my presence. Elephant footprints are all over the place through the mud on either side of the Wongwei: it's a known thoroughfare of theirs. Very little is known about the forest elephants, except that they are very agitated when they see humans, and are known to charge anyone they see. I would love to get to see an elephant, but it would still freak me out knowing that I'd either have to be so silent that it didn't see me, or I'd have to run like hell or climb up a big tree or something to escape it's rampage!
Anyway, I didn't hang out for too long at the Wongwei. I continued trekking through the muck, following what appeared to be the continuation of the Nkuma trail. There were indeed trail markers along this length of swamp, and I saw Andrew's footprints in the knee-deep mud that formed the trail (we call this type of trail 'potto-potto').
By around 3:45, I was out of swamp and back into dense rainforest, and the last trail marker I could find was Nkuma 4150. This meant that I had done the 6km of the Bompusa trail, followed by almost 3km of the Nkuma trail, and that I had another 3km of the Nkuma trail to go before I hit the intersection with Meike-5. From that point, I know the trail very well, as I have done it many times both day and night.
But from Nkuma-4150 the trail just went 50m or so and then disappeared! It was clear for a bit, twisting through an archway cut into a thick tangle of 'harmania' vines, and then just sort of ceased to exist. I tried just going straight from the harmania, but that just led down a steep slope across fallen logs and dense undergrowth - no trail. I tried bearing somewhat southwest, which was the general direction that the trail had been following for a while. This seemed more promising, because it followed the contour of the slope, but it, too, just sort of petered out among fallen trees and undergrowth. A more-southerly bearing had the same result; a more northerly one went down the slope again.
I had lost the trail.
So here I was, less than two hours before sunset, about 10km from camp down a trail that had numerous stretches of swamp to muck through, and about 3km from a point on the trail system that I knew well and that would lead me briskly back to camp (an easy 1.5 hours from Nkuma-1100 x Meike5-0). If I were to head due west, I didn't know if I would be traveling north or south of the remainder of the Nkuma trail, but I did know that I would eventually hit a point that I knew. And I had Nkuma-1500 waypointed in my GPS, and it said that point was only 2.1km to the west.
So I had (1) the option of returning via the trail I had just come on, or (2) bushwhacknig west to the trail I knew. It was conceivable that I would hit Meike-5 in two hours, and be able to meet Andrew there before he trekked back to camp. And if I were to be really late back to camp (which, at this point, was inevitable), I figured the search party would first be sent in the direction that I would likely be - to that side of the Grande Tour.
LOST
So at about 4pm, I consciously left the known trail behind me, armed with a pair of garden snips and a compass bearing of due West. Down the slope I went.
To be continued...
Monday, April 30, 2007
Thursday, April 26, 2007
(RM) Snail mail/ parcels
Snail mail/ parcels
Thursday, 26 April, 2007
I've been asked if it is possible to receive mail here (thanks Nils!), so this posting basically explains the situation.
It's clear I'm pretty isolated here, but at least there's twice-weekly email uploads and downloads! So although I may be in the middle of the jungle in the middle of Africa, I still feel fairly connected, albeit virtually, to the rest of the world.
Physically, however, it would be difficult to get much more distant. Getting here, to LuiKotal camp, is a multi-day ordeal, involving an international flight to Kinshasa (which can involve several connections from most places), a harrowing ordeal to leave the Kinshasa International Airport (airport code: FIH), a minimum of one overnight in the city, a regional flight from the Kinshasa city airport to the Ipope airstrip (there are no roads to Ipope), possibly with a refueling stop en route, then a 5km walk to Lompole, another overnight there, and finally another 20km walk to camp, which includes several river crossings, lots of mud, one dugout canoe ride, and sometimes another overnight.
The international flights generally limit baggage to one carry-on and two checked pieces of up to 23kg (50 pounds), with the maximum limit being 32kg (70 pounds) per checked bag. I personally brought two 32kg bags, plus my carry-on which was over 20kg (fortunately they didn't weigh it!).
The regional planes are chartered, and have stricter weight limits. Passengers count as weight. When I came in we had the larger plane, with a total possible payload of 900kg (we used it all). The smaller plane that's often chartered for this project can carry about 450kg, including the passenger(s). We rely on the planes to reprovision the camp with staples like rice, beans, and coffee, in addition to carrying the passengers and their luggage, so food can sometimes take priority over excess luggage.
From the Ipope airstrip, everything is carried on people's backs. The first stretch (about 5km) is from the airstrip to the project's depot in Lompole, while the second (about 20km) is from Lompole to LuiKotal camp. Porters generally carry loads from around 15 to 20 kilos - anything above that earns them a double portering rate, but obviously there's an upper limit that anyone can be physically expected to carry so far.
So mail, as we know it, does not exist in this part of the world. Even in Kinshasa, the mail system is fairly dismal, and not to be relied upon for anything beyond inconsequential postcards or other anecdotes. And outside of the main few cities of the country, I don't think people even know the concept of 'mail'.
At our camp, however, we're connected to the outside world by periodic new arrivals or departures. I came in with three others, and four people left a few weeks later. This is how we can send and receive 'mail'. I, for instance, bought a few postcards while in Kinshasa, and 'sent' them a few weeks later when people left camp. They were probably posted from Germany. I also 'sent' some digital photos to my cousin in New York, via the New Yorker that left.
So using this same system, it is actually possible for me to receive 'mail'. Timing is obviously irregular, and weight and size are big factors on whether the person arriving will really agree to bring something in for me. But letters, postcards, photos, CDs, and so on, should have relatively inconsequential effects on their luggage's weight, so should not be a problem.
It is now late April, and the next flight coming to Ipope will be in mid- to late-May. It will be carrying Grit, and possibly Jonas. Grit is coming from Leipzig, and I think that's where Jonas is based right now too. Leipzig is where the Institute is that established this camp. So any mail that is sent to me should be sent care of the Institute in Leipzig.
For anything that arrives at the Institute by around mid-May, it can be addressed to Grit Schubert. After that, her mail will probably just sit there until she gets back from here several months later. So address any later correspondence to Gottfried Hohmann and he'll make sure it gets to me with the next Institute visitor. It is recommended that anything be double-enveloped, so that if Grit or Gottfried opens 'their' mail, they just find another label inside with my name on it. Use the following format:
Ryan Matthews at LuiKotal Camp, DRC
c/o GRIT SCHUBERT (or c/o GOTTFRIED HOHMANN, if it will arrive after mid-May)
Max-Planck Institut fur evolutionare Anthropologie
Primatologie
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
Germany
So following this method, I guess my wish list is data CDs with photos of what's been going on in people's lives in recent months, or even just with photos of what's been going on in the world (we get very little news of the outside world here). I suppose some interesting magazine articles or newspaper clippings would be appreciated, or some hardcopy pictures to look at and show off. Developed photos are ok, but the humidity here kills them, and the portering trip to camp often leaves everything soaking wet. Anything sensitive to being dropped in a river ought to be waterproofed! CDs with recommended listening of mp3-format music would be a good call - I've got about 100GB of space left on my player's hard drive. Or maybe spices that you think would complement the food here, or little sweets or whatever. I dunno - get creative!
Or just letters and postcards, of course:)
If you do send something via this method, I'll be sure to acknowledge it (by email) when it finally arrives. If it's been more than a month or so, or you read in another entry that someone new came but you haven't gotten a response from me yet, then it's possible the mail was left in Leipzig - write me to see what's up. I brought a list of email addresses, but I don't have everyone's, so be sure to include that too.
Whatever I get, it'll be cool. The fact that getting something to me here is such an involved process, just makes it that much more special when it finally arrives. Thanks in advance!
-Ryan.
Thursday, 26 April, 2007
I've been asked if it is possible to receive mail here (thanks Nils!), so this posting basically explains the situation.
It's clear I'm pretty isolated here, but at least there's twice-weekly email uploads and downloads! So although I may be in the middle of the jungle in the middle of Africa, I still feel fairly connected, albeit virtually, to the rest of the world.
Physically, however, it would be difficult to get much more distant. Getting here, to LuiKotal camp, is a multi-day ordeal, involving an international flight to Kinshasa (which can involve several connections from most places), a harrowing ordeal to leave the Kinshasa International Airport (airport code: FIH), a minimum of one overnight in the city, a regional flight from the Kinshasa city airport to the Ipope airstrip (there are no roads to Ipope), possibly with a refueling stop en route, then a 5km walk to Lompole, another overnight there, and finally another 20km walk to camp, which includes several river crossings, lots of mud, one dugout canoe ride, and sometimes another overnight.
The international flights generally limit baggage to one carry-on and two checked pieces of up to 23kg (50 pounds), with the maximum limit being 32kg (70 pounds) per checked bag. I personally brought two 32kg bags, plus my carry-on which was over 20kg (fortunately they didn't weigh it!).
The regional planes are chartered, and have stricter weight limits. Passengers count as weight. When I came in we had the larger plane, with a total possible payload of 900kg (we used it all). The smaller plane that's often chartered for this project can carry about 450kg, including the passenger(s). We rely on the planes to reprovision the camp with staples like rice, beans, and coffee, in addition to carrying the passengers and their luggage, so food can sometimes take priority over excess luggage.
From the Ipope airstrip, everything is carried on people's backs. The first stretch (about 5km) is from the airstrip to the project's depot in Lompole, while the second (about 20km) is from Lompole to LuiKotal camp. Porters generally carry loads from around 15 to 20 kilos - anything above that earns them a double portering rate, but obviously there's an upper limit that anyone can be physically expected to carry so far.
So mail, as we know it, does not exist in this part of the world. Even in Kinshasa, the mail system is fairly dismal, and not to be relied upon for anything beyond inconsequential postcards or other anecdotes. And outside of the main few cities of the country, I don't think people even know the concept of 'mail'.
At our camp, however, we're connected to the outside world by periodic new arrivals or departures. I came in with three others, and four people left a few weeks later. This is how we can send and receive 'mail'. I, for instance, bought a few postcards while in Kinshasa, and 'sent' them a few weeks later when people left camp. They were probably posted from Germany. I also 'sent' some digital photos to my cousin in New York, via the New Yorker that left.
So using this same system, it is actually possible for me to receive 'mail'. Timing is obviously irregular, and weight and size are big factors on whether the person arriving will really agree to bring something in for me. But letters, postcards, photos, CDs, and so on, should have relatively inconsequential effects on their luggage's weight, so should not be a problem.
It is now late April, and the next flight coming to Ipope will be in mid- to late-May. It will be carrying Grit, and possibly Jonas. Grit is coming from Leipzig, and I think that's where Jonas is based right now too. Leipzig is where the Institute is that established this camp. So any mail that is sent to me should be sent care of the Institute in Leipzig.
For anything that arrives at the Institute by around mid-May, it can be addressed to Grit Schubert. After that, her mail will probably just sit there until she gets back from here several months later. So address any later correspondence to Gottfried Hohmann and he'll make sure it gets to me with the next Institute visitor. It is recommended that anything be double-enveloped, so that if Grit or Gottfried opens 'their' mail, they just find another label inside with my name on it. Use the following format:
Ryan Matthews at LuiKotal Camp, DRC
c/o GRIT SCHUBERT (or c/o GOTTFRIED HOHMANN, if it will arrive after mid-May)
Max-Planck Institut fur evolutionare Anthropologie
Primatologie
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
Germany
So following this method, I guess my wish list is data CDs with photos of what's been going on in people's lives in recent months, or even just with photos of what's been going on in the world (we get very little news of the outside world here). I suppose some interesting magazine articles or newspaper clippings would be appreciated, or some hardcopy pictures to look at and show off. Developed photos are ok, but the humidity here kills them, and the portering trip to camp often leaves everything soaking wet. Anything sensitive to being dropped in a river ought to be waterproofed! CDs with recommended listening of mp3-format music would be a good call - I've got about 100GB of space left on my player's hard drive. Or maybe spices that you think would complement the food here, or little sweets or whatever. I dunno - get creative!
Or just letters and postcards, of course:)
If you do send something via this method, I'll be sure to acknowledge it (by email) when it finally arrives. If it's been more than a month or so, or you read in another entry that someone new came but you haven't gotten a response from me yet, then it's possible the mail was left in Leipzig - write me to see what's up. I brought a list of email addresses, but I don't have everyone's, so be sure to include that too.
Whatever I get, it'll be cool. The fact that getting something to me here is such an involved process, just makes it that much more special when it finally arrives. Thanks in advance!
-Ryan.
Monday, April 16, 2007
(RM) Monkey lunch
Monkey lunch
Monday, 16 April, 2007
Let me begin by saying that I've been a vegetarian for the past ten years. I turned veggie around January or February 1997, sometime into my second semester of my degree program in Geography and Environmental Science. I think most of the students in the program became vegetarian by around then, as well. The rationale was basically that the meat industry, in its current form in the developed world, has such a detrimental effect on the environment, that, if we were purporting to be somewhat environmentally conscious, the least we could do as individuals would be to stop supporting that force of environmental degradation.
To be fair, I was never very much of a meat eater up to that point, so the switch from omnivore to herbivore was not very difficult for me. I never gave up eggs or milk products, so the proper title of my vegetarianism has been ovo-lacto-vegetarian. I never liked fish in the first place, so I didn't eat them either. When possible, I usually bought free-range eggs, too.
In the intervening decade, my sister will claim that I was not really vegetarian, because I did occasionally make exceptions and eat meat. This is true, although I still pretty much stood by my original rationale for not eating meat: I would generally be ok with eating it if it were not produced in an environmentally detrimental way. If someone caught a fish on the lake at the cottage, for example, I'd be happy to have some.
The other exception I would make was for culturally-mandated meat. Yeah, you could argue that eating tons of beef in the United States is culturally-mandated, but that's taking a rather narrow view of American culture, don't you think? What I'm referring to is basically turkey on Thanksgiving, sushi at Japanese restaurants, and goat in Africa. The goat in Africa is ok because that's how the people I had been among there produced their own food. The turkey on Thanksgiving I only had a couple of times, because yes, it is indeed a very cultural thing to have a turkey on Thanksgiving. And the sushi... well, I admit that's a bit of a stretch, but what else would I eat at those restaurants!?
Ok enough about all that, now back to the Congo. When I left the States a couple of months ago, I determined that I would indeed be giving up my vegetarianism because once I got here, I would have so little choice in what I'd be eating that I couldn't really afford to forgo certain things based on my stance while in North America. And anyway, we would only really be eating meat that was harvested sustainably, as opposed to being raised in massive meat factories like in North America. I had my first couple of non-vegetarian meals while in France, and I've had a lot of fish since arriving in Congo.
The fish is an everyday staple here at camp. We have a resident fisherman (on rotations) that is housed, fed, and doled out a daily cigarette, and we pay him by the kilogram of fish he brings in every day. This usually amounts to a chunk or two per person, per meal, including our workers. We also have a supply of locally-produced smoked fish that supplements days where the fisherman only brings in a kilo or two.
The fish is caught in the Lokoro River, which is very close to our camp, and which has innumerable tributary branches that flood into the forest closer to camp. The fishermen put nets across various fingers of the tributaries, and they go out every morning for a couple of hours to check on all the nets. I'm sure we have a bit of an environmental impact by doing this, but I don't think it's at all unsustainable. In addition, the river forms the northern boundary of our study area forest and the village's exploited forest to the north, so there are always plenty of other fishermen doing the same thing as well.
Bushmeat, on the other hand, is strictly forbidden on our side of the Lokoro. Everyone knows that the people around here are hunters, and that they regularly consume the spoils of the forest hunts. But everyone also knows that the stretch of forest that we are using as a study site is completely off limits to hunting. "The garden of the animals," as Papa Endu endearingly refers to it. And of the food we have portered in to camp from the village, all is vegetable; none is animal. Really, it would be nice to have some goat or chicken every once in a while, but the villagers don't raise livestock because of their proximity to the forest and its predators - a single leopard can decimate the village's animal population literally overnight.
So we are pesci-vegetarian at LuiKotal camp, and so are our local workers while they're here. With a few rare exceptions...
Today our top bonobo worker went out on the early morning shift with two of the researchers. He located the bonobo nest with them at 5:30am, and then continued on to some old nests to take measurements of their decay rates - a job he regularly does. When he was finished, he headed back to camp. He got home around 11am carrying a Wolf's guenon with its entrails hanging out. Apparently, the unfortunate little monkey was killed by an eagle, who was subsequently frightened away when Lambert came upon it. So Lambert got a fresh monkey without breaking the taboo on hunting in our forest.
I was pissed. I gave him shit, and told him he shouldn't be stealing the eagle's lunch. He said that it's not just the eagle's food, it's the human's food too, and anyway, this has happened three times before and it's been ok. Indeed, this is the fourth time within the past year or so that bonobo workers have come across fresh prey, dropped by the predator that caught it. And this is the fourth time over the past year or so that we've had fresh non-fish meat at camp.
I let Lambert know I wasn't pleased, and that the eagle should be able to eat what it catches. I can't encourage this sort of thing! Then I took some photos of the cook's assistant standing over the thing with his machete, and I asked the cook what sort of ingredients he would need for its preparation. He used a bit of tomato paste, salt, and hot pepper.
I didn't find it very satisfying. Granted, one monkey doesn't go very far in feeding ten people, so we each just got a little chunk. I think my chunk was a shoulder blade. I must have spent ten minutes trying to pry the meagre amount of meat and cartilage off of the bone, and only slightly less trying to chew it up. I think the best aspect was the little chunks of chili pepper stuck to the flesh. I passed when offered the last bit of 'sauce' from the bottom of the serving bowl. The worst was that the monkey-meat odour stayed on my hands for the next hour, well after washing them vigourously with soap.
So I've been at the camp for just about a month now, and I've had a whole four bites or so of monkey meat, in addition to all the varieties of fresh and smoked fish we get each day. I know I'm gonna get flak for this, but really, what should I have done? For the most part, the animals in our stretch of forest are free to just do their thing without fear of much more than eager stares through binoculars, in contrast to the bullets, arrows, and snares they'd face in most parts of the country. Over the coming months though, we're bound to have another such situation in which a freshly-killed animal is basically handed to us by some frightened predator, and I'll probably get to eat that one too. And inevitably, if I spend much time in the village, I'll be eating what they eat, which is what they hunt - the group that left a couple of weeks ago apparently had tortoise before catching their flight.
In the meantime though, we'll continue to eat our kwanga and greens. Last night we had fresh raw spinach ("what, you mean you don't even want it prepared!?") with a dressing of mustard and lime juice, and today we're having pondu. We got some nkoti in today, for the first time since I've been here, so I'll look forward to trying that in the next day or two. And of course the bananas, papayas, grapefruits, plantains, and fresh fish.
Unlike the rest of the Congolese population, it'll be a while until the next time we have any more bushmeat!
Monday, 16 April, 2007
Let me begin by saying that I've been a vegetarian for the past ten years. I turned veggie around January or February 1997, sometime into my second semester of my degree program in Geography and Environmental Science. I think most of the students in the program became vegetarian by around then, as well. The rationale was basically that the meat industry, in its current form in the developed world, has such a detrimental effect on the environment, that, if we were purporting to be somewhat environmentally conscious, the least we could do as individuals would be to stop supporting that force of environmental degradation.
To be fair, I was never very much of a meat eater up to that point, so the switch from omnivore to herbivore was not very difficult for me. I never gave up eggs or milk products, so the proper title of my vegetarianism has been ovo-lacto-vegetarian. I never liked fish in the first place, so I didn't eat them either. When possible, I usually bought free-range eggs, too.
In the intervening decade, my sister will claim that I was not really vegetarian, because I did occasionally make exceptions and eat meat. This is true, although I still pretty much stood by my original rationale for not eating meat: I would generally be ok with eating it if it were not produced in an environmentally detrimental way. If someone caught a fish on the lake at the cottage, for example, I'd be happy to have some.
The other exception I would make was for culturally-mandated meat. Yeah, you could argue that eating tons of beef in the United States is culturally-mandated, but that's taking a rather narrow view of American culture, don't you think? What I'm referring to is basically turkey on Thanksgiving, sushi at Japanese restaurants, and goat in Africa. The goat in Africa is ok because that's how the people I had been among there produced their own food. The turkey on Thanksgiving I only had a couple of times, because yes, it is indeed a very cultural thing to have a turkey on Thanksgiving. And the sushi... well, I admit that's a bit of a stretch, but what else would I eat at those restaurants!?
Ok enough about all that, now back to the Congo. When I left the States a couple of months ago, I determined that I would indeed be giving up my vegetarianism because once I got here, I would have so little choice in what I'd be eating that I couldn't really afford to forgo certain things based on my stance while in North America. And anyway, we would only really be eating meat that was harvested sustainably, as opposed to being raised in massive meat factories like in North America. I had my first couple of non-vegetarian meals while in France, and I've had a lot of fish since arriving in Congo.
The fish is an everyday staple here at camp. We have a resident fisherman (on rotations) that is housed, fed, and doled out a daily cigarette, and we pay him by the kilogram of fish he brings in every day. This usually amounts to a chunk or two per person, per meal, including our workers. We also have a supply of locally-produced smoked fish that supplements days where the fisherman only brings in a kilo or two.
The fish is caught in the Lokoro River, which is very close to our camp, and which has innumerable tributary branches that flood into the forest closer to camp. The fishermen put nets across various fingers of the tributaries, and they go out every morning for a couple of hours to check on all the nets. I'm sure we have a bit of an environmental impact by doing this, but I don't think it's at all unsustainable. In addition, the river forms the northern boundary of our study area forest and the village's exploited forest to the north, so there are always plenty of other fishermen doing the same thing as well.
Bushmeat, on the other hand, is strictly forbidden on our side of the Lokoro. Everyone knows that the people around here are hunters, and that they regularly consume the spoils of the forest hunts. But everyone also knows that the stretch of forest that we are using as a study site is completely off limits to hunting. "The garden of the animals," as Papa Endu endearingly refers to it. And of the food we have portered in to camp from the village, all is vegetable; none is animal. Really, it would be nice to have some goat or chicken every once in a while, but the villagers don't raise livestock because of their proximity to the forest and its predators - a single leopard can decimate the village's animal population literally overnight.
So we are pesci-vegetarian at LuiKotal camp, and so are our local workers while they're here. With a few rare exceptions...
Today our top bonobo worker went out on the early morning shift with two of the researchers. He located the bonobo nest with them at 5:30am, and then continued on to some old nests to take measurements of their decay rates - a job he regularly does. When he was finished, he headed back to camp. He got home around 11am carrying a Wolf's guenon with its entrails hanging out. Apparently, the unfortunate little monkey was killed by an eagle, who was subsequently frightened away when Lambert came upon it. So Lambert got a fresh monkey without breaking the taboo on hunting in our forest.
I was pissed. I gave him shit, and told him he shouldn't be stealing the eagle's lunch. He said that it's not just the eagle's food, it's the human's food too, and anyway, this has happened three times before and it's been ok. Indeed, this is the fourth time within the past year or so that bonobo workers have come across fresh prey, dropped by the predator that caught it. And this is the fourth time over the past year or so that we've had fresh non-fish meat at camp.
I let Lambert know I wasn't pleased, and that the eagle should be able to eat what it catches. I can't encourage this sort of thing! Then I took some photos of the cook's assistant standing over the thing with his machete, and I asked the cook what sort of ingredients he would need for its preparation. He used a bit of tomato paste, salt, and hot pepper.
I didn't find it very satisfying. Granted, one monkey doesn't go very far in feeding ten people, so we each just got a little chunk. I think my chunk was a shoulder blade. I must have spent ten minutes trying to pry the meagre amount of meat and cartilage off of the bone, and only slightly less trying to chew it up. I think the best aspect was the little chunks of chili pepper stuck to the flesh. I passed when offered the last bit of 'sauce' from the bottom of the serving bowl. The worst was that the monkey-meat odour stayed on my hands for the next hour, well after washing them vigourously with soap.
So I've been at the camp for just about a month now, and I've had a whole four bites or so of monkey meat, in addition to all the varieties of fresh and smoked fish we get each day. I know I'm gonna get flak for this, but really, what should I have done? For the most part, the animals in our stretch of forest are free to just do their thing without fear of much more than eager stares through binoculars, in contrast to the bullets, arrows, and snares they'd face in most parts of the country. Over the coming months though, we're bound to have another such situation in which a freshly-killed animal is basically handed to us by some frightened predator, and I'll probably get to eat that one too. And inevitably, if I spend much time in the village, I'll be eating what they eat, which is what they hunt - the group that left a couple of weeks ago apparently had tortoise before catching their flight.
In the meantime though, we'll continue to eat our kwanga and greens. Last night we had fresh raw spinach ("what, you mean you don't even want it prepared!?") with a dressing of mustard and lime juice, and today we're having pondu. We got some nkoti in today, for the first time since I've been here, so I'll look forward to trying that in the next day or two. And of course the bananas, papayas, grapefruits, plantains, and fresh fish.
Unlike the rest of the Congolese population, it'll be a while until the next time we have any more bushmeat!
(RM) Papa Endu
Papa Endu
Friday, 13 April, 2007
"You don't mind being in the middle of the forest when it gets dark,
with just a compass to find the way, right?"
Brigham and I had left the trail a couple of hours before, as soon as we
heard the bonobos. Our 'Tim' trail was heading east, and we heard their
calls to the southwest. With our compasses, we followed that bearing
for a while, adjusting it accordingly when we heard subsequent calls.
We first found the bonobo group around the spot where we crossed the
north-south 'Meike-5' trail, and continued to follow them beyond that
trail. Once we were with the bonobos, I stopped watching my compass,
but knew simply that we were west of Meike-5.
The bonobos had decided it was time to stop feeding for the afternoon,
and had made the move from their feeding trees to their chosen nest site
for the night. I didn't see any of them descend to the ground; they
traversed the canopy with ease and eventually settled on a group of
trees in which to build their nests. Bizarrely, for this is the first
time this group has done it under our watch, they nested in the same
spot as two nights before. Brigham pointed out the exact spot where he
had observed them 48 hours ago; we stood there again and waited for the
rest of the bonobos in the vicinity to arrive.
It was then that we ran into Lambert and Papa Endu again - the two
Congolese bonobo workers who were also out following the bonobos for the
afternoon. When we don't know where the bonobos are, multiple people
often head out in the afternoon to different regions of the forest in
the hope that at least one of us hears and locates the group. Both
pairs of us found the same group that night. The four of us shared some
biscuits, drank some water, and noted the whereabouts of the nest site.
We wouldn't really be needing the compass after all, since my three
companions had been at this exact nest site over the previous days and
knew the way back to Meike-5 - it was only about 50m to the east. We
put our headlamps on and hiked the 8.5km or so back to camp.
That night, Brigham and I gossipped about Papa Endu. The man's somewhat
middle-aged, though I have no idea what his age actually is. His son is
also working at our camp, and is probably around 20. Papa Endu's been
around a while.
Compared with the other men who work for us, we both agree that Papa
Endu is a real charmer. It seems that he's always got a smile when he
makes a statement, and his statement is usually along the lines of
"such-and-such is very beautiful." He could be speaking of an inedible
fruit, a tree, an animal, a food, or whatever. Just always with a smile
and a charming voice: "ezali malamu mingi mingi!"
Papa Endu's first career, before he got a job at our camp following
bonobos around, was as a hunter. He's good with a shotgun, and equally
so with the bow and arrow. He knows our forest well because he spent
many years of his life hunting in it. Now, because of his job with us,
he's forbidden from even picking up a tortoise that crosses the path -
no matter how hard he pleads. (He got in big trouble one time, when he
saw a great bow-and-arrow-making tree just under a tree where bonobos
were, and instinctively walked up and started chopping it down.)
In my discussion with Brigham, we came to the conclusion that Papa Endu
is probably the person working for us who is best suited to the job, and
who likes working it the most. His job consists of walking the forest
trails that he's known for years, but without hunting anything. He's
obliged to locate and mark the nests where the bonobos were seen the
previous night, and he's obliged to track down the whereabouts of
bonobos whenever they've evaded us. He chuckles when he watches the
bonobo juveniles playing on the branches, swinging around or teasing one
another or whatever. And when we're elsewhere on the trail, he always
catches the slightest sound of other animals in the distance and points
them out.
Yesterday he took me down the trail that leads from our camp to our
drinking water stream, and pointed out where a small nocturnal antelope
was sleeping. He had shown me that spot several weeks before, but the
antelope wasn't in it that day. This time the little guy was there, all
curled up under some branches a few metres off of the trail, looking
back at us watching it. Apparently it's been nesting there for at least
a month now, despite the regular camp traffic going back and forth to
the stream. We obviously pose no threat, I guess. At night it goes and
does whatever it does, probably visiting LuiKotal. I have seen little
duikers around camp a couple of times - it may well be the same one.
I think Papa Endu honestly enjoys his job. I think he perceives it to
be somewhat of a vacation from the hunting vocation he's been accustomed
to thus far in his life: he gets to do much of the same stuff, but
without any of the hassle of actually succeeding in the hunt. He covers
a minimum of 15km a day in the forest, and always has several good meals
to eat.
Papa Endu still gets to track the animals, but rather than shoot them,
he points them out to us white folks who pull out our binoculars in vain
attempts to see the little bird or monkey or whatever that he hears
through the forest. He just chuckles as we traipse off the trail to get
a better look at a congo peacock, or as we spend 10 minutes staring at a
noisy mangabey. He'll just grab a big leaf, put it at the base of a
tree, and sit there chilling out with a smile as we observe the animals
he used to shoot.
Apparently, last night he almost caught a duiker (a small antelope) with
his bare hands. Even a charmer among the animals, the duiker was
somehow mesmerised by the light of his headlamp through the heavy rain
- Papa Endu approached gently and finally lunged for the animal's legs
at the last second. It jumped up, ran straight into the tree it was
standing against, and then towards Brigham. Papa Endu just yelled
"Brigham!," perhaps expecting Brigham to just wrap his arms around the
poor thing and pick it up. It got away, but the incident nonetheless
gave us yet another impression of Papa Endu's prowess in the forest. I
wonder what he would have done had he actually caught it?
Our workers generally stay at camp in two-week rotations, and Papa
Endu's is up in a few days. He's planning on returning to his family in
the village and spending the next couple of weeks hunting on their side
of the Lokoro. He's a good hunter and he knows it; he doesn't even want
to bring his sons along to get in his way - they don't need to know how
to hunt since he's capable enough to feed the whole family on his own.
I wonder if he goes out on his hunting outings with the same air about
him as on his bonobo outings with us. I have no doubt that his face
lights up with a big smile when he comes across a forest tortoise,
because that's so easy to catch, and is apparently very tasty. But does
he chuckle when he sees red colobus jump from tree to tree, before
shooting a couple down for dinner? Somehow I doubt it.
Our study site is an anomoly in the region because there is no regular
hunting of animals that goes on in it. Other stands of forest have a
similar range of animal species represented, but they essentially serve
as food pantries for various adjacent villages. In our forest, however,
the animals are allowed to just do their thing. There's not even any
wood cutting beyond a certain distance from camp, aside from some
limited trail clearing.
Nonetheless, our activity here effectively contributes to the adjacent
villages in different ways. We buy local produce from the local
agriculteurs, and we directly employ a lot of people both at camp and to
transport stuff to and from camp. They don't get as much fresh meat
from the forest we work in, but many people in the nearby villages are
still indirectly fed by this stretch of forest.
Although not everyone who lives in the area sees it as clearly as I make
it out to be, I think Papa Endu is one of the people who respects this
formula the most. He still gets to hunt sometimes, he still gets to
spend his days walking the forest, and he always has enough food to
eat. But with us he gets to enjoy the forest as it used to be, or
perhaps even as it is supposed to be. Instead of seeing the abundant
wildlife and thinking it would be great to hunt here, he sees the cause
and effect: not hunting is just what created that abundance. His
smiling statement to me as he pointed out the sleeping duiker sums it
up: "c'est le jardin des animaux ici!"
Yeah, I like that about our forest too: "it's the garden of the animals
here."
Thursday, April 12, 2007
(RM) Food list
Food list
This entry is actually so long that I had to send it in two batches; the intro is in the entry called 'Food and recipe challenge'.
Discalimer:
Let me warn you that you’re not obliged to read any of this. I go into a lot of detail on the random foods. Don’t complain that it’s boring - only read it if you’re really interested! There’s a table of contents to sum up the main things, followed by really detailed descriptions.
STARCHES
We have kwanga with every meal except breakfast, when we eat rice. In addition, for variety, I try to ensure that we’ve got at least one other starch with each meal.
- Kwanga
This is the main starch around here. I believe it’s made of manioc tubers, though a lot of transformation has happened to get it to kwanga form. We get it in logs, about a kg each, which are wrapped up in big leaves. The logs are put on a shelf over the fire to get hot, and then they’re chopped up into chunks and served up in a big pot. We grab a chunk, squeeze off a hunk of it, and dip it in the other food. I find it’s got a consistency similar to a glue stick, although its actual stickiness varies depending on how many days it’s been sitting in the pantry. The colour is white, with a bit of clearness to it, sort of like congealed rice noodles. It’s not that flavourful, nor is it all that absorbent, so it doesn’t soak up sauces that well, but it’s sticky so it’ll accept a good mixture of spices. Kwanga is the staple food here, so it’s served with pretty much every meal. It’s also fairly portable, so it’s useful for hiking.
- Patates douces
These are basically potatoes. They’re a bit sweeter than the spuds I’m used to. They’re also fairly small, so they must be a pain in the ass to peel. I’m glad I don’t peel them! We get them peeled and boiled, and they’re served in a pot. I suppose they could be mashed too, but that’s not done for us. Sometimes I mash them in my bowl and mix other stuff in with them.
- Lombardo
These are similar to potatoes, but with a different taste. They look the same as the patates douces, but have a slightly redder flesh. The texture is almost the same, but the taste isn’t as agreeable. They’re served the same way as the patates douces, sometimes together in one pile.
- Benkufu
These tubers look similar to the potatoes and lombardo from the outside, but their texture is very different. The flesh is very white, and it’s filamented linearly. They are also prepared by peeling and boiling. If they’re boiled too much, they turn to mush, but the filaments sort of hold them to their shape. They can also be fried in local oil, or placed in the hot coals and cooked like that.
- Fufu
This is local flour made by grinding down the benkufus. It can then be mixed with water to make little patties or whatever. We haven’t had any of it since I’ve been here.
- Maize
We get little corns on the cob. The kernels are so hard! They’re boiled up, but it’s quite a pain to actually eat the kernels since they’re so hard. They’re really eaten by the mice in the pantry, too, so I don’t think it’s very practical to get maize.
- Plantains
OK, these may be fruits, but I’m sticking them in this group because of their role in a meal. They’re peeled, sliced into manageable sections, and prepared a few ways. Usually they’re just boiled. Sometimes they’re buried in the hot embers of the fire to cook, and they get a nice crust. The other way is to fry them in local palm oil, although that takes tons of oil. We had them fried once. We get plantains by the large bunch, and they last a while, so we generally have plenty on hand. They’re not really considered veggies, but are rather like another starchy accompaniment.
- Rice
We get huge sacks imported by plane from Kinshasa. We eat rice for breakfast every day, and it’s often the starch (in addition to kwanga) we have with our lunches and dinners.
- Spaghetti
This is an imported luxury that’s enough for a couple of meals between planeloads.
- Couscous
Another imported luxury that only lasts a few meals.
- Flour, yeast
This is imported and used to make some bread, although it’s hard to make bread in pots over a fire.
GREENS
I try to ensure that we’ve got a serving of greens with most meals, although they’re only good for a couple of days on the shelf. When there’s no greens left in the pantry, we usually revert to beans.
All of the greens are prepared the same way: they are mashed up, cooked with some water and oil in a big pot, and with some garlic, onion, salt, and tomato paste. The end result generally looks like soupy green mush, and I find that they all taste pretty similar.
- Epinards
This is spinach. It’s the same spinach as we have in The West. We get it in little bunches of fresh leaves that pretty much have to be used the day we get them or they go bad.
- Matembele
This stuff is similar to spinach, but somehow different. I can’t really describe how it’s different though. I guess the bunches are bigger, but the resultant pot is generally pretty comparable.
- Pondu
This stuff comes in big bunches. The stalks are green, with smaller red branches and green leaves on the ends of those. About half of the leaves are removed, and the other half are discarded with the stalks. I don’t understand which ones are to be kept and which are discarded, but the cooks do. It’s mashed up and cooked with tons of (local) palm oil instead of the moderate amount of vegetable oil used with the other greens.
- Nkoti
I’ve never had this, but it’s one of the available local greens. It’s not very popular at camp though, so I get the impression that we won’t be using it much.
- Bitekuteku
I've never had this either, but I guess it's like the others.
- Spaghetti local
This is not spaghetti, and not really a green either, but I don’t know where else to categorise it. It’s basically the pith of long stems from some big leaves. The leaves are discarded, as is the ‘skin’ of the stems, leaving long pithy bits that taste good. They range in length from about 10 to 25 cm (5 to 10 inches), and about half a cm in diameter. They are prepared identically to the greens, though their taste is different.
VEGETABLES
- Aubergines
These are small green eggplants. They’re prepared by peeling them, boiling them, and mashing them up with some salt and probably some tomato paste, garlic, and onion. They’re tasty.
- Courgettes
I guess this is squash, although we haven’t had it since I’ve been here. Apparently it’s prepared by cubing and boiling.
- Haricots
These are our beans, imported from Kinshasa. They start as dry greenish-pink beans and end up as soupy red beans. They’re prepared with salt, onion, garlic, and tomato paste. This is the backup vegetable for when none of the others are around.
- Peanuts
OK, I don’t know where to categorise these, so they’ll get tossed in with the veggies. These are produced locally. We generally have them roasted. They’re good mixed into other dishes, particularly the greens. They add crunch, which is missing in everything else we eat. They’re also a good snack between meals. Once we had peanut sauce, which was basically peanut butter. The peanuts were mashed up, and some salt and pili-pili (chili pepper) was added for flavour. That was our vegetable for the meal.
- Mbika
These look like pumpkin seeds, but I think they’re actually calabash (another type of gourd) seeds. They’re prepared by mashing them up into a paste, adding local palm oil and tomato paste, and some salt. The mbika sauce has a good texture, and a taste somewhat like peanut butter. We eat it as the vegetable of a given meal.
FRUITS
- Papayas
We eat these for breakfast, mashed up in rice. We grow papayas at camp, although they don’t ripen very often. Unripe papaya has been used once in a creative curry meal with coconut.
- Bananas
We get these by the whole bunch. They’re little and sweet. The mice like them too.
- Oranges
The ones we get are green and somewhat sour. They’re a lot tougher than the Sunkist variety.
- Limes
Little, shiny, and slightly yellow. Good as a seasoning on papaya or avocado.
- Lemons
These are thick, green, gnarly, and sweet.
- Pamplemousses
These are primitive grapefruits. Essentially half of the fruit is pith. We generally have these for dessert after dinner, chopped up into usable bits so we chow into the fruity sections and leave the dividing elements. They’re pretty sweet; probably sweeter than the oranges.
- Avocados
We get the larger variety here than the little Mexican ones generally seen in North America, although they’re not always that large. We eat them for breakfast, mashed up and mixed with rice. We’ve got several young avocado trees at camp, but they don’t produce fruit yet.
- Coconuts
We get these husked, similarly to the ones in the stores of North America. We generally eat chunks as snacks. Once we had a curry of unripe papaya cubes with coconut chunks, stewed in a spiced sauce (imported curry powder) and served over rice. That was great.
- Pineapples
We actually grow these at our camp, but they take forever to produce a single pineapple. We also get them every once in a while from the village.
- Saffoo
This is a little nut-looking fruit with a thin brownish skin. It looks a bit like an oversized date. It’s boiled, and the thin skin is sucked off with the flesh, which is in a thinnish layer between the skin and the pit. I find the taste to be a cross between avocado and lime. These are more of a tasty treat than a useful fruit that we can get regularly, and they’re impractical for anything more than an infrequent indulgence.
- Tondolo
Little red fruits that I've never had. Apparently you eat the whitish inside, including the seeds, and it smells (but doesn't taste) like breakfast sausage.
- Cola nuts
Apparently there’s a cola nut tree along one of the trails in our forest, but I haven’t been down that trail yet. I wonder how easy it will be to get one of the fruits down.
- Glucose biscuits
Yeah, I know, these aren't fruits, but they're good snacks and they don't fit into any other group. We buy them in bulk in Kinshasa and consume a lot. They're portable, so mostly they're used as snacks while in the field on long days. The biscuits themselves are basically sweet little cookies that are probably intended for babies who are teething, in packs of 13.
SPICES/SEASONINGS
We have a few local seasonings, several regular imported staples that we use for seasoning, and a few imported spices that will serve to prepare just a couple of dishes each.
- Pili-pili
We’ve got two varieties of hot peppers. We grow tiny red ones at camp, and we get larger, juicier, green ones from the village. The green ones are similar to habaneros in appearance and hotness. Our tiny red ones are dryer and not quite as hot, but still pretty powerful if you get a whole one in a bite. Both varieties are prepared by mashing them up and mixing them with rock salt. We sprinkle the mixture over most things, we mix it into the greens, or we just dip the kwanga into the mixture for flavour.
- Lompidj
This is a green leafy herb. We ground it up with rock salt and pili-pili, and add it to most dishes for flavour. I guess the closest comparable flavour I know of would be fresh dill.
- Rock salt
We import this from Kinshasa. It’s worth a lot around here.
- Cane sugar
We import this from Kinshasa. It’s also worth a lot around here.
- Honey
We import this from Kinshasa, but apparently we can get local stuff too.
- Onions and garlic
We import this from Kinshasa. It’s my job to put them into the sun every day to keep them from getting too moist and going bad.
- Tomato paste
We import this from Kinshasa by the case of tiny little cans. It’s used in pretty much every dish we eat.
- Palm oil
We get this from the village. It’s thick, orange, and grainy, and probably not that healthy, but it tastes good. It congeals at about 20C, so it won’t even flow in the morning if the night was at all cool. It’s used in a number of dishes, and can be used to fry stuff.
- Vegetable oil
This is imported from Kinshasa and used for flavouring in a number of dishes.
- Imported seasonings
Black pepper
Mexican fruit seasoning
Curry powder
Garam masala
Cinnamon
Coriander
Turmeric
Herbes de Provence
Basil
Etc. (whatever people brought)
MEAT
The local population around here is a hunter society. In general, each village has a large stand of forest that is attributed to them, where they do their hunting and other resource gathering. There are also plenty of rivers where people do their fishing. In our case, the village of Lompole has basically ceded much of their forest to us, so the Lompole forest has become a study site rather than a hunting resource. There’s still a lot of Lompole forest (to the north of the Lokoro River) that isn’t part of the study site, so the villagers still eat plenty of local bushmeat. But we don’t purchase any of it. We need to remain clearly opposed to hunting, in order to maintain credibility when we request that the villagers not hunt in our study area.
We do, however, accept the fishing that goes on in the Lokoro. Our camp is just south of the Lokoro, and there are a few fishing villages along its length nearby. We have one resident fisherman at camp who is not paid a daily wage, but is paid by the kilogram of fish that he brings in for our immediate consumption. He also gets to benefit from the luxuries of living in our camp, vs. in a fishing village (free food, a complimentary daily cigarette, coffee with sugar, salt, plenty of hangout time with the other workers, etc.).
So our fresh meat supply consists solely of fish. In addition, we have smoked fish that’s produced locally, and we have canned stuff.
- Fresh fish
We’ve got quite a variety of species that appear every morning. Sometimes there are some big ones that can weigh four or five kilos (up to 10 pounds or so), while the majority are smaller. I guess the average daily haul is about 1.5kg, though it ranges from none on bad days to about 10kg on the best days. The workers’ staple is fish. The fish is pretty much always prepared by chopping it up and boiling it with tomato paste, salt, onion, and garlic. I find that it’s a pain in the ass to eat, because of all the tiny little bones to pick out. I sometimes forgo the fish entirely just so I don’t have to deal with picking out all the bones.
- Smoked fish
I think this stuff looks nasty, but it’s got similar nutritional qualities to the fresh stuff but it keeps longer. The meat is pretty shrivelled up inside though. At least the bones are decomposed sufficiently to chew through. It’s prepared identically to the fresh fish, but needs to boil longer to make it chewable. Smoked fish is probably the only thing we have, aside from peanuts, that requires actual chewing – everything else we eat is pretty much mush.
- Sardines
We import these by the case from Kinshasa. We bring a tin into the field on days we’ll be out for most of the day. We also use sardines to supplement the fish supply on days that the fisherman doesn’t bring much in.
- Corned beef
We import this from Kinshasa. This is also portable food for taking into the field on long days. Once we had it mixed up with beans and spices for dinner, sort of like chili. Corned beef isn’t something that’s particularly liked, but it’s practical.
BEVERAGES
We get our water from a local stream about four minutes down a trail, and filter it before drinking. We also use that water, put into buckets, for bathing in shower stalls at camp. There’s also another stream about five minutes further down the trail that we can go to, to actually bathe in. Both streams are about ankle-deep. The bathing one is also where our laundry is done.
- Water
Our drink selection consists of filtered water at the ambient temperature, or boiled water steeped with a few imported things:
- Coffee grounds
We get two brands imported from Kinshasa. The Bora Sana isn’t very good, while the Carioca Super Qualité Kinshasa is passable. We mix it with hot water and let the grounds settle at the bottom. We mix in sugar and milk powder, and it’s actually not that bad.
- Nescafé
This imported luxury doesn’t last the whole period between planeloads; it’s much tastier than the Carioca Super Qualité Kinshasa.
- Nesquik
The chocolate variety is clearly the most popular here, mixed with the boiled water and milk powder, but we also have the strawberry variety. I haven’t tried that. I think the pink colour just turns me off.
- Tea
We have Lipton bags with the yellow label. There are also a few other varieties around, that individuals brought. There’s a bit of green tea, for example.
- Milk powder
Just used as a base for Nesquik, or as an additive to coffee or tea.
COOKING INFRASTRUCTURE
All of our food is cooked over fire. The fire is built by placing the ends of long thick logs together, in a starburst pattern. As they get burned, the logs are pushed closer to the centre. The pot is balanced on the middle of the log starburst. If needed, a satellite fire is created in the same way with some of the smaller logs, but usually there is just one pot on at any given moment. There are rarely flames; the heat is mainly transmitted from red-hot embers on the ends of the logs. The ash is sometimes used to cook stuff in too.
There is a shelf above the fire, where smoked fish is stored and where kwanga is heated up. Shoes can also go there to dry, and the workers put their tobacco and cigarettes there to keep it dry. Fresh fish can be placed there to get smoked for longer-term storage.
There is a collection of pots for cooking in. No pans.
There’s a bucket for sorting through the fish guts.
There’s one ladle. I ordered another on the plane from Kinshasa.
There are a few knives. These are used for everything from peeling potatoes to chopping greens to opening cans of tomato paste. They get so much use that most have lost their handles, but they are still useful.
There’s a big mortar and pestle for mashing the greens or the peanuts or the mbika seeds. The pestle is made of a dugout log on a pedestal, and the mortar is like the butt end of a baseball bat.
All of our dishes are stainless steel. We always eat from bowls (no plates), with a small side plate for piling kwanga, pili-pili, or fish bones. We always have a spoon and a fork, but never a knife. Things just aren’t tough enough to need a knife. We each have a mug. That’s it.
RECIPE CHALLENGE
OK, now you know all of our food supplies here, and what we’ve got at our disposition to prepare it. We have two cooks working full-time to do the work, although my role is to come up with meals. So far, I just program what’s known. I’m open to suggestions though!
So, if anyone reading this finds that these ingredients and cooking implements would enable something more interesting than what we’ve got, please send us recipes. Check the ‘Communication’ blog entries for details on how to go about sending emails here, and include a bit of news from the outside world while you’re at it!
Thanks!
This entry is actually so long that I had to send it in two batches; the intro is in the entry called 'Food and recipe challenge'.
Discalimer:
Let me warn you that you’re not obliged to read any of this. I go into a lot of detail on the random foods. Don’t complain that it’s boring - only read it if you’re really interested! There’s a table of contents to sum up the main things, followed by really detailed descriptions.
STARCHES
We have kwanga with every meal except breakfast, when we eat rice. In addition, for variety, I try to ensure that we’ve got at least one other starch with each meal.
- Kwanga
This is the main starch around here. I believe it’s made of manioc tubers, though a lot of transformation has happened to get it to kwanga form. We get it in logs, about a kg each, which are wrapped up in big leaves. The logs are put on a shelf over the fire to get hot, and then they’re chopped up into chunks and served up in a big pot. We grab a chunk, squeeze off a hunk of it, and dip it in the other food. I find it’s got a consistency similar to a glue stick, although its actual stickiness varies depending on how many days it’s been sitting in the pantry. The colour is white, with a bit of clearness to it, sort of like congealed rice noodles. It’s not that flavourful, nor is it all that absorbent, so it doesn’t soak up sauces that well, but it’s sticky so it’ll accept a good mixture of spices. Kwanga is the staple food here, so it’s served with pretty much every meal. It’s also fairly portable, so it’s useful for hiking.
- Patates douces
These are basically potatoes. They’re a bit sweeter than the spuds I’m used to. They’re also fairly small, so they must be a pain in the ass to peel. I’m glad I don’t peel them! We get them peeled and boiled, and they’re served in a pot. I suppose they could be mashed too, but that’s not done for us. Sometimes I mash them in my bowl and mix other stuff in with them.
- Lombardo
These are similar to potatoes, but with a different taste. They look the same as the patates douces, but have a slightly redder flesh. The texture is almost the same, but the taste isn’t as agreeable. They’re served the same way as the patates douces, sometimes together in one pile.
- Benkufu
These tubers look similar to the potatoes and lombardo from the outside, but their texture is very different. The flesh is very white, and it’s filamented linearly. They are also prepared by peeling and boiling. If they’re boiled too much, they turn to mush, but the filaments sort of hold them to their shape. They can also be fried in local oil, or placed in the hot coals and cooked like that.
- Fufu
This is local flour made by grinding down the benkufus. It can then be mixed with water to make little patties or whatever. We haven’t had any of it since I’ve been here.
- Maize
We get little corns on the cob. The kernels are so hard! They’re boiled up, but it’s quite a pain to actually eat the kernels since they’re so hard. They’re really eaten by the mice in the pantry, too, so I don’t think it’s very practical to get maize.
- Plantains
OK, these may be fruits, but I’m sticking them in this group because of their role in a meal. They’re peeled, sliced into manageable sections, and prepared a few ways. Usually they’re just boiled. Sometimes they’re buried in the hot embers of the fire to cook, and they get a nice crust. The other way is to fry them in local palm oil, although that takes tons of oil. We had them fried once. We get plantains by the large bunch, and they last a while, so we generally have plenty on hand. They’re not really considered veggies, but are rather like another starchy accompaniment.
- Rice
We get huge sacks imported by plane from Kinshasa. We eat rice for breakfast every day, and it’s often the starch (in addition to kwanga) we have with our lunches and dinners.
- Spaghetti
This is an imported luxury that’s enough for a couple of meals between planeloads.
- Couscous
Another imported luxury that only lasts a few meals.
- Flour, yeast
This is imported and used to make some bread, although it’s hard to make bread in pots over a fire.
GREENS
I try to ensure that we’ve got a serving of greens with most meals, although they’re only good for a couple of days on the shelf. When there’s no greens left in the pantry, we usually revert to beans.
All of the greens are prepared the same way: they are mashed up, cooked with some water and oil in a big pot, and with some garlic, onion, salt, and tomato paste. The end result generally looks like soupy green mush, and I find that they all taste pretty similar.
- Epinards
This is spinach. It’s the same spinach as we have in The West. We get it in little bunches of fresh leaves that pretty much have to be used the day we get them or they go bad.
- Matembele
This stuff is similar to spinach, but somehow different. I can’t really describe how it’s different though. I guess the bunches are bigger, but the resultant pot is generally pretty comparable.
- Pondu
This stuff comes in big bunches. The stalks are green, with smaller red branches and green leaves on the ends of those. About half of the leaves are removed, and the other half are discarded with the stalks. I don’t understand which ones are to be kept and which are discarded, but the cooks do. It’s mashed up and cooked with tons of (local) palm oil instead of the moderate amount of vegetable oil used with the other greens.
- Nkoti
I’ve never had this, but it’s one of the available local greens. It’s not very popular at camp though, so I get the impression that we won’t be using it much.
- Bitekuteku
I've never had this either, but I guess it's like the others.
- Spaghetti local
This is not spaghetti, and not really a green either, but I don’t know where else to categorise it. It’s basically the pith of long stems from some big leaves. The leaves are discarded, as is the ‘skin’ of the stems, leaving long pithy bits that taste good. They range in length from about 10 to 25 cm (5 to 10 inches), and about half a cm in diameter. They are prepared identically to the greens, though their taste is different.
VEGETABLES
- Aubergines
These are small green eggplants. They’re prepared by peeling them, boiling them, and mashing them up with some salt and probably some tomato paste, garlic, and onion. They’re tasty.
- Courgettes
I guess this is squash, although we haven’t had it since I’ve been here. Apparently it’s prepared by cubing and boiling.
- Haricots
These are our beans, imported from Kinshasa. They start as dry greenish-pink beans and end up as soupy red beans. They’re prepared with salt, onion, garlic, and tomato paste. This is the backup vegetable for when none of the others are around.
- Peanuts
OK, I don’t know where to categorise these, so they’ll get tossed in with the veggies. These are produced locally. We generally have them roasted. They’re good mixed into other dishes, particularly the greens. They add crunch, which is missing in everything else we eat. They’re also a good snack between meals. Once we had peanut sauce, which was basically peanut butter. The peanuts were mashed up, and some salt and pili-pili (chili pepper) was added for flavour. That was our vegetable for the meal.
- Mbika
These look like pumpkin seeds, but I think they’re actually calabash (another type of gourd) seeds. They’re prepared by mashing them up into a paste, adding local palm oil and tomato paste, and some salt. The mbika sauce has a good texture, and a taste somewhat like peanut butter. We eat it as the vegetable of a given meal.
FRUITS
- Papayas
We eat these for breakfast, mashed up in rice. We grow papayas at camp, although they don’t ripen very often. Unripe papaya has been used once in a creative curry meal with coconut.
- Bananas
We get these by the whole bunch. They’re little and sweet. The mice like them too.
- Oranges
The ones we get are green and somewhat sour. They’re a lot tougher than the Sunkist variety.
- Limes
Little, shiny, and slightly yellow. Good as a seasoning on papaya or avocado.
- Lemons
These are thick, green, gnarly, and sweet.
- Pamplemousses
These are primitive grapefruits. Essentially half of the fruit is pith. We generally have these for dessert after dinner, chopped up into usable bits so we chow into the fruity sections and leave the dividing elements. They’re pretty sweet; probably sweeter than the oranges.
- Avocados
We get the larger variety here than the little Mexican ones generally seen in North America, although they’re not always that large. We eat them for breakfast, mashed up and mixed with rice. We’ve got several young avocado trees at camp, but they don’t produce fruit yet.
- Coconuts
We get these husked, similarly to the ones in the stores of North America. We generally eat chunks as snacks. Once we had a curry of unripe papaya cubes with coconut chunks, stewed in a spiced sauce (imported curry powder) and served over rice. That was great.
- Pineapples
We actually grow these at our camp, but they take forever to produce a single pineapple. We also get them every once in a while from the village.
- Saffoo
This is a little nut-looking fruit with a thin brownish skin. It looks a bit like an oversized date. It’s boiled, and the thin skin is sucked off with the flesh, which is in a thinnish layer between the skin and the pit. I find the taste to be a cross between avocado and lime. These are more of a tasty treat than a useful fruit that we can get regularly, and they’re impractical for anything more than an infrequent indulgence.
- Tondolo
Little red fruits that I've never had. Apparently you eat the whitish inside, including the seeds, and it smells (but doesn't taste) like breakfast sausage.
- Cola nuts
Apparently there’s a cola nut tree along one of the trails in our forest, but I haven’t been down that trail yet. I wonder how easy it will be to get one of the fruits down.
- Glucose biscuits
Yeah, I know, these aren't fruits, but they're good snacks and they don't fit into any other group. We buy them in bulk in Kinshasa and consume a lot. They're portable, so mostly they're used as snacks while in the field on long days. The biscuits themselves are basically sweet little cookies that are probably intended for babies who are teething, in packs of 13.
SPICES/SEASONINGS
We have a few local seasonings, several regular imported staples that we use for seasoning, and a few imported spices that will serve to prepare just a couple of dishes each.
- Pili-pili
We’ve got two varieties of hot peppers. We grow tiny red ones at camp, and we get larger, juicier, green ones from the village. The green ones are similar to habaneros in appearance and hotness. Our tiny red ones are dryer and not quite as hot, but still pretty powerful if you get a whole one in a bite. Both varieties are prepared by mashing them up and mixing them with rock salt. We sprinkle the mixture over most things, we mix it into the greens, or we just dip the kwanga into the mixture for flavour.
- Lompidj
This is a green leafy herb. We ground it up with rock salt and pili-pili, and add it to most dishes for flavour. I guess the closest comparable flavour I know of would be fresh dill.
- Rock salt
We import this from Kinshasa. It’s worth a lot around here.
- Cane sugar
We import this from Kinshasa. It’s also worth a lot around here.
- Honey
We import this from Kinshasa, but apparently we can get local stuff too.
- Onions and garlic
We import this from Kinshasa. It’s my job to put them into the sun every day to keep them from getting too moist and going bad.
- Tomato paste
We import this from Kinshasa by the case of tiny little cans. It’s used in pretty much every dish we eat.
- Palm oil
We get this from the village. It’s thick, orange, and grainy, and probably not that healthy, but it tastes good. It congeals at about 20C, so it won’t even flow in the morning if the night was at all cool. It’s used in a number of dishes, and can be used to fry stuff.
- Vegetable oil
This is imported from Kinshasa and used for flavouring in a number of dishes.
- Imported seasonings
Black pepper
Mexican fruit seasoning
Curry powder
Garam masala
Cinnamon
Coriander
Turmeric
Herbes de Provence
Basil
Etc. (whatever people brought)
MEAT
The local population around here is a hunter society. In general, each village has a large stand of forest that is attributed to them, where they do their hunting and other resource gathering. There are also plenty of rivers where people do their fishing. In our case, the village of Lompole has basically ceded much of their forest to us, so the Lompole forest has become a study site rather than a hunting resource. There’s still a lot of Lompole forest (to the north of the Lokoro River) that isn’t part of the study site, so the villagers still eat plenty of local bushmeat. But we don’t purchase any of it. We need to remain clearly opposed to hunting, in order to maintain credibility when we request that the villagers not hunt in our study area.
We do, however, accept the fishing that goes on in the Lokoro. Our camp is just south of the Lokoro, and there are a few fishing villages along its length nearby. We have one resident fisherman at camp who is not paid a daily wage, but is paid by the kilogram of fish that he brings in for our immediate consumption. He also gets to benefit from the luxuries of living in our camp, vs. in a fishing village (free food, a complimentary daily cigarette, coffee with sugar, salt, plenty of hangout time with the other workers, etc.).
So our fresh meat supply consists solely of fish. In addition, we have smoked fish that’s produced locally, and we have canned stuff.
- Fresh fish
We’ve got quite a variety of species that appear every morning. Sometimes there are some big ones that can weigh four or five kilos (up to 10 pounds or so), while the majority are smaller. I guess the average daily haul is about 1.5kg, though it ranges from none on bad days to about 10kg on the best days. The workers’ staple is fish. The fish is pretty much always prepared by chopping it up and boiling it with tomato paste, salt, onion, and garlic. I find that it’s a pain in the ass to eat, because of all the tiny little bones to pick out. I sometimes forgo the fish entirely just so I don’t have to deal with picking out all the bones.
- Smoked fish
I think this stuff looks nasty, but it’s got similar nutritional qualities to the fresh stuff but it keeps longer. The meat is pretty shrivelled up inside though. At least the bones are decomposed sufficiently to chew through. It’s prepared identically to the fresh fish, but needs to boil longer to make it chewable. Smoked fish is probably the only thing we have, aside from peanuts, that requires actual chewing – everything else we eat is pretty much mush.
- Sardines
We import these by the case from Kinshasa. We bring a tin into the field on days we’ll be out for most of the day. We also use sardines to supplement the fish supply on days that the fisherman doesn’t bring much in.
- Corned beef
We import this from Kinshasa. This is also portable food for taking into the field on long days. Once we had it mixed up with beans and spices for dinner, sort of like chili. Corned beef isn’t something that’s particularly liked, but it’s practical.
BEVERAGES
We get our water from a local stream about four minutes down a trail, and filter it before drinking. We also use that water, put into buckets, for bathing in shower stalls at camp. There’s also another stream about five minutes further down the trail that we can go to, to actually bathe in. Both streams are about ankle-deep. The bathing one is also where our laundry is done.
- Water
Our drink selection consists of filtered water at the ambient temperature, or boiled water steeped with a few imported things:
- Coffee grounds
We get two brands imported from Kinshasa. The Bora Sana isn’t very good, while the Carioca Super Qualité Kinshasa is passable. We mix it with hot water and let the grounds settle at the bottom. We mix in sugar and milk powder, and it’s actually not that bad.
- Nescafé
This imported luxury doesn’t last the whole period between planeloads; it’s much tastier than the Carioca Super Qualité Kinshasa.
- Nesquik
The chocolate variety is clearly the most popular here, mixed with the boiled water and milk powder, but we also have the strawberry variety. I haven’t tried that. I think the pink colour just turns me off.
- Tea
We have Lipton bags with the yellow label. There are also a few other varieties around, that individuals brought. There’s a bit of green tea, for example.
- Milk powder
Just used as a base for Nesquik, or as an additive to coffee or tea.
COOKING INFRASTRUCTURE
All of our food is cooked over fire. The fire is built by placing the ends of long thick logs together, in a starburst pattern. As they get burned, the logs are pushed closer to the centre. The pot is balanced on the middle of the log starburst. If needed, a satellite fire is created in the same way with some of the smaller logs, but usually there is just one pot on at any given moment. There are rarely flames; the heat is mainly transmitted from red-hot embers on the ends of the logs. The ash is sometimes used to cook stuff in too.
There is a shelf above the fire, where smoked fish is stored and where kwanga is heated up. Shoes can also go there to dry, and the workers put their tobacco and cigarettes there to keep it dry. Fresh fish can be placed there to get smoked for longer-term storage.
There is a collection of pots for cooking in. No pans.
There’s a bucket for sorting through the fish guts.
There’s one ladle. I ordered another on the plane from Kinshasa.
There are a few knives. These are used for everything from peeling potatoes to chopping greens to opening cans of tomato paste. They get so much use that most have lost their handles, but they are still useful.
There’s a big mortar and pestle for mashing the greens or the peanuts or the mbika seeds. The pestle is made of a dugout log on a pedestal, and the mortar is like the butt end of a baseball bat.
All of our dishes are stainless steel. We always eat from bowls (no plates), with a small side plate for piling kwanga, pili-pili, or fish bones. We always have a spoon and a fork, but never a knife. Things just aren’t tough enough to need a knife. We each have a mug. That’s it.
RECIPE CHALLENGE
OK, now you know all of our food supplies here, and what we’ve got at our disposition to prepare it. We have two cooks working full-time to do the work, although my role is to come up with meals. So far, I just program what’s known. I’m open to suggestions though!
So, if anyone reading this finds that these ingredients and cooking implements would enable something more interesting than what we’ve got, please send us recipes. Check the ‘Communication’ blog entries for details on how to go about sending emails here, and include a bit of news from the outside world while you’re at it!
Thanks!
(RM) Food (and recipe challenge!)
Food (and recipe challenge!)
OK, so before I left for the jungle, I was asked a number of times what sort of food we would be eating. I didn’t really have a good answer, but I knew it would be a combination of local foods with a few imported items. And that’s just what it is. But really, I don’t feel that there’s a whole lot of variety, especially compared with the culinary choice I’ve been accustomed to for most of my life. So, while this missive is primarily just to describe the sorts of food we’ve got here, it’s also a challenge to anyone who reads it and considers themselves somewhat creative with food.
Part of my job here is to orchestrate all of the food for our camp. This means that I place twice-weekly orders to the local village for the local stuff, and I also ration the imported stuff that has to last until at least the next plane. Planes come every month or two, and have a limited capacity, so I’ve also got to determine what needs to be shipped in on the upcoming flights – essential staples, mostly, like rice, sugar, salt, and coffee.
I’ve also got to maintain the food stocks, to ensure that they don’t go bad. With the heat, humidity, and vermin, this is a formidable task. I’ve got a storeroom of blue plastic barrels that can be shut airtight, where much of the dry stuff is stored. I take many of the things out regularly to dry in the sun so that it doesn’t get mouldy. The local food is kept in an open-air ‘pantry’ consisting of log shelves and liana loops hanging from the ceiling. The bananas and plantains hang in whole bunches from the ceiling, while the other things are lined on the shelves. Mice and insects are my enemies; they pose a challenge to storing anything for long.
We eat three meals a day at camp, and often take portable food for long days in the field. Breakfast is at 6am, lunch is at noon, and dinner is at 6pm. Our workers have a different regime that suits them better. We (the research team) always eat together. If people are still out in the field in the evening (which is frequent), we generally wait for them to return and shower before eating dinner together. It’s the first time in years that I’ve been in a living situation where we have formal meals as a group!
In the 'Food list' entry is a list of ingredients, with basic descriptions of their qualities and sometimes with comparisons to foods we know in The West. At the end are descriptions of our kitchen facilities. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with interesting recipes with these components, and send them to us here at LuiKotal camp. Cuz really, we only eat a few variations of the following things, and some interesting suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ryan.
In summary, the 'Food list' has the following foods (but in excruciating detail):
CONTENTS (foods imported from Kinshasa are marked with a *. The rest is local.)
-STARCHES
- Kwanga (the staple starch)
- Patates douces (potatoes)
- Lombardo (like potatoes)
- Benkufu (stringy potatoey things)
- Fufu (manioc flour)
- Maize
- Plantains
- Rice*
- Spaghetti*
- Couscous*
- Flour, yeast*
-GREENS
- Epinards (spinach)
- Matembele (like spinach)
- Pondu (other leafy thing)
- Nkoti (other leafy thing)
- Bitekuteku (other leafy thing)
- Spaghetti local (pith)
-VEGETABLES
- Aubergines (eggplants)
- Courgettes (squash)
- Haricots (beans)
- Peanuts
- Mbika (like pumpkin seeds)
-FRUITS
- Papayas
- Bananas
- Oranges
- Limes
- Lemons
- Pamplemousses (like grapefruits)
- Avocados
- Coconuts
- Pineapples
- Saffoo
- Cola nuts
- Glucose biscuits*
-SPICES/SEASONINGS
- Pili-pili (chili pepper)
- Lompidj
- Rock salt*
- Cane sugar*
- Honey(*)
- Onions and garlic*
- Tomato paste*
- Palm oil
- Vegetable oil*
- Imported seasonings*
-MEAT
- Fresh fish
- Smoked fish
- Sardines*
- Corned beef*
-BEVERAGES
- Water
- Coffee grounds*
- Nescafé*
- Nesquik*
- Tea*
- Milk powder*
-COOKING INFRASTRUCTURE
If you've read what we've got from the 'Food list', you're ready for the Recipe Challenge!
RECIPE CHALLENGE
Now you know all of our food supplies here, and what we’ve got at our disposition to prepare it. We have two cooks working full-time to do the work, although my role is to come up with meals. So far, I just program what’s known. I’m open to suggestions though!
So, if anyone reading this finds that these ingredients and cooking implements would enable something more interesting than what we’ve got, please send us recipes. Check the ‘Communication’ blog entries for details on how to go about sending emails here, and include a bit of news from the outside world while you’re at it!
Thanks!
OK, so before I left for the jungle, I was asked a number of times what sort of food we would be eating. I didn’t really have a good answer, but I knew it would be a combination of local foods with a few imported items. And that’s just what it is. But really, I don’t feel that there’s a whole lot of variety, especially compared with the culinary choice I’ve been accustomed to for most of my life. So, while this missive is primarily just to describe the sorts of food we’ve got here, it’s also a challenge to anyone who reads it and considers themselves somewhat creative with food.
Part of my job here is to orchestrate all of the food for our camp. This means that I place twice-weekly orders to the local village for the local stuff, and I also ration the imported stuff that has to last until at least the next plane. Planes come every month or two, and have a limited capacity, so I’ve also got to determine what needs to be shipped in on the upcoming flights – essential staples, mostly, like rice, sugar, salt, and coffee.
I’ve also got to maintain the food stocks, to ensure that they don’t go bad. With the heat, humidity, and vermin, this is a formidable task. I’ve got a storeroom of blue plastic barrels that can be shut airtight, where much of the dry stuff is stored. I take many of the things out regularly to dry in the sun so that it doesn’t get mouldy. The local food is kept in an open-air ‘pantry’ consisting of log shelves and liana loops hanging from the ceiling. The bananas and plantains hang in whole bunches from the ceiling, while the other things are lined on the shelves. Mice and insects are my enemies; they pose a challenge to storing anything for long.
We eat three meals a day at camp, and often take portable food for long days in the field. Breakfast is at 6am, lunch is at noon, and dinner is at 6pm. Our workers have a different regime that suits them better. We (the research team) always eat together. If people are still out in the field in the evening (which is frequent), we generally wait for them to return and shower before eating dinner together. It’s the first time in years that I’ve been in a living situation where we have formal meals as a group!
In the 'Food list' entry is a list of ingredients, with basic descriptions of their qualities and sometimes with comparisons to foods we know in The West. At the end are descriptions of our kitchen facilities. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with interesting recipes with these components, and send them to us here at LuiKotal camp. Cuz really, we only eat a few variations of the following things, and some interesting suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ryan.
In summary, the 'Food list' has the following foods (but in excruciating detail):
CONTENTS (foods imported from Kinshasa are marked with a *. The rest is local.)
-STARCHES
- Kwanga (the staple starch)
- Patates douces (potatoes)
- Lombardo (like potatoes)
- Benkufu (stringy potatoey things)
- Fufu (manioc flour)
- Maize
- Plantains
- Rice*
- Spaghetti*
- Couscous*
- Flour, yeast*
-GREENS
- Epinards (spinach)
- Matembele (like spinach)
- Pondu (other leafy thing)
- Nkoti (other leafy thing)
- Bitekuteku (other leafy thing)
- Spaghetti local (pith)
-VEGETABLES
- Aubergines (eggplants)
- Courgettes (squash)
- Haricots (beans)
- Peanuts
- Mbika (like pumpkin seeds)
-FRUITS
- Papayas
- Bananas
- Oranges
- Limes
- Lemons
- Pamplemousses (like grapefruits)
- Avocados
- Coconuts
- Pineapples
- Saffoo
- Cola nuts
- Glucose biscuits*
-SPICES/SEASONINGS
- Pili-pili (chili pepper)
- Lompidj
- Rock salt*
- Cane sugar*
- Honey(*)
- Onions and garlic*
- Tomato paste*
- Palm oil
- Vegetable oil*
- Imported seasonings*
-MEAT
- Fresh fish
- Smoked fish
- Sardines*
- Corned beef*
-BEVERAGES
- Water
- Coffee grounds*
- Nescafé*
- Nesquik*
- Tea*
- Milk powder*
-COOKING INFRASTRUCTURE
If you've read what we've got from the 'Food list', you're ready for the Recipe Challenge!
RECIPE CHALLENGE
Now you know all of our food supplies here, and what we’ve got at our disposition to prepare it. We have two cooks working full-time to do the work, although my role is to come up with meals. So far, I just program what’s known. I’m open to suggestions though!
So, if anyone reading this finds that these ingredients and cooking implements would enable something more interesting than what we’ve got, please send us recipes. Check the ‘Communication’ blog entries for details on how to go about sending emails here, and include a bit of news from the outside world while you’re at it!
Thanks!
Monday, April 9, 2007
(RM) Second bonobos
My second bonobo encounter
7 March
Bonobo encounters have been fairly hit-or-miss over the past couple of weeks. When I first arrived here, it seemed that our bonobo group was nested almost every day; that frequency has been waning.
Ideally, the bonobos are followed to their nesting site in the evening, and they are greeted there again in the morning. They are then followed for as long as possible during the day, although they often evade the researchers in the field. If the group has evaded the researchers, or if their whereabouts was entirely unknown for the day, researchers spend the afternoon looking (listening) for them. In this way, the group is often found again in time to nest them in the evening.
On Friday evening, the researchers who had gone into the field succeeded in locating the bonobos settling into nest trees for the night. In fact, they located two separate nest groups - about 500m apart. This had been the first successful nesting in almost a week. So, that night, when we planned the next morning, it was determined that two groups of researchers would head out to the field in order to have observers at each of the two nest sites. I joined one of the two groups.
Bonobos nest at around dusk, and they begin to stir at first light. For whoever nests the bonobos, this means that they start hiking back to camp as of around 6pm, while whoever greets the bonobos in the morning needs to be within close earshot of the nest by around 5:30am. The cue is when it is possible to navigate the forest without the headlamp – that’s when it’s time to move close enough to the nest tree to begin visual observations.
Lately, the bonobos have been nesting between 7 and 9 kilometres from camp. This makes a long commute in the dark to get to the nest sites by first light. For nest sites that are far from established trails, the last few hundred metres can add a considerable amount of time to the commute. (At least the trails leading to the recent nest sites are on dry ground; many of the trails here are submerged in water or mud. The following days’ nests were in such swampy areas.)
Saturday morning, the closest of the two nest groups was about 50m off of the trail, after about 7.5km of trail hiking from camp. The next one was about 250m off of the trail, after another 250m or so of trail. So we needed to leave camp by 3:45am in order for everyone to make it to the nest groups by 5:30.
The day began at around 3, in the misty dark of the night. Each of us appeared gradually from our tents, dressed for the field. The moon shone eerily through the haze. We turned the light bulb on at our table. We used thermoses of hot water that had been prepared the night before to make oatmeal and coffee. Everyone seemed to have a different recipe for oatmeal – I mashed a banana into mine.
We all had similar supplies for such an excursion: The headlamp for the hike out – and possibly for the hike back, in cases where someone stays out all day and comes back after dark. A couple of litres of water each. Some food, including a couple of packs of biscuits and a can of sardines per person, and perhaps a banana or two. Each group generally takes some kwanga (the local starch, with the consistency of a glue-stick). Everyone needs a compass, a pair of binoculars, and a field notebook. There’s generally a GPS unit per group. A raincoat is always a good idea. I also brought my camera and tripod, although the extra weight means that these aren’t brought out daily.
We began the hike promptly at 3:45. We didn’t stop for over 90 minutes, and we barely spoke. Stopping to pee means falling significantly behind – there’s no time for breaks. In a single-file line, with headlamps illuminating the windey trails through the forest, this really constitutes a commute.
The first 5.5km are a straight shot down a single trail, then a 1km shortcut trail to the second trail, then another half km or so to the start of the trail where the bonobos nested. The first pause in our hike was at the start of that trail, where we divided into our two groups. We also agreed to keep our headlamps pointed downwards, in order to avoid shining into the forest where the bonobos were still sleeping.
I was in the first group, so we arrived at the turnoff from the trail with about 10 minutes to spare; the others still had half a kilometre to hike, much of which was off the trail already. We got to sit and rest for a few minutes, eat a few biscuits, and repack our bags from hiking mode to observation mode.
We headed into the forest, on the lookout for bonobos. Through my binoculars, I spotted one high up in a tree, swinging downwards. We continued in that direction. Another bonobo (or possibly the same one) climbed a spindly tree high enough to stare at us. We stopped and stared back for a few moments. It went back to the ground and took off. So did the others, I guess. We tried following the group, but they sure move more stealthily than we do. And when they’re out of sight and not calling, they’re pretty damn hard to locate. Our bonobos got away. I’d gotten good looks at two (maybe the same one), while my colleagues said they’d seen three.
So then we did what a lot of bonobo field work involves. We sat and listened. We first returned to the trail near to where we had first left it, and continued down it to the first good log. We discussed tactics, repacked our bags, ate biscuits, and so on. I’m making it sound like we were so busy - really, we just sat and listened. I photographed a mushroom.
After a while (was it 30 minutes or an hour?), we heard a bonobo call off in the distance! A single call. So we continued down the trail in that general direction, and stopped again once we were in line with the approximate spot where we thought the call may have come from. We found another log, sat down, and proceeded to listen again.
After another while (someone else was taking notes on such details as timing), we heard bonobo calls. This time they were closer, and it was a series of calls rather than just one. We were off! We headed straight into the forest, following the compass bearing in the direction of the bonobo calls, and soon found them. There were several scattered around, up different trees in the vicinity. I chose to observe the juvenile and the infant playing high up in a tree, next to a day nest of, presumably, a mother. They were so cute!
As we approached the bonobo group, it became clear that there were loads of bonobos all over the place: above us, up in neighbouring trees, on the ground nearby, and so on. I continued to observe the two little guys playing, because they were the cutest. But I couldn’t help notice some movement in the underbrush ahead of us. And some bright red!
It was Martin, with his red bandana. We had located the other nest group, that he and Brigham had been observing since dawn. It’s likely that the bonobos we had first encountered at our nest site were also among the greater group surrounding us, but we were clearly infringing on Martin and Brigham’s observations.
The bonobos in our forest have been getting gradually habituated to the presence of human researchers since sometime in 2002, when the LuiKotal field research station was first established. Habituation has progressed slowly but surely, to the point where behavioural observations are finally possible: the bonobos are sufficiently relaxed to human presence to allow us to actually make observations. But the policy has always been to have a maximum of three humans observing a given group at a time, generally all within close proximity to each other. Suddenly, as Andrew and Caro and I showed up to the group being observed by Martin and Brigham, we had five humans scattered among the bonobos. At least two of us needed to leave.
So I left with Andrew. He planned to return in the afternoon, to take over the observations for whoever was ready for a break. We made our way through the bush back to the trail, and started back to camp. It was about 8:30am, and we had already been out for almost 5 hours. Camp was about 8km away.
So my second encounter with the bonobos was fairly typical, though my cutting it short early is generally not so intentional. The early morning departure from camp, with the long hike to the nesting site, is standard practice. The quick loss of the bonobo group, unfortunately, is also fairly normal. Sitting on a log, listening intently, is therefore very common too. And although heading back to camp at around 8:30 was my choice, it is often also fairly commonplace, if the morning group gets away and doesn’t make another sound.
Since I was out so early, so far from camp and carrying photo gear, I took advantage of the rest of the day and returned very slowly to camp. Since I couldn’t photograph bonobos, I decided to photograph more mushrooms. They’re so much more cooperative! I shot dozens of them. I also got several cool butterflies, a blue dragonfly, a colourful flycatcher (bird), and several other smaller primate species. I got home around 4:45pm – about 13 hours after leaving camp.
Since Saturday, they bonobos have been successfully followed pretty much all day. They were nested again on Saturday night, and they were followed for the full day on Sunday. Granted, it was raining most of the day on Sunday, so they didn’t move around a whole lot. But when they did travel, they travelled far, and mostly through swampland! So now the bonobo work has the added dimension of schlepping knee-deep through mud, in addition to the other challenges.
I think I’ll probably hold off for a little while before going out on another bonobo observation day – at least until they’re not in swampland all day. It’s definitely tough work for everyone involved, and the researchers here who do it on a daily basis are clearly pushing their bodies hard. But spirits are high, because of the bonobos. Sure, 20km+ days are the norm, deep mud is always a possibility, and lunch often consists of sardines and biscuits. These all seem somewhat trivial, though, when you get to hang out with a bonobo group as they go about their daily business. I guess the bonobos are habituating the researchers, too.
7 March
Bonobo encounters have been fairly hit-or-miss over the past couple of weeks. When I first arrived here, it seemed that our bonobo group was nested almost every day; that frequency has been waning.
Ideally, the bonobos are followed to their nesting site in the evening, and they are greeted there again in the morning. They are then followed for as long as possible during the day, although they often evade the researchers in the field. If the group has evaded the researchers, or if their whereabouts was entirely unknown for the day, researchers spend the afternoon looking (listening) for them. In this way, the group is often found again in time to nest them in the evening.
On Friday evening, the researchers who had gone into the field succeeded in locating the bonobos settling into nest trees for the night. In fact, they located two separate nest groups - about 500m apart. This had been the first successful nesting in almost a week. So, that night, when we planned the next morning, it was determined that two groups of researchers would head out to the field in order to have observers at each of the two nest sites. I joined one of the two groups.
Bonobos nest at around dusk, and they begin to stir at first light. For whoever nests the bonobos, this means that they start hiking back to camp as of around 6pm, while whoever greets the bonobos in the morning needs to be within close earshot of the nest by around 5:30am. The cue is when it is possible to navigate the forest without the headlamp – that’s when it’s time to move close enough to the nest tree to begin visual observations.
Lately, the bonobos have been nesting between 7 and 9 kilometres from camp. This makes a long commute in the dark to get to the nest sites by first light. For nest sites that are far from established trails, the last few hundred metres can add a considerable amount of time to the commute. (At least the trails leading to the recent nest sites are on dry ground; many of the trails here are submerged in water or mud. The following days’ nests were in such swampy areas.)
Saturday morning, the closest of the two nest groups was about 50m off of the trail, after about 7.5km of trail hiking from camp. The next one was about 250m off of the trail, after another 250m or so of trail. So we needed to leave camp by 3:45am in order for everyone to make it to the nest groups by 5:30.
The day began at around 3, in the misty dark of the night. Each of us appeared gradually from our tents, dressed for the field. The moon shone eerily through the haze. We turned the light bulb on at our table. We used thermoses of hot water that had been prepared the night before to make oatmeal and coffee. Everyone seemed to have a different recipe for oatmeal – I mashed a banana into mine.
We all had similar supplies for such an excursion: The headlamp for the hike out – and possibly for the hike back, in cases where someone stays out all day and comes back after dark. A couple of litres of water each. Some food, including a couple of packs of biscuits and a can of sardines per person, and perhaps a banana or two. Each group generally takes some kwanga (the local starch, with the consistency of a glue-stick). Everyone needs a compass, a pair of binoculars, and a field notebook. There’s generally a GPS unit per group. A raincoat is always a good idea. I also brought my camera and tripod, although the extra weight means that these aren’t brought out daily.
We began the hike promptly at 3:45. We didn’t stop for over 90 minutes, and we barely spoke. Stopping to pee means falling significantly behind – there’s no time for breaks. In a single-file line, with headlamps illuminating the windey trails through the forest, this really constitutes a commute.
The first 5.5km are a straight shot down a single trail, then a 1km shortcut trail to the second trail, then another half km or so to the start of the trail where the bonobos nested. The first pause in our hike was at the start of that trail, where we divided into our two groups. We also agreed to keep our headlamps pointed downwards, in order to avoid shining into the forest where the bonobos were still sleeping.
I was in the first group, so we arrived at the turnoff from the trail with about 10 minutes to spare; the others still had half a kilometre to hike, much of which was off the trail already. We got to sit and rest for a few minutes, eat a few biscuits, and repack our bags from hiking mode to observation mode.
We headed into the forest, on the lookout for bonobos. Through my binoculars, I spotted one high up in a tree, swinging downwards. We continued in that direction. Another bonobo (or possibly the same one) climbed a spindly tree high enough to stare at us. We stopped and stared back for a few moments. It went back to the ground and took off. So did the others, I guess. We tried following the group, but they sure move more stealthily than we do. And when they’re out of sight and not calling, they’re pretty damn hard to locate. Our bonobos got away. I’d gotten good looks at two (maybe the same one), while my colleagues said they’d seen three.
So then we did what a lot of bonobo field work involves. We sat and listened. We first returned to the trail near to where we had first left it, and continued down it to the first good log. We discussed tactics, repacked our bags, ate biscuits, and so on. I’m making it sound like we were so busy - really, we just sat and listened. I photographed a mushroom.
After a while (was it 30 minutes or an hour?), we heard a bonobo call off in the distance! A single call. So we continued down the trail in that general direction, and stopped again once we were in line with the approximate spot where we thought the call may have come from. We found another log, sat down, and proceeded to listen again.
After another while (someone else was taking notes on such details as timing), we heard bonobo calls. This time they were closer, and it was a series of calls rather than just one. We were off! We headed straight into the forest, following the compass bearing in the direction of the bonobo calls, and soon found them. There were several scattered around, up different trees in the vicinity. I chose to observe the juvenile and the infant playing high up in a tree, next to a day nest of, presumably, a mother. They were so cute!
As we approached the bonobo group, it became clear that there were loads of bonobos all over the place: above us, up in neighbouring trees, on the ground nearby, and so on. I continued to observe the two little guys playing, because they were the cutest. But I couldn’t help notice some movement in the underbrush ahead of us. And some bright red!
It was Martin, with his red bandana. We had located the other nest group, that he and Brigham had been observing since dawn. It’s likely that the bonobos we had first encountered at our nest site were also among the greater group surrounding us, but we were clearly infringing on Martin and Brigham’s observations.
The bonobos in our forest have been getting gradually habituated to the presence of human researchers since sometime in 2002, when the LuiKotal field research station was first established. Habituation has progressed slowly but surely, to the point where behavioural observations are finally possible: the bonobos are sufficiently relaxed to human presence to allow us to actually make observations. But the policy has always been to have a maximum of three humans observing a given group at a time, generally all within close proximity to each other. Suddenly, as Andrew and Caro and I showed up to the group being observed by Martin and Brigham, we had five humans scattered among the bonobos. At least two of us needed to leave.
So I left with Andrew. He planned to return in the afternoon, to take over the observations for whoever was ready for a break. We made our way through the bush back to the trail, and started back to camp. It was about 8:30am, and we had already been out for almost 5 hours. Camp was about 8km away.
So my second encounter with the bonobos was fairly typical, though my cutting it short early is generally not so intentional. The early morning departure from camp, with the long hike to the nesting site, is standard practice. The quick loss of the bonobo group, unfortunately, is also fairly normal. Sitting on a log, listening intently, is therefore very common too. And although heading back to camp at around 8:30 was my choice, it is often also fairly commonplace, if the morning group gets away and doesn’t make another sound.
Since I was out so early, so far from camp and carrying photo gear, I took advantage of the rest of the day and returned very slowly to camp. Since I couldn’t photograph bonobos, I decided to photograph more mushrooms. They’re so much more cooperative! I shot dozens of them. I also got several cool butterflies, a blue dragonfly, a colourful flycatcher (bird), and several other smaller primate species. I got home around 4:45pm – about 13 hours after leaving camp.
Since Saturday, they bonobos have been successfully followed pretty much all day. They were nested again on Saturday night, and they were followed for the full day on Sunday. Granted, it was raining most of the day on Sunday, so they didn’t move around a whole lot. But when they did travel, they travelled far, and mostly through swampland! So now the bonobo work has the added dimension of schlepping knee-deep through mud, in addition to the other challenges.
I think I’ll probably hold off for a little while before going out on another bonobo observation day – at least until they’re not in swampland all day. It’s definitely tough work for everyone involved, and the researchers here who do it on a daily basis are clearly pushing their bodies hard. But spirits are high, because of the bonobos. Sure, 20km+ days are the norm, deep mud is always a possibility, and lunch often consists of sardines and biscuits. These all seem somewhat trivial, though, when you get to hang out with a bonobo group as they go about their daily business. I guess the bonobos are habituating the researchers, too.
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