“click-click-click” = Beautiful Beach

After setting up the tents and figuring out the sleeping situations (I chose to not sleep in the tents directly under the giant tree where all the monkeys are), us non-tenters brought our stuff up to the “chalets.” I had to lug my giant rolling duffel that somehow wasn’t over Swiss Air’s weight restrictions up about 40 yards of unevenly-spaced stone steps through the rainforest-esque surroundings. Eventually I made it to the chalet and just passed out on the couch, claiming it as my sleeping spot despite the presence of actual beds in the other rooms. They’re actually pretty nice, inside and out: they have this log cabiny exterior up the side of this big hill, and the inside has three rooms, a kitchen, and a little living room with a couple really comfy couches. For dinner we were spoiled by yet another braii, then split for the night as it started to rain. Little did we know, that’d be a continuing theme for the next few days. I realized that first night that the trick to sleeping in a place that has random bugs, cockroaches, and scorpions (though we haven’t seen any yet, only decapitated cockroaches), as well as a ridiculously high humidity level, is to just completely shut them out of your mind and imagine you’re somewhere much cleaner, cooler, and much much less sketchy. I got a solid eight hours of sleep that night, and had a dream related to Arrested Development, which goes down as a win in my book.

The next day was the last day for my one professor, Brian King. It was awesome to get to know a professor that well over the course of only two weeks, something you rarely get (in your first two years at least) at a school as big as Penn State. I used a Batman analogy to describe him (which fit perfectly because he loves Batman and is a huge comic-book nerd): you had Bruce Wayne Brian that we got during class that just got down to business and was super smart and knew his ish, and you had Batman Brian who was this super cool guy that curses, jokes, and plays Frisbee with his students.

Friday we followed up peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast with a session for our “new” class with our “new” professor. I’m not really a huge fan of it so far, since it has a more scientific and ecological lens as opposed to the historical one from Brian’s class, so it was rough going at 9am for the next two hours. After lunch of tomato and cheese sandwiches (I kid you not, I had leftovers from dinner the night before instead), we actually got a couple of the women from the local village to help teach us Xhosa (the local language). To be honest I was kind of disappointed with the lack of clicking (or at least what I thought would be the traditional clicking) in the words. And even when clicks are included, they’re really tough to seamlessly incorporate into the other syllables of the word. It’s funny though to hear the ladies talking and the clicks randomly pop up: “blah blah click blah blah blah click.” After that we had a ton of free time before dinner, so a few others and I walked along the beach to collect shells and hang out.

The beach there is beyond beautiful, and if it weren’t for the monkey gangs and swarms of sharks it’d be damn-near perfect. It’s the epitome of pristine and untouched, as there were about eight trillion shells, about three trillion of which were crazy beautiful. The official rule/law is that since it’s a marine nature reserve you can’t disturb/take any of the shells, but I may or may not have broken that. Between the two times I went, I may or may not have filled my pockets with the coolest looking shells that I assume would be easy to sneak through customs. The scenery in the background and backdrop further down the beach is so pretty, too, because there’s this transition from monkey-infested rainforest to huge Ireland-esque rolling green hills with waves crashing up against huge rock walls off in the distance. 

The next day we got our first little taste of the field work we’d be doing in a couple weeks after we all reconvene. (We’re splitting up the twelve us on Sunday for a week: one group (mine) was staying here at Dwesa and the other was going to Mkambathi (sp?) to work with our new professor, Erica Smithwick, for her research.) We had to drive out like thirty minutes into the forest/jungle combo, and then walk around a 40m x 40m plot of land with like fifteen different tree species in it. Yahoo. I feel bad when I realize how uninterested in trees I am when I’m working with a forest ecology professor, but trees just don’t do anything for me. I got more exciting news when I finally realized what me research project for the next week would be: capturing and identifying reptiles and amphibians. If there’s anything I could care less about then trees, they might be up there. Building traps to maybe identify some random-ass species of frog or snake or something just might be too exhilarating for me. I guess someone’s gotta do it though.

So Sunday finally came, the day of the split, and my group watched the other group off on their five hour trek up to Mkambathi, and then sat in the “conference center” (which has served as our lounge, classroom, and electricity whore) and waited for Jan and Vearna (our reptile and amphibian guides in Dwesa) to show up. About three hours later we were hitting the road with them to build and set up our first two (of six) traps. For fear of unknowingly saying something racist, I’m not sure how to describe the experience of the six of us crammed into the bed of their pickup truck; it was definitely interesting since it wasn’t something I’d ever done before, clearly thinking of my own safety because it was pretty damn easy to fall out of it on those crappy asphalt roads. But yea we were crammed into the back of this truck in addition to all this equipment, so it was a tight and uncomfortable (yet memorable) bunch of rides. So after like fifteen minutes of being sodomized by the grooves in the truck bed, we stopped to chop some trees down for the wooden stakes (we hunt vampires too). It was hilarious because when we went out in the field with Smithwick she was super adamant about not disturbing anything, even the little twigs and branches on the forest floor. We start walking through the forest and basically give Smithwick the finger and go to town on some trees with a couple of machetes. I gotta say, I want a machete when I get home, they’re so much fun. So Jamie, yes, I walked through the jungle with a machete.

We spent the next few hours setting up the first two traps, which weren’t exactly what I expected physically, but technologically it was. They basically consist of buckets, black plastic sheets, and lots and lots and lots and lots of dirt. There’s essentially one central bucket and three arteries per say of this plastic sheet that’s probably like fifty feet long, with little meshy metal traps along the sides. Apparently these reptiles and amphibians run along the sheets and end up in the buckets so we can do a biodiversity survey of the traps. It sounds really inefficient considering how big this place is, but I’m sure it’ll show some results. In order to dig these holes to put the buckets in, we had to dig with shovels and our hands to get all this dirt out so they could fit. Most of the time it was a bitch and a half to shovel and claw through the roots, but it gave me a nice excuse to use the machete to chop things up a bit. After digging the holes, we’d use dirt from those (and dig fresh holes) to weigh down the plastic sheets that these artards run along. This was the really really muddy part, but once you get really dirty it starts getting (dare I say) fun. I’m not a huge fan of half-assing something like getting dirty, so going essentially all in was pretty awesome. At night we got to shower and braii again (Jan loves his braiis), which was extremely relaxing after a relatively laborious day.

The next day we basically went around from 6-1 doing the same exact process four more times, then went like 5-7 driving around and checking the traps. One fun thing that happened on the way there in the morning was that we drove behind a couple of running zebras. It’s odd to see them in a forest setting when we’re so used to seeing them in a savannah or grassland. It was amazing to see how many different landscapes (biomes they’re called, I think) this one little nature reserve has, as we went from forest to jungle to coastal grassland to…regular (?) grasslands, back to the forest to a different type of grasslands to green rolling hills and on and on and on. So now that the two “tough” days of intense manual labor, we’re basically spending the rest of the week going from trap to trap and re-checking them all, and walking around turning over rocks looking for stuff the old-fashioned way. So things should be a tad more relaxing in the coming days. Hopefully I’m right…