Akwaba Cote d'Ivoire!

I arrived in Abidjan Sunday night after a lot of airplanes and many airplane meals. Rather than waste precious new books on an airplane (I've spent the past year building up my kindle's library), I slept and chatted on the first plane, and watched Mulan, Les Miserables, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower on the second. My plane was only two hours late, and - unlike last year - all my luggage arrived! For my year in Abidjan, I've got a camping bag full of clothes, a duffel bag filled mostly with Ziploc baggies for collecting monkey poop and food, and a nice new pair of rubber boots.

I'm currently on the patio of my room at the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifique in Abidjan listening to the call to prayer echo across the lake from the city. Abidjan would like to be a tropical rainforest again, if it had its way, but instead it gets to be a giant, crowded, humid city. It is the rainy season now. Last night and this morning the rain was really impressive. It's since cleared, but I'm glad I got an extra dry bag to keep my camera in!

I spent Monday getting logistical things taken care of in advance of heading for the forest. We'll leave on Wednesday rather than today because we've got a few more things to finish up here. Monday afternoon, we went to change some money and get groceries at a very fancy grocery store downtown. Not only is this grocery well stocked, but you can pay with a credit card! As well as some staples like rice, sardines, and lentils, I got some extravagances (in particular, Nutella, but the French kind without palm oil in it).  I also got a *lot* of tea because I like drinking it in the mornings, and I like having tea for people when they come up to camp. I am also now the proud owner of an Ivorian cell phone, and the magical little doohickey which will give me internet access in the forest. And, most importantly, I got my research permit which will allow me entrance to the forest!

So I'll spend the rest of today finishing up some loose ends from school - I'm trying to finish a manuscript draft to give to my advisor when he heads back to Ohio tonight (he's been in the forest for the past few weeks), and I am working on coauthoring a paper with my friend Noah based on some data we've been collecting on forelimb use in several species of monkeys in Tai, so I need to finish up my section of it before he leaves Cote d'Ivoire in late July. But then I'll leave bright and early tomorrow morning for the place that really knows it's a rainforest!

And they're off...

This evening, I leave the US for Cote d'Ivoire! An overnight plane from Boston to Paris, followed by an afternoon plane from Paris to Abidjan, will deposit me back in the tropics where I can sit overlooking the lagoons in Abidjan and watching lizards sun themselves. 

I plan to spend Monday taking care of logistics: groceries, changing money, buying a cellphone, buying a usb-connector for the internet. There's a fancy grocery store in Abidjan we go to where I can purchase a year's supply of rice, tuna, tea, powdered milk, candles, and so on - and, importantly, use a credit card! I'll also meet up with my advisor in Abidjan. He has just completing a few weeks checking up on our field station.

If all of that goes as planned and I get all my stuff taken care of on Monday, I'll leave on Tuesday morning for a long drive all the way across the country. From Abidjan, which is the de facto capital of Cote d'Ivoire (home to the ports, most government offices, embassies, etc.), we'll drive up north to Yamoussoukro, which is the official capital of Cote d'Ivoire. Apparently President Houphouet-Boigny, who ran the country during the 90s and early 2000s, was born in Yamoussoukro, and wanted to honor his hometown by making it CAPITAL. The other ridiculous thing he did there was build the world's largest Basilica. It is quite large, and we'll drive right in front of it on our way through the city. From there, we make an arc down to the southwest, through Duekoue, Guiglo, Daloa, and eventually the town of Tai! That takes between 6-10 hours depending on traffic and the state of the roads.

We'll likely spend the night in Tai on Tuesday. Tai is a small town with probably about 5,000 residents. It's only electrified part of the time because sometimes the big generator breaks down - they're off of the main grid in Cote d'Ivoire. Last year, I slept in the convent in Tai on my way into the forest because the hotels were all full (there are only a couple). Tai is where I get all my produce and groceries during the time that I'm in the field. I'll need to say hi to the mayor of Tai and other government officials, and show my permits to Eaux et Forets, the agency that deals with the parks and wildlife. Wednesday morning, we'll drive to the villages to pick up the field assistants, and then - between Gouliako and Pouliyula - pick up the road heading into Tai National Park where I'll be back in my forest home!

I'm not sure how frequently I'll be able to get to the internet; the place where we can pick up a signal is about a half hour walk from camp. I anticipate once or twice every week or two. I'll do my best to keep in touch as frequently as possible over the next year (!!) that I'm in the rainforest! 

My house in the research station

The kitchen at the research station, with food, coolers, and dishes

The cooking setup. In the evenings, a group of monkeys hangs out in the trees behind the kitchen and watches me cook.

A tailless whip scorpion who lived in my house (they're not dangerous, just impressive looking)

Four of the employees of the Tai Monkey Project and me!

A Diana monkey - the guys I'll be studying!

Beginning Again

It's time for a re-dedication of The Great Blue Erin. I've made it through my first three years of graduate school: coursework, gross anatomy, conferences, three months in the field, five semesters of teaching. I've submitted a lot of unsuccessful grant applications, and a few successful ones. I took my candidacy exams, I defended my dissertation proposal, and now - here I am! It's May 7, and I leave for a year of nothing but primates in 37 days. Of course, this is generally an occasion for celebration, but I thought I'd be leaving on my own with not even a satellite phone to connect me to the world outside of Tai National Park.

Fortunately (!!), it turns out this isn't the case! With the help of nearly-ubiquitous mobile coverage across sub-Saharan Africa, I will apparently be able to access the internet just a short half-hour walk from camp! Expect occasional dispatches from the middle of the rain forest of southwestern Cote d'Ivoire ...

This time tomorrow.

I was doing some reading for my archaeological theory class when This Time Tomorrow by the Kinks started playing. The reason I own this song is its presence on the Darjeeling Limited soundtrack, but I've always felt that it does a pretty good job encapsulating life.

Seven miles below me I can see the world and it ain't so big at all
Well, this time tomorrow what will we see?
Field full of houses, endless rows of crowded streets
I don't where I'm going, I don't want to see
I feel the world below me looking up at me

To some extent, that matches where I'm at right now. I'm about a third of the way through my second quarter of graduate school (frequent blogging is, fortunately, not a prerequisite for grad school success). I am working on Archaeology Theory right now, preparing for a presentation and paper on Marxist Archaeology. I'm also working on collating data for a possible master's thesis on the feeding ecology of the Diana monkey, in case I don't get to go to the Ivory Coast to start my fieldwork this summer. I'd love a little more certainty about the next 6 months, but things are treating me well. I'm going a little stir crazy with the winter - last year I skipped most of winter and went right to 95% humidity and a hundred degrees. I'm starting to realize that might not have been such a bad plan ...

Well, I've been a resident of Columbus for about two hours shy of a week now. I have a nearly complete apartment (no internet yet, and other things keep popping up. Paper towel dispenser. A thingy to put in the shower to hold shampoo. Something else to put in the living room so it's not just a couch and a bookcase), a complete room (I put my bed together all by myself - it arrived in a box full of lumber and screws), and some well-stocked cabinets. Today I'll make my second grocery run. I have to go to the library this weekend to return books and DVDs I borrowed. I know my way from the student union to the anthropology building to the science library, and I have a wireless password. I'm practically a regular at the coffee shop across the street from my apartment (they have free wireless, too), and I've found great Ethiopian and great Mediterranean.

I haven't met very many people yet, but the next week looks promising. On Saturday, I'm planning on going to the botanical garden with "Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry" (hopefully avoiding the crush of 110,000 people headed to the football game). There's swing dancing on Tuesday, and I'm going out to dinner on Wednesday (Somali!) with a group of people from the area who I know through a website we all post on regularly. The other anthropology students start showing up in the next week or so, and classes start in a week and a half! Things are looking pretty good :-)

New Hampshire is not the rainforest

After almost 3 months of being in a temperate climate, I think I've finally readjusted. I've stopped needing to sleep under a blanket at night and sweatshirts rarely feel like the right clothing choice. The cats and dog don't look quite so monstrously large any more, I don't get urges to catch any large-ish orthopteran I see to feed to a hideously ravenous monkey. My neck doesn't feel strangely light without binoculars, and I don't think I could climb up a cliff right now.

I've beenwhiling away the time at home, for the most part. May included a trip to Columbus to dance and meet other graduate students, and graduation came and went in a whirl.



In June, I took the train to Chicago and went to the Lincoln Park Zoo, where I fell in love with some Allen's Swamp Monkeys. Then it was back to St. Louis for some more dancing followed by an extravagant week of traveling in California. I spent 8 hours at the San Diego Zoo where I fell in love with even MORE monkeys.



I took trains and buses up the coast and really enjoyed myself. Since then, it's mostly been working as an engineer and occasionally heading down to Boston and dancing. I have a number of friends around, and it's been wonderful catching up with people before they scatter to all corners of the earth (literally. Central Ohio is very tame. I have friends who will be in Korea, China, London, Paris, Zimbabwe, California, etc. doing things as varied as studying the circus, teaching English, and working for Facebook). I move to Columbus at the very beginning of September. I have a roommate and an apartment about 2 miles from campus. The prospect of preparing for graduate school and adultish life is very exciting, though really I wish I was headed to the rainforest, Kenya, or both. Soon enough!

El fin de Viaje

The man at Karine, the fruit stand in the Mercado, still remembers me. I catch his eye as I approach the line of fruit stands (having passed the line of shoe stands and the line of plastic bucket stands) and he starts laughing, probably remembering the earlier fruit excursion - mounds of apples, plums and grenadillas, plus three avocadoes all squirreled away to sustain us during the strike. A polite kiss on the cheek later, I explain that, sadly, this is my last morning in Peru and I wanted to buy some fruit for the plane. And say goodbye, of course. I take a plum and he adds a grenadilla to my bag. "This is your food for the plane?" he asks. When I nod, he takes the back back from me and adds a kiwi,, three apples, and an unidentified fruit that looks suspiciously like a tomato,but, he assures me, is really a fruit from the forest. He won't let me pay for them, and waves goodbye. "Ojalá, nos vemos!"

Two days earlier, I was sixty meters in the air. The sun had just peaked out over the horizon, and within one minute shone brightly in its entirety. Coincident with the sunrise, a flock of scarlet macaws flew by 30 feet below me but still high above the canopy. The sounds of titis and howlers reaffirming their territories' integrity filtered up to where I sat. Ronald and I sat against the metal poles on the platform, the two of us still wearing the rock climbing harnesses we'd hooked onto the wire guideline as we scaled the ladder to the platform. Minutes pass and the forest below us wakes up. The nightjars, jaguars, and owl monkeys are asleep and now the screaming peahens and emperor tamarins take over.

Ronald and I head down to Puerto together. We managed to avoid the Collectivo by hitching a ride on a boat from Boca Amigos going down with a motor to be fixed and a huge quantity of cases full of empty beer bottles to return in Puerto. It started raining at 2:00 in the morning with a brief lull at 4 when I ran from my cabin to the lab without getting completely soaked. On the river, though, with my raincoat, a poncho and a tarp over my head, I am drenched and sit in cold water for about five hours. On the bright side - this is the first time in four months that I've shivered!

And now, here I am, taking off. The air conditioning in the plane sends visible clouds into the humid rainforest air that followed me on. I guess it's similar to whatever fogs your breath on chilly mornings. My seatbelt is fastened, the trees speed past, and now I'm up in the air. People are all very clean, and my seat is squishy and comfortable. There are no baby monkeys peeing in my hair, no fer-de-lances hiding next to the doors. For a while I follow he meanders of Rio Madre de Dios through the green below, but now we're up above the clouds and the only thing I can see is white, punctuated by occasional mountain tops. Away we go!