Whirlwind

I don´t even know where to start, so much has happened in the last two weeks (has it only been two weeks?!)...lets see how this goes

So day one of work work meant meeting up with two new volunteers from Spain in Quito, hauling all our bags and loads of groceries/household goods from Quito out to the project. We try and bring more when we have volunteers to help, cause it´s a lot of stuff! A two hour bus ride brought us to Otavalo, a very cute town with lots of traditional goods (so hard not to buy it all!). Here we grab a quick lunch of the very traditional variety: potato soup with a chunk of some sort of meat, then a plate with rice, a small salad, and another chunk of meat, and fruit juice. It´s easy to get lunch here cause they serve the same thing to everyone, so no making choices :p Then we head to the grocery store for more food, then to the fruit market across town for fruits and veggies, then back to the grocery store for meat and cheese...once we have sufficiently loaded down with tons of food, we meet the volunteers back at the bus station and get on the second bus of the day out to Pucara (2.5 hours). We literally take up ALL the storage space on the bus, its fabulous. That´s basically the routine every 1st and 3rd Monday of the month when we get new volunteers. If the food doesn´t last two weeks, I make another ´run´into Otavalo (minimum 5 hours bus being a quick run).

Once the shopping in done, we get to the Bear House and do an introduction for them about the project and start teaching radio telemetry to get them ready for the field. Then the work starts the next day...we have about 7 plus trails with designated Listening Stations where you try and listen to the collars of the bears. For example, you tune 951 and if it beeps, then Frida is close, 947 is Enrique, ect. It´s fun when you hear them cause you know they´re somewhat close, so cool! It is a LOT of hiking though, especially when there is a mud slide and the buses don´t run. On Friday one of the volunteers and I hiked about 11 miles....just an average day. And it´s something like that 5 days a week. Talk about getting in shape!

So that´s the normal sequence of events that should be more or less what I´ll be up to for the next 5.5 months. These past two weeks though have not been normal and I´ve been busing all over the place learning tons about the project...

After a week at the volunteer house getting to know the trails, I headed off with the Film Volunteer we had for January to San Gabriel where a grad student of Armando (my boss) is working on the bear-cattle conflict. It´s a really interesting conflict and if anyone can dig up the old BBC show Natural World on it, it would be worthwhile to see. Anyways, some bears attack cows in some parts of the country and not in others. Scientists don´t all agree that it´s bears, so we are trying to prove that it is. To do that, we listen to accounts of local people who say they´ve had their cows killed by bears, then they lead us to where it happened and we try and track the marks left. Last week we followed a bear ´drag trail´down a mountain about 1 km through massive amounts of mud and vines. We finally did find the cow carcass though and it was pretty obviously a bear killing and not a puma, so it was worth while. We did a lot of interviews of locals, got to see some bear skins and bear paws of an older man in the town. They believe that if you brush your horse with a bear paw when it´s little, that the horse will grow up extra big and strong. Not good for the bears...but not widely believed either which is good.

After that adventure, I headed back to the Bear House for a few more days to keep learning the Listening Stations so I´ll be able to hopefully lead some hikes next month. It´s been fun to get to know the town and the people. It´s so small that everyone says hello, where are you going? and have a good trip every time you see them. We also have a house dog named Bobby who often accompanies us on hikes which is really nice. It´s incredibly remote, even by Ecuadorian standards. There is no cell phone reception unless you walk about 15 min down the road and stand on the Phone Rock. But you have to be in the right spot for it to work, and even then it´s questionable. We can use the phone at the local shop, but it´s rather moody and prefers to call conventional phones more often than cell phones. I don´t really know how this works as the phone seems fine, it just can´t call mobiles. All part of the experience. We can get to internet in the neighboring down of Apuela, about a 1 hour walk down hill from our place (luckily I haven´t had to walk back up yet cause there´s usually a pickup truck headed up who gives us a ride).

There are two bus routes into Pucara from Otavalo, the short is 2.5 hours and the long is 3.5 hours. Unfortunately the short is prone to weekly landslides when it´s raining and the bus drivers are very cautious and close down the route if there even a chance of too much rain. Then we have to walk the hour to Apuela and take the 3.5 hour bus from there. This is along a really nice road and doesn´t really get shut down. So although it´s a lot longer (and a pain if you have a ton of bags), we always have some method of getting to the city of Otavalo.

Right now I´m in Quito, we have a week before the next batch of volunteers (four from New Zealand) shows up. I´m spending the week getting to know the country a bit better. I saw my first Spectacled Bear at the zoo today. Pretty nice zoo actually, it´s all rescued animals. Tuesday I head up to meet Bubu in Yanahurco. This is the bear that´s been under rehabilitation to be re-released into the wild. He is in a very remote part of the Paramo of Ecuador (the highlands) and so the fact that I get to go up and meet him is a really lucky opportunity for me. I´m really really excited and so happy to be able to get up there.

Thats about as much update as I can handle for now, but more soon hopefully...with pics!!!