Elephants Galore

So. the surveying has all finished, and I have been spending the last week trying to work out the financial situation of each of the clinics... not a small task considering all the accounts are in Nepalese, and the accounting has been lets say immaginative.. so nothing too exciting on the work front to report. However on a rare day off we got to go on an elephant safari, through the National park. Which was seriously good fun. No tigers were spotted but we did see 4 Rhino and a few snakes, plus a few herds of Spotted and Samba deer.

me on the back of an elephant, heading off on safari!

Also i got to go to the Elephant breeding centre here in Sauraha, where wild male elephants roam around the centre at night and mate with the females when they are in season! the result is many very cute baby elephants to play with.

playing with one of the baby elephants, playing tug of war with trunks.. no contest..

one evening i went with a couple of the other voulnteers to the Tharu village community stick dance, a kind of local dance put on for tourists.. and they make you get up and join in their dance.. which goes on for AGES... here's me, swetting away, throwing some serious shapes, to the thump of drums, and thwack of sticks.....

another visit was to the elephant TB camp, where they are treating Elephants that have TB. it is a 1 year long treatment, with human meds. This is a ball of medication being prepared, which they hate as it tasts really bitter (i had a bit)

and if the elephant keeps spitting out the medication ball, then they get it in liquid form as a rectal bolus.... the guy in the white shirt is all the way up to his shoulder inside the elephants bum.

I'm now in my last few days here in Sauraha. wrapping up all the financial records and making sure i have all the data i need. then I'm heading north east up to Pokaraha, which is meant to be a beautiful town/city in the mountains, beside a lake. I plan to be there for 2-3 days as a bit of a break from the jungle, before heading back to Kathmandu and then home on the 16th!

small crocodile that we found by the river...

a couple of pics of the Orphaned baby rhino that they are looking after in the park HQ.. a cross between a dianasor and an armoured Pig.. you are totally unable to control them, they are so stocky, and just barge through everything!!

baby rhino sniffing my camera. they are super inquisitive.

So, its been a while since i uptated this blog. I have been flat out surveying all around the national park for the last 10 days. sitting on the back of the motorbike for 2-3 hours each way to get to some of these places! My supevisor here told us we had to go back and finish all 40 surveys in Mardi.. that place that looked like the surface of the moon. and in doing so totally trashed the motorbike.. cruising back from mardi on the highway, someone kept beeping us, then we pulled over he said our rear wheel was wobbling all over the place.. we'd knackered the rim of the rear wheel, and all the bearing in both wheel hubs needed replacement plus loads of other mechanical thingy-ma-jigs. anyway 12hours later in the mechanics and a shed load of ruppes later we were back on the road!


a view from the road in one of the villages. this is the middle of the rice harvest, and when they have cut the rice (by hand.. there are not many tractors here!) and threshed out the rice grains (by hand) then they place the rice straw out in front of their houses to dry before making a huge stack and keeping it as fodder for the animals for the rest of the year.


not a great shot, but i got invited to a nepalese wedding. the daughter of the owner of the hotel i'm in was getting married. a whole day of festivities with loads of food, and about 400 people. This is the groom arriving behind a procession of elephants and band!

lunch-time in one of the districs we were surveying.. notice the cow in the back ground, and what you cant see is all the flies on my food, straight from the cow dung.. nice.... this is rajesh my interpreter/driver. the things hanging up are the maze cobs drying.

- this is the most eye-ore looking buffalo i could find...... no thistles here though!

one of the vet technicians at his desk. not a huge amount of medicines here, but they do an amazing job, with v little support.

Another exciting story was that we saw 2 cobras... the first slitherd across our path on the motorbike but we were going v slowly so it was no problem. But the second, we were belting it up this road when one just shot across the road right in front of us.. Rajesh slammed on the breaks and it was a Massive black cobra, we just avoided it, and i was like.. cool a huge cobra.. but rajesh was visibly shaking... apparently if you run over one, they turn and strike the bike, but usually get your leg as thats the closest thing... so we quietly drove off, but i was like "cool" quietly under my breath...

So now i have finished all the surveying and am now back in the office in Sauraha, translating all the surveys from nepalese into english.. quite a tedious task given that my nepalese is non-existant, and putting it all into excel! next few days will be less exciting, but i an very relieved not to have to be sitting on that motorbike for a while.

i'm also trying to blag my way onto the rhino monitoring excurstions that happen a couple of times a week (on elephant back), so i should get some photo's of Rhino, and there are two baby orphaned Rhino that were picked up after the last flooding here and they are at the national park headquarters. So hopefully i can go and see them (one is 6 weeks one is 2 weeks!) and apparently they are super cute and come up and suckle on your hands.

Friday already! this week has been a blast of surveying. we finished one clinic, and started on the next. this one is Jadapur region, see map! i'm staying in the eastern yellow bulge at the top (sauraha), jadapur is to the left of the northern green dotted bit, mardi is in the south yellow bit and Kolwa is way to the west!

So we had to spend a day getting permissions for our work from the main park HQ, and there they have set up a vulture breeding centre and also a crocadile breeding centre.

This is breeding Gyps bengalensis, the asian black and white vulture, which is declining at about 50% each year due to the use of Diclofenac a pain killer used when treating cattle. When the vultres eat the carcass of the cow/buffao that has been recenlty treated with diclofenac then it knackers the vultures kidneys and they die! people are trying to ban its use in animlas but its v cheap and that's causing some problems.
the croc farm growing Gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) an indian river crocodile that specialises in eating fish.

Also while at the centre they asked if i wanted to see leo-pold..? i had no idea who leo-pold was so studidly when they showed me this dark shed, i stuck my head right against the wire to look in... they pulled me away just in time, as this v v angry LEOPARD jumped up at the wire and had a swipe!! blimey, i almost needed a change of underwear.

They have this leopard, that is kept in appalling conditions. it was rescued as a baby from one of the villages and is meant to be going to kathmandu zoo... but its been in a tiny shed for 1 year already.. see pic

we tried to carry out our survey in Mardi, but the roads are as below, it is like the surface of the moon. trying to ride pillion on the back of a motorbike across this was dreadful! i think i got inter-costal bruising and a spasming back! we did half of the surveying we needed to do before giving up. althought i have just spoken to my supervisor here, and apparently we have to go back to finish the job! that'll be monday if the rains hold off.


roads in Mardi..

this is major form of traffic we have to contend with on most of our journeys.. motorbikes are a rariety!

sometimes when the roads actually exist. them this is our other main contender.. how many people are in this one....?? (probably at least 8-10 on the inside alone!!!)

here is us surveying in Mardi, usually quite a crowd comes to see what we are doing to to proide their own input?!

yours truly and the trusty honda something or other that is the bain of my life (or bum). (7hours driving to mardi and back on the back of this thing...)
this is a milk collection centre in Jadapur. where people bring their 1-2 litres of spare milk each day to sell

Since the last blog, I saw a rhino! which comes to munch the grass near to where I am working in my office. it crosses the small river in the evening and comes a munchin'. I got some good photo's of it with my nice camera so you'll have to wait to see those. Also we had our first rains last night. we've been having some pretty amazing electrical storms but no rain until it poured and poured v early this morning, so I think its fair to say the monsoon is here.

Those of you who know of my love of football will be delighted to hear that 'my' bar, overlooking the river has now got a tv and everybody crams into this v v rickety building on bamboo stilts and watches the wold cup in the evening, me included! Everybody in nepal is an Argentina fan wierdly enough though I don't suppose the nepalese team made it to the world cup (harsh.)

As for the work, we finished surveying the first of 4 veterinary clinic catchment areas today, so only 3 to go. woo hooo. The next 3 are a bit further away so I think i'm going into rural nepal to stay for a couple of days as its a 3 hour drive to get to the furthest area. I think we're planning tues and wed nights out, then i'll be back to chitwan. (i think it'll be quite basic as the area does not have power!) the rest should be reachable from chitwan with a daily commute through the nepal countryside!

internet is super slow here today, so i only upload one pic. but this is a little friend that we came across on our journey around the countryside!! (he's tame sadly)

Up market and now surveying

So since my last blog, I have moved upmarket into a tourist Lodge. "The Rhino Lodge". which happens to be run by a man that works here in NTNC building i'm in. Its a marked improvement in that i am now sleeping (thanks mum for the wet towel covering you while you sleep advice.. works a treat) also not having to navigate 200m to the bathroom at night through the snake infested grass (dont tell Sach, there were two snakes lurking last time i went) certainly is a big plus. Oh, and not bumping into the wild elephant in the middle of the night, that likes to munch the grass in the NTNC grounds (apparently v v dangerous).

I'm still only in a room with a fan, but cooler than the oven i was in at the NTNC, hopefully I can move in a few more days into a room with A/C... that will be real luxury.

So i have a jolly 10mins walk through the blistering heat to get to work and back, past a field of marijuana! which apparently grows here like a weed..

closer...

But i have discovered the 'Spot' for watching the sun go down.. a collection of what you might call beach bars that are on the edge of the river, with a beautiful view over into the national park, and the setting sun (see below)

Also today was the official start of my survey, we have it written in english and nepalese and Rajesh (spelling now correct) came and picked me up at 7am. we did 10 questionnaires before it got too hot and had to stop at about 11:30! crazy crazy heat!

this is us doing the questionnaire, and the kind of livestock management practices in place here. This is standard. (anyone with a cow is very rich, anybody with 2 cows is... a liar. its usually a buffalo!

and this is how we get around! me riding pillion on the back of the motorcycle...(no helmet yet for me, but that is coming tomorrow). We manage about 10mph max put put putting along, swerving between domesticated buffalo and tractors and carts being pulled by cows... on really basic dirt tracks)

this is me escaping the heat, writing my report over lunch!!

Chitwan National Park

This is what Kathamandu streets look like! Super busy, with people on motorbikes cruising through the crowds!

This is Patan Dobah square, a centre of Tempals and religious posts and sculptures! Also the old royal palace is here. they were having an environment day celebration when we were there, which is ironic as there is no rubbish collection or proper sewerage disposal in kathmandu.. it all gets dumped in the river!!

this was a good way to deal with a ladder that is too short! get a barrel, and balance the ladder on it.. pretty precarious, and not a lot of Health and Safety here!

this is the coolest transport i saw in Kathmandu and all around nepal, its basically a lawnmower on steroids! the front unhooks and is used as a mechanical plough device! they chug along at about 15mph.. with a single headlight on the front, they look and sound like diesel powered dragons slowly roaring up the street.

So after my last post, we had a whole day in Kathmandu looking at all the sights and sounds. The Hindu and buddist temples are everywhere, and Patan dobah square (2nd pic) was amazing. you are allowed into some of the temples to give your respects to vishnu or whichever god is represented in each temple!
It was an exhausting day, and we were off early on out bus to Chitwan (7am) the next day. It is really very very hot here in Kathmandu, but positivly cool compared to chitwan. which is the most hot/humid/draining places i have ever even contemplated. it never gets cool, even at night, and when the power goes off (v frequently) there are no fans... nastie.

this is the office block in the grounds of the BCC where i am staying (i have been given my own little office, and i'm tying to work out how to keep it cool.

i'm staying in a little wooden long/house block type thing, but this was pretty darn hot, so i think i am going to go up-marked and pay to stay in one of the many tourist lodges in the village we're in!! hopefully even find some Air conditioning!! (tho pretty useless when the power is off!)

I started my Survey yesterday, we did a pilot study and i will try to get some photo's. all lots of shaking heads and discussing the problems with the veterinary clinics. (i have a translator with my called Ragesh) and I ride pilion on his motobike as we cruise around looking for people to interview!

I have found the area where all the local tourist elephants come to bath, so here are a couple of photo's of those. Lydia who is also on my Masters course has just headed off today up to Bardia, another National Park, and so i'm here with my Nepalese collegues, to bust out the rest of my survey. we're hoping to interview 130-150people over the next 20 days or so...

Just looked at the Thermometer and its 38Degrees C in the sunshine and 35Degrees C in my office!! hot hot hot!

Lydia in our room

yours truly, planning the days adventure