It’s nice to have an international businesswoman for a sister. The other week, said sister traveled to Mumbai for a week of meetings, providing a perfect excuse for me to visit the megacity (and the sister). A local friend much increased our enjoyment of the city, showing us the sites and protecting us from unscrupulous henna saleswomen on Chowpatty beach. In our few days of tourism we visited the Gateway to India, various shopping districts and hotspots, and stuck our heads into the Taj Palace Hotel, one of the sites of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. What a beautiful hotel! In the bathroom an attendant lady in a grey sari helped me wash my hands (a little weird but why not) and in the courtyard pool a very polite but very firm security guard suggested we should return the way we came.
Mumbai is a massive city, population over 14 million at last census. One thing that struck me as I rode in taxies around the city was the number of street-sleepers – people who at dark just spread a bit of sheet or cardboard wherever they are on the street or doorway and go to sleep. Mumbai has a major lack of affordable housing, and the people drawn to the city from rural areas in search of jobs often have no choice but to sleep wherever they can in proximity to their jobs. The work done by these street-sleepers is mostly menial and temporary, yet still represent greater opportunity than can be found in the villages from where they came.
Upon my arrival in Mussourie, riding up the hill for the first time in a taxi, I was very excited to see a little brown monkey sitting on a wall on the side of the road. Over the next few days, I saw many more, both the brownish rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta), and the slightly larger grey langur monkey (Semnopithecus dussumieri). Handsome beasts they are, but my initial excitement has given way to some annoyance and trepidation. They are not at all afraid of people or vehicles, and can be quite aggressive if they see food, as I discovered as I made the elementary monkey mistake of walking out of my house with a sandwich in my hand one morning. A few days later, I looked up from my morning chai in time to see a macaque dashing out the front door with a loaf of bread from the kitchen in its hand. Although I give them a wide berth these days, they are endlessly entertaining to watch!
. It’s been about three weeks since I arrived in Mussourie, in Uttarakhand State. I’ve been studying Hindi at the Landour Language School, an almost-100 year old institution housed in a church and old monastery complex. This is just about the busiest time of the year for the school; about 50-60 students of all different nationalities are to learn Hindi for a whole variety of reasons, from personal interest, to study abroad programs, to professional development. The classes are fairly intense – one-on-one for four, one hour sessions a day. That combined with 3-4 hours of homework and self-study makes for a decently full workday
Life up here in the cloud bank is persistently misty and rainy. September is the tail-end of the monsoon, but locals claim that this year’s monsoon is lasting weeks longer than usual. This week much of Uttarakhand State has been plagued by flooding and landslides. Many locals I've talked to claim that this is the longest and most intense monsoon in recent memory, and have cited climate change. Anecdotal evidence of climate change in action.
Locals often claim that Kaktovik is the foggiest place on earth. In the little room that serves as an office for the local airline, some witty fellow has scratched "BarterIsland" off the map on the wall and replaced it with "FoggyIsland". I believe it. For 5 days the coast was gray and totally socked in, with visibility less than a couple hundred meters; not good conditions to land a small plane on a gravel spit runway. So I fretted in the bunkhouse, getting ever more irritable as my window for reaching India on time narrowed (check out the foggy bunkhouse in the picture). The fog finally cleared on Friday, and when I reached Fairbanks, US Airways told me that if I wanted to get back to Virginia without spending $1400, then I would have to wait until Monday.
So no orientation for me. However I did get to spend an extra couple of days with my parents in Virginia. I finally got to New Delhi on Wednesday night, a full 8 days after my originally scheduled arrival time. After a few days engaged in paperwork and a mini-orientation, I jumped on a plane up to Dehra Dun, the capital of Uttarrakhand state. From there a taxi took me up, up, up into a cloud, to the town of Mussourie, a British-Raj era hill station, where I will be studying Hindi at the LandourLanguageSchool for the next three months. After 2 days here, I've concluded that Mussourie is perpetually encased in a cloud. Walking through the busy town center, the blare of horns and chatter of honeymooning couples is muffled by the dense fog hanging between the buildings. Occasionally there's an opening in the white bank, and glorious views down the hillsides are visible. Dense trees cover the slopes, and gray languor monkeys and a whole variety of unidentified birds fill the branches. Rhesus macaques sit on walls along the roads, staring balefully at passersby, hoping to spy some food to snatch. I'll upload some photos as soon as I take some! Classes start tomorrow!
I'm currently back in Kaktovik, my season of Alaskan field work wrapped up, and waiting for the fog to lift so I can get back to Fairbanks. The daily flight from Kaktovik to Fairbanks has been canceled for the last two days in a row due to poor visibility. I'm really hoping tomorrow will be clearer; as it is I will have only 1.5 days back in Virginia to repack before flying to India! If I get delayed another day, things are going to get ugly...
My last few weeks at the Jago delta camp were great - we had good weather and got lots done. The short arctic summer is drawing to a close, and the sun set for the first time a few days ago. Now we get prolonged and spectacular sunsets each evening around 11pm (look at my last post for a photo).
We've had some adventures with our boat, I've learned a lot about shorebirds and mudflat invertebrates, and on my last day in the field I finally got my greatest wish and saw a polar bear! We were out in the boat surveying the barrier islands just offshore looking for a good place to catch birds when what we thought was a chunk of white driftwood suddenly turned into a bear. We were in the boat at the time, so it wasn't as scary as it would have been had we been wandering around the island on foot! It was a young male, maybe 4-6 years old, and was curious about us, standing up on his hind legs for a better look. We kept a respectful distance to avoid bothering it, but I was able to get some good pictures with my new camera. What an amazing beastie! Now I'm content and can leave the Arctic happy. It would have been a huge disappointment to go without seeing one.
Later that same day, we celebrated the polar bear, someone's birthday, and my departure by jumping in the Arctic ocean. A little chilly, but totally fun!
I've been in the field for about a week and a half now, and have just returned to town for an evening to get more fuel for the boat and take a much needed shower. Work at the Jago river delta camp has been going well. There are four of us in camp, and we've been spending our days sampling the mudflat for the invertebrates that shorebirds feed on, conducting surveys of shorebirds on the mudflat every three days, and trying to catch a few select species of shorebirds to test them for avian influenza. The weather has been wonderful, for the most part. Or perhaps I should say that it's been cold and windy, but people who've spent a lot of time up here say that this is far better than normal! We had a bonfire on one of the barrier islands a few evenings ago after work, and searched for polar bear tracks, but didn't find any. In fact we haven't seen any polar bears at all so far, which is unusual. Yesterday it was very foggy on the mudflat, and it was a bit frightening spending the day slogging across the mud in the gloom, seaching the white landscape for a white bear-shape that might pop out of it. We did see a grizzly bear a few days ago close to camp, but it ran like the wind when we got close to it.
After two weeks of preperation in Fairbanks, I flew on a commercial flight to Kaktovic, a small community on the northern coast of Alaska on the Arctic Ocean. The town has a population of only about 250 people, mostly of Inupiak Eskimo heritage. Until the 1940's the Inupiak were transient and mobile, moving around the Alaskan coastal plain following seasonal resources. Only with the establishment of the DEW (Distance Early Warning) Line, a network of radar facilities around the coast of Alaska to detect incoming bombers from Russia, did the Inupiak settle near these facilities. We are staying in the Fish and Wildlife bunkhouse, which is one of the nicer buildings in town. All week we've been completing final preparations; today our entire crew went out in boats to set up one of the field camp sites. I've been learning a number of new skills here in Kaktovic, including how to fix and assemble zodiacs, how to repair and mount boat motors, and how to shoot and clean Remmington 12 gauge pump-action shotguns. The shotguns are for bear protection - both polar and grizzely bears are common here, and all field teams are required to carry guns as a last option in a bear encounter. Rather than shot, we will have shells with us in the field - packs more of a powerful punch, which is desirable if you have a bear charging you at 35 miles an hour. We will likely move out into our field site permenantly in the next day or two.
Mumbai is a massive city, population over 14 million at last census. One thing that struck me as I rode in taxies around the city was the number of street-sleepers – people who at dark just spread a bit of sheet or cardboard wherever they are on the street or doorway and go to sleep. Mumbai has a major lack of affordable housing, and the people drawn to the city from rural areas in search of jobs often have no choice but to sleep wherever they can in proximity to their jobs. The work done by these street-sleepers is mostly menial and temporary, yet still represent greater opportunity than can be found in the villages from where they came.
