The purpose of this trip north is to scope out potential new study sites – not for me, but for a couple of post-docs in our lab. Marion is studying heath forests – forests which occur on white sand soils – and plans to compare Bornean heath with similar ecosystems in Brazil. David is working on detecting forest degradation from satellite imagery. Pita, Neli, and I are simply field assistants! Which I’m overjoyed about - rather exciting to be in a new part of Borneo without the responsibility of organizing or collecting data. Today we drove from Putussibau to the base camp for the next week of field work – Lanjak. We will be spending most of our time working inside Danau Sentarum National Park, which contains a huge, seasonally flooded lake.
Unsurprisingly, the road to Lanjak was terrible. Despite hiring a four wheel drive truck for $150 (yes, everything is expensive here), most passengers were carsick for the drive, and our driver had to get out of the truck periodically to plan a route through muddy sinkholes in the road. We pulled one unfortunate truck out of the mud, only to see it get stuck minutes later in the same pothole. Happily, after 5 hours we arrived in Lanjak to find that the place we were planning to spend the night – the national park office – was flooded with ~3 meters of water, thus requiring a boat to get there! Instead of the water bed option, we chose to stay in a little losmen on higher ground thus unflooded.
As our time up north is limited, we planned the next day’s trip with the park officers over a dinner of rice and small dried fish. I’ve apparently acquired a taste for these crunch little tidbits which I couldn’t stand the first time I tasted them three years ago. By eating small fish bones perhaps I make up for the calcium lacking in this dairy-free Indonesian diet?
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