El maravilloso viaje de Tobi a Vietnam

I uploaded some fotos, unfortunately I just had a few, but they give a pretty good impression of our life here.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=53421&l=708f2&id=698210007

After my first night in the center I can say that it was a weird feeling to be the only human being in vicinity, Ok, it was cool to hear the sound of the jungle (mainly the cicadas) while falling asleep, but I was still a little bit overwhelmed of so much responsibility. So I will be glad when Falk comes back in a week and everything went well.
In the morning we worked another time in the garden of the house in the village, where I lived before and will live again.
It seems impossible for me to work in this goddamn garden without getting stung by some insects. This time it was 3 wasps, who thought that I approached too much to their nest. Okay it would also get pretty pissed off when someone handling a huge knife (compared to my size) came close to my house.

After my first night in the center I can say that it was a weird feeling to be the only human being in vicinity, Ok, it was cool to hear the sound of the jungle (mainly the cicadas) while falling asleep, but I was still a little bit overwhelmed of so much responsibility. So I will be glad when Falk comes back in a week and everything went well.
In the morning we worked another time in the garden of the house in the village, where I lived before and will live again.
It seems impossible for me to work in this goddamn garden without getting stung by some insects. This time it was 3 wasps, who thought that I approached too much to their nest. Okay it would also get pretty pissed off when someone handling a huge knife (compared to my size) came close to my house.

Yesterday everyone left to Phong Nha (the release site of the monkeys) and so Ben and I we are the only foreigners here in the center.
Because of this I have to change my room and move into the center to have a look at it till our German animal keeper comes back next week.
At first glance it might seem a little bit too cautious, but we had an incident two weeks ago, when two gibbons disappeared at Hill 2, our open-air enclosure, and another one was found with three gunshot wounds.

This morning we woke up and heard some terrible music, which made me mention that it was as horrible as Modern Talking.
Surprisingly half a minute later we heard the chorus: “ Cherry, cherry lady…”
So in fact it WAS Modern Talking.

Nearly September, so the day of departure is approaches rapidly. Less than 5 weeks and I will go. During that time I’m gonna go to the Ha-Long Bay and also spend one day at Tam Coc, which is less famous, but a lot closer.

At the moment we have a German Film team here in the center, which is making a movie about the release of a group of primate next week.
So yesterday we had a little “party” (or what they call a party here in Cuc Phuong) with free beer and potato chips (or more likely rice chips). Later Ben and I finished the evening with a vodka-cola copa at our terrace. By the way, the vodka is a local brand, and (of course) made of rice. We added some freshly picked lemons to it, so it was terrific. Living in the tropics can be soo cool ;)
Even though Ben might not agree to it, because he is suffering of something we call double M, the mosquito measles. His legs look even worse than mine 3 weeks ago looked.

When Ben moved in the house, things changed a little bit. Especially the quality of food improved; on Wednesday we had spaghetti with cheese sauce and today we are gonna cook a vegetable pan. Who is now surprised that I want to cook a something WITHOUT meat, hasn’t seen the meat they sell here on the market. It lies all the day in the sun (as no one has a fridge) and is usually covered with flies and other insects. For that reason we decided to cook vegetarian, at least when we cook for ourselves.

On Monday the center will be really deserted, because most guys leave for the release ceremony. So it’ll be just Ben, me and our Vietnamese keepers. Our manager Tilo will stay away for nearly three weeks, so we’ll have Ben’s farewell party already tomorrow, two weeks before his departure.

Hey,
it's me again. After just one day in Cuc Phuong I had to return with our new volonteer to Hanoi, this time for business.
We need some special maps for the distribution maps of the primates, which we only can get at the local forest institute.
So we went there and had a conference with nearly all of their staff, who were truly helpful, but are also expecting some payment.
And of course they had to discuss it further with their bosses, who will have to ask their bosses, etc..
This can be really tiresome, because it means that somebody (normally Ben) has to go back to Hanoi another time to fetch the maps.

Anyway we had a nice time yesterday drinking icecold beer. Especially cool was, when we went to a bar called Comic-Cafe, where all the walls was posted with framed german comic books and there were also some copies of german comic books.
So we sat in the middle of Asia, drank beer and read german comics. NICE ;)

Another nice spot was a local microbrewery where we tried great beer (it was founde by czechs) and ate some good vietnamese food. A bit strange were some of the other dishes on the menu, some of the harmlesser ones were camel and buffalo, the really strange stuff included turtle and mush cat.

So in a few hours we will go back to Cuc Phoung, hopefully this time for a little bit longer, because Hanoi is cool, but really exhausting. Whereas Cuc Phuong is the entire opposite.

Hey guys, how are you? As we often have neither electricity nor internet I started to write my blog offline and upload it when it’s possible. So I wrote at the beginning the date corresponding to the entry. So you might want to check them out in the archive

Today I learned the important lesson never to do a barber who don't understands you. I told her that I want my hair short at the side, but on top a little bit longer, so I now look like a newly shorn recruit - EVERYWHERE.

That's life here in Vietnam. I'm really enjoying all the people here and the different food. I'm gonna eat German sausage (Bratwurst) tonight, because here we have a German-Vietnamese Joint-venture, which produces genuine German food.

Finally I DID it.
I took my day off and made a hike in the park. I borrowed the bicycle of one of colleagues and went to explore the park.
And it was awesome, because during the week there is nearly nobody inside. I had just once bad luck to have two vietnamese boys walking in front of me, when I visited a prehistoric cave here in the park. I seems to me that those people here do not talk with each other, they shout at each other. So I hardly could appreciate the silence and the sound of dripping water which is so typical for caves, luckily the bats were used to it and did not felt disturbed, so I could see dozens of them hanging from the ceiling.
Anyway, later I dropped my bike at the side of the road where a small trail was cut into the jungle and there I was able to enjoy the sound of silence or better the sound of nature, because the jungle is actually never quiet.
Later I sat down on a fallen tree and ate a little bit of the pineapple I brought for that purpose. This was particularly nice, because you can sit there relaxed and just see the life and all those animals passing by.
Then I went till the end of the park where I had lunch and met a nice couple from Canada and South Africa, who currently live in Scotland.
With them I made another hike through the jungle. This one was different but also beautiful and I really enjoyed it to talk someone else than my colleagues here (just to hear some new stories).
At the end I was a bit worried how to get home, as I was pretty exhausted, but fortunately the 20km back were mainly going down (which was also a rather good explanation for my fatigue, because on my way there I had to climb all of it).

So when I arrived back I bought a bottle of bia hoi (drafted beer in cheap looking green plastic bottles without labeling) as a reward.
Bia hoi is my newest discovery here in Vietnam, even though it is despised by most foreigners for it’s watery consistence. I like it, because the taste is quite smooth and it contains less alcohol than a real beer, but drunken cold it is also pretty refreshing. So for me it is a perfect drink for an evening on my terrace and, by the way, also incrediblely cheap, one liter of bia hoi costs 5000 dong, aproximately 25 Cent.

Yesterday we had our first tiny sight of the beginning typhoon season. It’s was an incredible view to see all those amounts of rain coming down.
Unfortunately my door got blocked by a branch and as my windows are latticed it took me more than two hours to remove it from inside.
I poked it with my longest kitchen knife (because I had nothing else) till I finally was able to open the door.

Most of the time here everyone was busy to repair the damages of the storm. Apparently the National Park was stroken particularly hard, all the day I was accompanied by the humming of the generators, because we still do not have electricity.

Saturday we will go to Hanoi, because Jakob is leaving and we occupy the free seats in his taxi.
So I’ll finally be able to upload this (and spend 3 hours writing emails ;) )
I still haven’t been to the National Park, even though the weather wasn’t bad the last few days, because I was a bit sick.
I greatly improved my Vietnamese (in my opinion, from a few words to a few sentences is a great leap ;)), so I can have short conversations (mainly about eating, drinking and the life in Germany).

It still can be pretty boring, but I really started to like my quiet meals on the terrace in front of my house. I always feels like a bit of paradise with all the butterflies and birds around me. Unfortunately are my neighbours not always so quiet and peaceful as the nature around me and so I sometimes have to listen to some really strange vietnamese pop-music.

So hopefully I will be able to supply myself in Hanoi with some stuff I really miss and/or need.
First of all some new lecturing stuff, later on canned tuna, olive oil and some new clothes, especially T-Shirts, because I sweat so much, that I could easily change my clothes twice a day.
When I asked where I could buy tuna there was an outburst of outrange within my mates claiming that I cannot buy fish which is fished in kilometer-long fishing nets where dozens of others fish die in and which nearly extincted the albtross.
So I truely felt a bit guilty when I whispered barely audible “But I like it”.
Fortunately nobody heard it :D

Yesterday an incredible and highly emotional fight could be seen here in Cuc Phuong. It was Team 1 (me and my swissknife) against team 2 aka the mother of all coconuts supported by some mosquitos, who tried to disturb me.
It’s was a tough game, but at the end I won, bleeding from a cut from my saw and from some of the mosquito stings, but it didn’t matter because I finally opened it and was able to enjoy an incredibly tasty coconut.

I even saved about a third of it to give it to my colleagues and when I gave it to them, they were pretty… …dissappointed.

How lame is this ;)
I gave them a part of my coconut I fought furiously for and they just said emotionless: “A coconut, okay”

I’m planning to hike a bit in the National Park, but it has been raining for days and it doesn’t look like it will stop in near future.
So I’ll keep on waiting and hoping, because I still got two months to find a nice day ;)
Oh and raining doesn’t mean the slowly and constantly dropping raindrops we know in Germany, it is like a huge flood which comes down at once, then stops for while and later on continues, stops, continues, etc.

In less than two weeks another Volonteer from Germany will arrive and so I’m gonna have some company, because he’ll live in the same house as I do (which is actually a kind of semi-detached house with a shared kitchen at one side and a corridor comparting the two halfs)
This also might improve my dinners, because normally I’m too lazy to cook a real meal for me and just eat some Asia-noodles. Generally spoken is the cuisine here great, even though I’m rarely able to apreciate it.
For breakfast I normally eat some swiss-roll and a pot of green tea. At lunch I eat outside in a kind of “restaurant”, where they sell great bun bo, another variety of the ubiquious noodle soup.

Yesterday I went to vietnamese wedding. One of our animal keepers married and they had a huge party in his garden.
But it was really strange, because it was unlike every other wedding I’ve seen in my life, it just lasted for two hours, at 19.30h the party was already over (I was told, the guests arrive in waves and we were the last wave). We arrived, sat down and the fiance came and drank xeo with us, the traditonal vietnamese rice wine, which tastes like rocket fuel.
Later every 5 minutes another vietnamese came and also drank a shot of rice wine with us. So we managed to get pretty drunk in a relative short time, till we finally fled to the tea table, where everyone took the obligatory green tea after dinner.
This was actually the only highlight in my week, because the rest of my time I’m pretty bored.
It’s like living on an island and all I can do to distract me is work or read one of my four book I brought with me or borrowed from our bookshelf. I even read Effi Briest, which is one of the most boring books I’ve ever read in my life.

Okay, I admit, I’m a bit annoyed, especially because it’s raining at the moment. So my homesickness is joined by the rain to depress me even worse.

It’s incredible, but I’m already more than three weeks here in Vietnam. So most of the curiousness and astonishment is gone and I do have bit of routine. I even got more or less used to the myriads of mosquitos here, although I found a new target of hate, HORNETS.
I have a nest of them in front of my house and when I was cutting the grass I accidently approached too much and those bastards stung me.
Fortunately I am prepared with some, normally pretty useless, high-tech stuff and so the sting-extractor, we carried around for 8 weeks in the Philippines, without using it once, had his first use. And astoundingly it really worked, the pain was gone just 10 minutes later.

That also means sometimes it’s pretty boring here because our local “nightlife” ends after dinner and a few beers. But from time to time some visitors pop in and bring some new topics to talk about. I also learned to play poker (something Falk and Jakob might regret because I play quite well, meaning I win more often than I loose) Last game I won 80.000 Dong, which might sound impressive, but it’s actually just 4 Euro. Anyway 80.000 Dong are 10 beer :D
Surprisingly the beer here is pretty tasty, I might it even rank our favorite higher than our famed Alhambra in Almeria.

We do have a bit of stress in the moment,as we are expecting the arrival of some new gibbons, those will be the primates 146,147 and 148, because last time I made an error, I mistook the number of cages for the number of primates. So at all we have 145 primates in 42 cages.
So everyone is really busy to prepare the quarantine station, because 3 gibbons need a lot of space.