My Upcoming Rwanda Adventure & Life as a Primatologist

Tomorrow I’m heading to Rwanda as a guest of the government. I’ll be getting a full tour of the country, which includes visits to see the mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park, the wild chimpanzees of Nyungwe, and other primates including colobus and golden monkeys. I’ll also be there for the UN’s World Environment Day (Rawanda is the host this year) and the annual baby mountain gorilla naming ceremony, attended by Don Cheadle (UN Godwill Embassador and star of the film, Hotel Rawanda).




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Mountain Gorillas are of course the obvious highlight of the visit. Mountain gorillas number about 700 individuals. There is still much debate whether they should form a distinct species or subspecies (I favor species status). They were made famous through the research of Dian Fossey (Gorillas in the Mist) who studied them from her base at Karisoke.

Male Mountain Gorilla (Silverback)

I was obviously invited on this trip because I am a travel writer and journalist, but I also have a very unusual commonality with the subject matter. I am actually a former primatologist. I once worked with 80 chimpanzees as a caregiver at the Primate Foundation of Arizona. I later worked as a researcher at the Language Reseach Center of Georgia State University with a group of very famous bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), including Kanzi and Panbanisha. The two have been featured by National Geographic and nearly every major newspaper on the planet. The center also had a rather sadly neglected Orangutan that I did my best to care for.

Bonobo Chimpanzee

I had an opportunity to work with Koko the gorilla as well (she was made famous by sign-language research with Dr. Penny Patterson, highlighted by National Geographic). However, I withdrew my application after my interview because of financial concerns related to the low pay for the position. It was the right decision I think, but I still felt bad, and would have liked to have had the experience of working with all four of the great apes (not counting the distinct species within orangutans and gorillas). And after all, it was Dian Fossey with her field research among mountain gorillas that really got me interested in primatology as a career anyway.

After nearly ten years of following another career path, I thought that the great apes were out of my life and locked in the closet. It seems I have yet another chapter…

Common Chimpanzee

And how does this tie into my life in Vietnam and Southeast Asia? Well, here in Vietnam—and even in my own Binh Thuan Province—we have many primates: Yellow-cheeked Gibbons, Slow Loris, various macaques, leaf monkeys and Langurs. Hopefully this trip will give me some ideas and inspiration to go out and both locate & document these species in my area and find ways to protect them.

A captive baby macaque chained at a bushmeat restaurant in Lam Dong Province, Vietnam. The Travel Channel very irresponsibly promotes this illegal dining establishment, despire being repeatedly informed about the situation.
Secondly, the subject of Rwanda’s recent history (have to avoid mentioning a certain keyword here so Vietnam doesn’t block my blog again) has a very direct commonality with Cambodia. I think it will be interesting to compare and contrast the development since their respective tragedies.

So stay tuned here and follow me on www.twitter.com/fisheggtree. I’ll be posting regular updates from the short trip. Also, note to editors: I’m available for stories on Rwanda and its wildlife.

Complaints from a Tourist in Mui Ne

I received this complaint today, which I'm sorry to say isn't so unusual about establishments around the country:

"I recently spent 3 days at Romana Resort & Spa and was sadly disappointed. The staff were very friendly which was nice but they were not trained and many things in the resort didn't work. Before we went there we enquired about wifi and we were advised they had wifi in the room but, of course that was a sham as it didn't work. The same lame Vietnamese excuse was given to us - "We have a problem with wifi in the room but we have at reception or in the restaurant. The restaurant didn't work and at reception we had to continually ask to connect. Our aircon continually turned itself off through the night (no it was not on a timer) and it was hot and when we left we asked for a car to take us to the highway to meet the bus from Sinh Cafe (never ride with them again) but the car mysteriously became unavailable at the time we were about to leave, even though it sat idle for hours before. There is a sign at the highway which says the resort is 700 metres away but it is actually 1.4 kilometres. When we came to Mui Ne with Sinh Cafe bus we were told they would deliver us to our resort but instead they dropped us at the highway in the middle of the day and we had to walk there. Later, when we booked out, Sinh Cafe said they would call us and say when the bus left their depot so we would know when to go to the highway but of course they didn't, (more Vietnamese lies) but luckily I had anticipated their incompetence and went there in time.More typical Vietnamese lies (service). In a nutshell, I will never stay at Romana again and I will never travel on Sinh Cafe buses again. I am very tired of Vietnamese liars and as a tourist, I will always tell others about the lack of service here and advise anyone to go elsewhere instead. Vietnam does not deserve tourists dollars. KW"

What's your reaction?

Where Parrots Come From

It's unfortunately common to see wild birds for sale all over Vietnam (and Southeast Asia for that matter). It's for this reason that one can go walking in the countryside or out in the jungle for the afternoon without hearing a single bird peep.

I always assumed that the birds caught for sale as pets (or to eat) were captured deliberately and specifically for that purpose alone. I discovered on a recent expedition however, that this is not always the case. The farmers above netted a flock of parrots that were eating (actually devastating) his corn crop in northern Binh Thuan Province.

It was unpleasant to see these poor beautiful and intelligent creatures stuffed into a tiny box, or even worse, crammed head first into soda cans with the ends tied shut. The farmer would eventually stuff all 15 parrots that he caught into soft drink cans, bend the end shut, and take them into town to sell to a bird dealer, at $1 each.

That bird dealer will then put them in these more attractive cages, mount them on a motorbike, and travel around the district, selling them on street corners, such as in front of the People's Committee Building and the Phan Thiet water tower. All of this is very illegal of course, but unfortunately is a regular affair.

So, next time you are tempted to buy a new pet  bird, please consider this; where these birds come from and how they are treated. Wouldn't you rather see them on your hike through the forest than in a tiny cage?

Also, this points to a different strategy that conservationists need to consider. Rather than always going after the bird sellers, we should also invest resources in how we can assist farmers in growing their crops while keeping these birds away, without resorting to trapping them. We can eliminate the bird sellers but if the birds are still a problem for the farmer, then they may just kill them and/or eat them rather than selling them.

Autopsy Under the Bridge

I saw a crowd gathered under the Phu Hai Bridge in Phan Thiet this morning. I figured they pulled another dead body out of the Phu Hai Harbor. They did.

I drove my motorbike around and parked then walked over to the crowd. Under the bridge were two "medical personnel" in blue gowns, gloves and masks, leaning over a naked corpse. Towels were draped over the face and crotch. They were finishing up an autopsy. Medical waste lay strewn around the pale cadaver.

My friends had always told me that sometimes authorities conduct curb-side autopsies with motorbike accident victims. I never believed it. It seemed to horrid. I thought they just said that to freak me out. How could they possibly learn anything in such a primitive circumstance. And are the officials even qualified to so hastily determine whether the person is actually clinically dead before they start cutting them open?

I'd never seen a dead body in America. Here I see them with regularity. They seem to strip the deceased of any dignity. I wondered what kind of crowd an open-air autopsy on a big fat dead white guy like myself would draw in Phan Thiet. I'll bet there'd be ticket scalpers.

A man looking on told me that the body belonged to a 19 yr-old student. He had drowned a couple of days ago at Doi Duong Beach in Phan Thiet but they couldn't find the body. It washed up here instead, on the other side of town. He was with some younger friends when he died. They nearly drowned as well. His death comes in a long series of children who drowned in the last few weeks at that beach.

Some if not all of the deaths have been attributed to the construction now going on at Doi Duong Beach. All of the old cafes there have been cleared out and the city is in the midst of constructing a sea wall, which will undoubtedly secure the land behind the wall, but ensure the loss of the entire sandy beach in front of it, forming an immense and unsightly, rocky hole. Lets just hope that they don't build a big cement theme park like the monstrosity in Phan Rang.

My condolences to the family of the boy. Whether they even consider it or not, it wasn't fair for him to die like that, and it was reprehensible for his body to be laid out like that for all to see. May he rest in peace.

This Blog is Blocked in Vietnam

I've identified 2 Vietnam service providers that are blocking this blog. One is:

ISP: VietNam Post and Telecom Corporation
Organization: Vietnam Telecom National (VTN)
Connection: Broadband
Assignment: Static
Proxy: None Detected
City: Hanoi
Region: Dac Lac
Country: Vietnam

The other is:

ISP: Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications (VNPT)
Organization: Cong ty Dich vu Vien Thong GPC

If you live in Vietnam and CAN see this blog, please visit whatismyipaddress.com and let me know what your ISP info is so I can narrow down what's going on.

Thanks!

Mexico's Communist Party Leader Visits Binh Thuan

Apparently yesterday Alberto Anaya, chairman of Mexico's communist Labor Party visited Binh Thuan Province to inspect dragon fruit plantations. Dragon fruit are native to Mexico and Central/South America. Funny I didn't even know Mexico had a communist/Maoist political party. Read more on the visit HERE.

Rwanda and Bangkok

In an exciting turn of events, the government or Rwanda has invited me to come tour the country (think Diane Fossey, Mountain Gorillas, wild chimpanzees, monkeys and genocide memorials)! I'll have more on this later. In the meantime, one of the problematic parts of the trip is that all flights west route through Bangkok... So the violence there is of particular interest to me at the moment. Oddly enough I was just there last fall researching an upcoming guidebook for AA (also the publishers of the National Geographic guidebooks).

Below is a regularly updated map of the ongoing violence in downtown Bangkok created by Richard Burrows.


View Bangkok Dangerous - Red Shirts Rally March-May 2010 in a larger map