Monday 3rd November, from Urisa’s base camp.
Urisa’s inhabitants are very welcoming. They allowed us to set up the camp in the middle of the village. Tents are a little bit on top of each other, but each one of us found a spot. A house under construction allowed us to put up a big tarpaulin to cover a spacious working space. The kitchen has been installed in a wooden house and the film crew can use a stone house to store away their equipment.
The base camp in Urisa – Copyright : S. Quérouil / IRD
From the camp’s setting up and the manipulation of samples, which need to be kept dried or alive, to the preparation of the equipment for the teams getting ready to leave for the forest, the camp has been buzzing with activity. The botanists have created a pretty terraced garden of orchids, which they wish to preserve and bring back to Bogor Botanical Gardens. The mammalogists are preparing the skulls of captured animals for the Museum’s collections. The herpetologists, the ornithologists and the speleologists are organising their expedition to lake Sewiki. Sylvie, our data manager, is explaining to Bruno, who has come to stand in for her, how she installed the server and planned the backups. There has been changes in the team composition: several Indonesian colleagues and a French researcher (Arnaud, an entomologist) have just arrived. Others will leave at the end of the week.
Ismail hanging up orchids to keep them alive – Copyright : S. Quérouil / IRD
Askamina preparing a kuskus’s skull – Copyright : S. Quérouil / IRD
For dinner, the cooks prepared us crab with coconut sauce, lemongrass and ginger, what a delight! As we are busy digging into the crabs’ pincers and shells, we are so silent that you could almost hear mosquitoes fly… But that is, if there were any. It is true that we are very lucky! As it has practically not rained for two months, mosquitoes are scarce these days.
(translated by Lisa Zaharias, L2 ST – Earth Sciences – UM2, France)