I wish you all a happy 2012 (even though I never liked the pair numbers...sigh). I specially hope a good year to my fellows in Morocco ( The PhD student & her boyfriend, the Czech, the Californian, The Ohioan, The Netherlander, The German, The German2 (sorry), and the ones coming soon!). Also to my friends of the UAM and the UB, specially de Valencian, the Catalan, The Chileans and the great Portuguese (my hero) and to Corso.

Scary night, long day

It’s 13:29 (Moroccan time) of the 23 December, and I’m in the Casablanca airport since, at least 10h. The last time I woke up was 5:40 (aprox.) of 22 December…I don’t even know how I can still write in English…or write at all…or breath! It’s been a long journey, as I was advancing on my anterior post, and I still have around 4 more hours before arriving to Spain…I’m a cute zombie in the middle of the corridor of the airport, with bad hand-washed clothes (I should learn to wash them properly!), with such a huge eyecups that I must look like a raccoon; and I feel like drunk.

After leaving the house at 2:00 (a.m), as I was about to do when I posted the last entry, I grabbed all my stuff and went out of the house, that was completely in silence, as well as the outside. Lights were tenuous and only my steeps accompanied me. Silly me, when I was a street far from home, I still expected to see one or both of my fellows appearing to accompany me to take the coach. I turned around and looked toward the direction of the house, but no one was there. I don’t know why I expected something like that, given that nobody went to the station with the Czech when she left or to Fez when the Ohioan travelled to Paris. As I said, I’m f&%$ing silly. Well, as no one was coming I just said “¡¡¿Serán cabrones?!!”, and continued my way; with my face completely covered by a hat, a hood and a neck gaiter; only my eyes were exposed…though my breath fogged up my glasses; so I looked like a little jawa (Star Wars, man!) with too much luggage (I didn’t have too much, but, even though, it was bigger than me, which is not difficult).

(Madrid, 24th December 20:51, Spanish time)

The first minutes everything was fine, though I looked behind me frequently just in case, and tried to avoid going near places where someone could come out. I arrived at the main street and soon after the frights started. Firstly, while I was walking through the sidewalk I saw something that looked like a bar resting against the wall, but when I went closer, the bar stand up and resulted to be a man that waited for me in the middle of the way. Somewhat nervous I just change the direction and started to walk through the road. I arrived near the butchery and then I thought if I should wait seated on a bench or if it would be better idea to be somewhat hidden to don’t be disturbed. A cough from the shadows gave me the answer. The dark places where, in fact, full with people; as the frequent noises revealed. So, I thought that maybe was better to be in a well illuminated place than going to one of those areas and risk me to find someone not very recommendable. I took a seat on a stone bench near a shoe store, with my bags surrounding me and with the face well covered, trying to look scary. It worked for a while; the men, which frequently passed nearby, speeded their steps in front of me.
I was there like 45 minutes; trembling and wondering when something would happen to me. Hordes of dog crawled through the street feeding on leftovers that they found on the garbage, sometimes fighting among them. I really hoped that there was enough rubbish to keep them happy and they didn’t realize of my presence, even when one looked at me while it was trying to sleep.

I realized that, even though I hadn’t seen them, there where two men at my left not too far, so I decided to move to the benches on the “square” so I can see them coming if they did it. Not much after, a man with a backpack passed nearby and said “Bonjour”. “F&%ck, he knows I’m not from here” I thought, and I answered with the deepest voice I could, so he believed that I was a guy. He went to the other side of the road and talked with a man; then they came back to my side of the road, each one on one direction. I thought that they were going to surround me; but fortunately wasn’t the case. One of the men left and the other, the one who talked to me before, sat down on the bench just behind mine (F&%ck).

I couldn’t stop smoking one cigarette after another and looking to my clock over and over again while the time seemed to have stopped. Then, the man behind me came and started to talk to me. At first I didn’t answer, wondering if it was a good idea to leave him clear that I was an outsider and worse, a girl. As he insisted, I finally said that I didn’t understand him in French. He told me to remove the hood so he could see me, but I only raised my head a little bit, so I could see him from my blurred glasses. Then, he asked me for a rolling paper. As I haven’t, he only said “merci” and went to have a seat behind me again. Afterwards, some more men came and sat with the other. They started talking so I had to check all the time to make sure that none of them approached. I took my mobile and hold it into my hand with the number of the PhD student prepared in case I had to call her asking for help (She didn’t come with me but, at least she told me that she would have the mobile on all the night in case I had an emergency).

One of the men came and stand just alongside me. Fortunately, my stuff occupied the entire bench so he could not sit with me. He stayed there staring at me and doing weird noises, thought I didn’t detected any hand movement…anyway it reminded me some awkward moment of my adolescence when I used to go to Plaza España with my friends and those kind of things happened.

Ten minutes latter, finally, the coach stopped in front of the “square”. I took my stuff and asked the driver “¿Casablanca?” And he said “oui”, so I got in and looked for a seat. I put again my stuff around me, grabbed it and tried to sleep.

(Madrid, 25th December 20:26, Spanish time)

However, my head was drowned in caffeine and I was still nervous; so I couldn’t sleep; or at least no more than little naps of 5 minutes. I was pretty tired and I could only thought about an awful thing that I had to do when I arrived to Spain and what I wanted to do next; while I listened a miscellaneous mix of Atmosphere, Ska-p, Non Servium, Gorillaz and different Spanish mc’s among others.

It took us one hour to went out from Azrou; after the stop in which I got in, we stopped at a petrol station at the end of the town, then at the bus station and latter, again, at the petrol station. When we finally went out I was already wondering about the resistance of the human bladder. There were some short stops, but mostly in the middle of nowhere and, given that I couldn’t ask the driver how long the stops were and that the passenger were mostly males (a.k.a campo de nabos), it didn’t look too good idea to get down; so I achieve a (painful) personal record.

Around 7h, the blackness outside the windows started to lead to tree shaped dark bluish shadows. I saw the sunrise on the road at the rhythm of “ …y lucharemos por defender la independencia de la bandera mostoleña…”…Who had said to me when I first listened that song on my adolescence that I would listen it again several years later on my way to Casablanca? Life is weird…it’s the best part of it.
We went through some very green areas full of small lakes clumped with egrets before entering in Rabat and continue another hour to Casablanca.

Once there I ran to the nearest smelly toilet and, afterwards, I smoke a cigarette while trying to clear my mind, which was completely messy after such a long night without rest and people began to look at me weirder than usual.

I look for a taxi and I could arrange a price to the airport that wasn’t too much high from the expected; so I got in, surprisingly alone. I didn’t know how far the airport where from the city, but I started to worry when I saw that it was suppose to be at 4km but we were driving for 10 minutes…But it was fine, It’s only that the Moroccan km are similar to the Renfe minutes (joke for Spaniards).

I got to the airport around 10h; passed the controls and went to have a coffee. I was trembling a little bit and I shouldn’t look well at all since people stayed a couple of meter away from me when possible. I was so tired that when I started to look at the floor I saw for as in the “magic eye”.

After nearly five hours of don’t-know-what-to-do, I could get into the plane, which was so full that many people had to check their luggage in before we could take off.
We did it and sadly, I thought “see you soon”.

One hour and some minutes latter the captain said that we were going to land, “to land? what the hell? Where is the city?” I thought, and suddenly I could glimpse the 4 evil tower standing up in a brown and dense cloud of pollution. “F&%k!!” I thought again, and pretty much, that comment summarizes all that came later… “ No es donde naces ni donde te crías, tu hogar es donde tu quieres estar…y ahora estoy muy, muy lejos de casa”

“…Yo no hice el viaje, el viaje me hizo a mi…”

The title is the name of a song of a Spanish music group, Combo Linga. It means “I didn’t make the trip, the trip made me”

I have already visited around 15-20 countries, and I have travelled all around my own (yeah, I’m a very lucky person, even if I don’t feel it most of the times…silly me) and I can say that this title is, in many aspects, right. When I was young I thought that all my problems came from being in Spain, especially in Madrid. I felt as if I were in a jail, doomed to repeat the same routine over and over again, with that awful feeling every morning that the bed sheets retain you and you don’t have any reason to put a foot out of the bed. Then, I grew up a little and started to travel on my own. That was quite useful to discover what was really caused by the environment and what was an inherent feature of the system (a.k.a. me). During my travels I learnt that half of those feelings were, certainly, caused by my situation…however, the other half always travelled with me. I learnt that my worst enemy was me. Fortunately, the new perspective that being far away from “home” gives enabled me to isolate my problems and, even though I’m f&%$ing slow solving them, at least I know them, that it’s more than most can say. Kilometres have made the enemy inside me weaker, and this last destination (Morocco) has, definitely, given it a deadly kick (I hope!!).

As I said before, coming here was a dream become true for me. Coming to an African country to study animals, even if it’s more northwards than I had rather, was my main fantasy about future when I was a child that turned stones on the garden to see what invertebrates were underneath and studied the capital of African countries in her free time ( I told you, I was a repellent girl!). Of course, I’m not exactly the person I wanted to be: my English is still clumsy, my French is pretty much non-existent, I haven’t learnt more than a couple of words and grammar rules of Swahili, my martial arts knowledge is poor and I’m weaker and fearful than I expected…However, given that most of the people I know are enclosed in lives that are pretty much the opposite of what they wanted I should be happy (and I am!!...at least for the next month, let’s see what happens next…sigh).

I cannot tell that Morocco is a beautiful place (Sorry!!). I know that there are a lot of people that are completely in love with this country, actually, some of my friends. Maybe it’s because I haven’t visited the most tourist places that are, presumably, more beautiful, and I’m only living a “regular” (i.e. non-holydays) life a couple of thousands kilometres away from where I was born. Nonetheless, what I can say is that is a very attractive place. In my opinion, being attractive is better than being beautiful, at least when talking about places and people. When something is beautiful it’s kind of boring, it doesn’t require any effort to see the good side, and I’m a girl used to challenges. And this time the challenge was hard (sorry Azrou, it took me a long time to see your weird beauty)!

As I said in the post “Firsts times: “, Azrou is pretty messy and dirty, so the first couple of days I couldn’t find anything beautiful on it (but of course the forest and the monkeys!). Nevertheless, one day coming back from the field I could see something that opened my eyes; the dusk over the Atlas mountains. Since then, one of my favourite moments in the day is when we are going down from the field and I see the coloured mountains on the horizon. Depending on the hour you can find a paint of bluish and greenish hills, different tones of orange or only shadows; but always amazing. Sometimes, I escape on the weekends in the afternoon just to go to the observation deck (?? Non even English-speakers know to tell me how to call it) that is near the main Mosque to see the sunset…

Through the mountains the light came to me. The light here is different, though I wasn’t able to see it at the beginning. It has corps, it’s dense, not like in Europe, where is transparent; you can see it blurring and staining the horizon, embracing you... I guess words are not enough…and less when this is not my mother tongue! Let’s summarize saying that, when I started to feel the light I finally felt at home. The mess became an interesting non-routine where everyday, even if the schedule is the same, you know that none day will be like the day before…and now it seems sad to come back to the grey and cold environment of Madrid; as I’m expected to do as soon as I’m able to cross half Morocco from here to Casablanca in a coach that is supposed to leave at 3:30 in the night (morning?)…argh…and I have to wait a couple of hours more here in silence, trying to don’t disturb the PhD student and the Californian…though I think I’m too much noisy anyway...poor guys.

So, let’s go to the point, ‘cause I’m hanging on the branches more than my dear macaques (I don’t think that this is an expression in English, but in Spanish someone that goes through the branches is someone that doesn’t go to the point). The topic was how travelling make you grow as a person and how this one in particular is changing me.

Well, first, I proud to say that I have proved my master advisor to be wrong. He told me that I wasn’t going to fit into the field work; but I have been here two months and, even if it’s true that I’m slower in learning this than in the lab, I haven’t had big problems nor fears, unlike others that came before me. Even when I was pretty scared when I arrived, because all the stories that people tell, I overcame it fairly soon (though this night is an exception). If you have read “The Innocent Anthropologist” by Nigel Barley; you know that when he goes to Cameroon to study the Dowayos tribe, everybody tells him awful stories and ask him to be careful with everything…exactly the same that the chief of the tribe tells him when the author has to come back to Europe! Fear to others is a common place, and of course, in many cases you need to be cautious, especially because when you are an outsider, many people try to take advantage of you if not worse; but as a general rule, never is as bad as people say (…I really hope it for tonight!!!..f&%$ck!).

So, one of the two most important things that I’ve learnt from me for now is that I wasn’t mistaken; I like field work, I like to be in Africa and, at least for now, I can cope with it fairly well (Let’s see when I had to face tropical diseases…).

The second most important thing is that I’m not dead inside and I still have a chance (maybe a couple) of being happy, not only with the “professional life”, but personal (the “” are because the definition of professional is being paid for something and…) . I don’t know exactly why, but being here I’ve realized that I have spent to much time doing what I thought that I had to do and excluding so much the things that I really wanted to do that, at the end, I thought that I not longer wanted them. I was in a jail of fear and now I’m about to break the bars and see what is on the other side…I’m scared, sure…but whatever happens cannot be worse than the night that I’m gonna have!! (again, f&ck!). So, thanks to this experience I feel brave enough to fight for me, once again, and recover those aspects of my life that I had abandoned long ago and, the most important of all, being honest to myself; I owe me that, don’t cheat on me again and follow my guts…Let’s see…

Well, th-th-th-that's all folks! I still have to wait another damned hour to get out of the house and wait for an hour or more on the street to, if lucky, take the coach ( if I’m lucky I’ll have a seat and don't be rapped, killed, kicked or whatever other awful thing) and in other 6 hours I’ll be in Casablanca…where I will have to find my way to the airport…Sorry for this mess and because it has little to do with biology… though probably it has lot to do with a field biologist way of life, I guess. Wish me luck, I’m gonna need it…

More photos

George


Leila


Kerry




Anna

Sad stories about macaques

Well, at the last post I said that the next one would be about funny stories of the macaques. However, last days events have made me change my mind. We all hear about why a species is endangered, the menaces it faces, such as illegal traffic, but when you see it and realize how such small things can cause such huge effects…

I have 3 sad stories, and I hope no to experience more in the future (though it’s quite unlikely…).

The first and the second one occurred on the tourist group we work with. It’s a group of macaques that is habituated to tourist and, in fact, a considerable amount of their daily feeding comes from them. In comparison with the other group, with a much more natural living, these are huge; females have extremely large swelling in comparison with the other females and even a 3 years old female has a big one.

This group is probably the one everybody sees when goes to see the famous (and dead) Gouraud’s Cedar tree; since part of their home range lies on the area near the shops for tourist and a zone prepared for barbeques and picnics. Partially because of this, the road that goes through their territory is relatively busy. This is dangerous for animals (and people) everywhere in the world, but here is even worse.

One of the main features of the traffic in Morocco is that it’s completely crazy. There is always people and animals crossing everywhere without any care and the cars, to don’t be less, also goes pretty fast, sometimes in the middle of a road of two directions. Actually, it is a miracle that no more accidents occur. In the part that I talk about in particular, there is a curve where you cannot see what is at the end from the beginning until is too late. Instead of going slow in this stretch, people usually go pretty fast and the most careful ones maybe touch the car horn.

Then, it’s no surprising that accidents take place, and one poor macaque had to suffer one.

It happened one of the days during my (everlasting) training. I was practicing an hourly scan and I was going to cross the road when I saw an orangish ball of fur in the middle of the road; it was a macaque infant. I called the Czech, pretty scared, and with some difficulties I could make her understand what I had seen (my spoken English is kind of Tarzan level most of the times…sigh). She told to the Californian by radio and we remove the corpse from the road and put it under a tree. The Californian went to check what female was without her infant and the Czech and me stayed with the body without knowing what to do. Then, one of the one year old females came close to the corpse and started to groom it. It was really sad for us but, fortunately for them, they don’t seem to realize of what happened to their partner. Of course, this wasn’t the first time that something like that happened and won’t be the last one…So, please, if any of you drive through this area , go slowly and be careful.

The second story has more to do with the fact that it’s a very accesible group. We were collecting data in the afternoon when most of the monkeys started to scream and run towards the picnic area. The Californian followed them running to see what happened and write it down but few seconds latter he told us through the radio that someone was stealing a monkey (well, in fact he had to say it twice cause we didn’t get it at first…damned Babilonia tower). Me and the PhD student went then there running but we didn’t know where to go and the Californian no longer replied on the radio so we stopped to ask (too much in my opinion), till someone guided us. Then we came into the forest again and found all the stuff of the Californian on the ground; coat, pocket pc, radio…I got scared then, thinking that maybe the baby macaque wasn’t the only primate missing. We tried to look for then and I separated from the PhD student. When I was pretty far she told me on the radio to come back to the tourist area and that the Californian was fine. We picked him up relatively far from the tourist area; he managed to run behind the guys long enough to make them drop the macaque. Then, we went back to Azrou and the PhD student warned the forest commission about the incident.
From this we should take two conclusions. One, which will be reinforced by the last story, is that no one should ever have a primate as pet (actually, any exotic animal). That was the reason because, presumably, the macaque was close to be kidnapped, they are appreciated as pets. The second one is that never, ever, in your damned f%&$ing life cut the communications with the only people that can help you, it’s a matter of survival.

Finally, the third story has nothing to do with our groups of macaques, at least as far as we know. We were coming back from the field when, pretty near Azrou, we saw a male Barbary macaque close to the road. We stopped and went to see him. We could approach him and he didn’t even try to escape, he only teeth chattered to us. We tried to feed him without any success and we were for a long time trying to keep him out of the road. He looked like if he wanted to kill himself. He was pretty weird and seemed to have a problem on his legs. Furthermore, he had the mark of having had a rope or something similar around his neck. We assumed that he was probably an abandoned pet. We couldn’t make anything for him. We saw him the next day and it looked that he wasn’t eating anything, since he was in an area full of acorns and there wasn’t any leftover that indicated that he was feeding on them. We didn’t see him again, probably he died, unable to live in the wild after a life of captivity...

Some pictures of the macaques

Joan grooming Mack


Athena





Pepito





Ben grooming Danni

First times: Macaques and Morocco

Tomorrow it’s my first day as research assistant for the barbary macaque project and I’m a little bit… scared?…frightened??…terrified??? Well, yeah, a little bit. After 6 weeks training, one would expect to be a master with the pocket pc, the codes and identifying the monkeys. However, being honest, it’s not enough; specially when there are two different groups of macaques, the PhD student who is supposed to teach you is so busy that she would need one of those hour-glass necklaces as the one Hermione had one the Prisioner of Azkaban (What did you expect? My generation grew up with those characters!), and the half of the days the rain sent the monkeys up on the trees, where they are much harder to identify even if you don’t consider the fact that you have drops falling into your eyes… But well; I’ll do it fine, I guess… I was one of those repellent girls that went out of the exam quite worried because they were going to fail and then they got a good mark; so I expect that this hasn’t changed.

So yeah, 6 weeks… 7 weeks ago I would have said that 6 weeks it’s a long time, but here the days pass so quickly that I still feel as if I have just arrived, even when most of the people are already preparing to leave…sigh.

I arrived in October, after expending less than a week in my hometown. The preceding month I’d had time for finishing my master, participating on my first field campaign and going to a dissection workshop in Texel, where I gave my first “formal” presentation in English (formal because it was about my own research, but It was a F&%$ing disaster!). So, I didn’t have much time for preparing stuff nor studying the protocols the PhD student whom I was going to assist had sent to me.

After taking a plane to Alicante and waiting for a long time in a mixed queue of flip-flops tourist, adventurers and Morroccan people coming back home; I found myself nearly praying (difficult task when you have no god!) for that toy-like plane to don’t fall in the middle of the flight (Have you guess the company? Yeah, it’s cheap but, f&%k!). Meanwhile, I also had another look to the notes I expected to know perfectly by the time I arrive to Morrocco but…

We landed safe and sound (!!!!) at Fez airport and, after another queue for passport issues and another one to change money, I went out with my luggage to meet the PhD student who, surprisingly, was as short as me and seemed to have the same sort of problems when speaking English as well as a very strong French accent which I could cope with since my best friend during the Erasmus was French.
The first thing she did was to drive me to the supermarket (Marjane); which reminded me to the Carrefour or any other European one!! So my first surprise was to see that the differences weren’t as huge as I had been told!!

After buying some basic stuff, we took the car and after one hour and a half we arrived to Azrou…which wasn’t exactly the “nice little town of green roofs” that my guide book said, but a messy middle-size city full of contrasts and with the typical nightmare traffic. The image I had the first time I put a foot on the city was like to be in a surrealistic performance; everything seemed to me like a puzzle made up with pieces of different boxes; a kind of platypus. Some streets were perfectly paved whereas others not only lacked from sidewalk but were of sand. The cars shared the road with the donkeys and the people that crossed everywhere as if they weren’t risking their life each time they wanted to go to the other side of the street, and the women with djellaba and veil walked together with the ones with tight jeans, heels and purses. The same happened with the shops; you could find one perfectly tidy up and well stocked near another one without painting walls and with only few gadgets on the shelves.
After a few days I became used to that miscelaneous world and that weird impression that you only have the first moments vanished with the time.

But, continuing with the action, the PhD student drove me to the flat which she and her two assistants shared. It’s a first floor, separated from the street (one of those without pavement and a horde of cats) by a metallic door which leads to a big room with a plastic white table and a pair of matching chairs, one of them broken, and a big amount of scientific stuff haphazardly piled in a corner. This big room leads to all the others: the restroom, which has one of those typical african waters without bowl that is also the shower; the kitchen, too small for four people and which stinks to cat faeces thanks to our fifth flatmate; the bedroom of the PhD student, the only one, apart from the restroom, with door; and the research assistants bedroom; separated from the big room by a courtain.

I don’t really remember much more of that day. I don’t know how I met the other assistant girl (I’ll call them by nationalities/cities for privacy issues…and because an international team is a kind of cool…), the Czech. I remember that I saw the assistant boy, the Californian, when I was outside smoking a cigarette and he came from running for a while. Afterwards, the two assistants invited me to go upstairs to “hang out”; expression that I didn’t know so far. There I met the other American, the Ohioan and the German (though I think I met her before in the bakery, where we went before going home). They were asking me a couple of things, if I’m not wrong, chit chat to get to know each other. However, I had to go downstairs to make me some diner; the schedule was completely different from mine and they had already had diner at 18h.

After having one of those typical Mr.Bean moments that one has when is in a new place (or when there is a lot of people looking; Mr.Bean is inherent to Murphy); the two assistants came back and we went to bed at 22 since, next morning, we would have to get up at 5.

I don’t remember what happened before arriving to the field ( I’m not a morning person, my hypocampus starts to work at 10 a.m …and stops at 22h), but I remember, more like a dream than like a real fact, the first time I saw the macaques. We were in a part of their territory that the team calls Texas. The monkeys started to climb down the trees and with them, a crowd of infants and juveniles, jumping, screaming and running everywhere I looked at. I couldn’t believed that I was actually there and I felt like an hybrid between Heidi in a poppy field and a Teletubby with and overdose of sugar ( happiness is usually ridiculous; fortunately is scarce). I took many pictures and I tried to memorize the faces of the macaques while we followed them through Parallel, Big Valley and so on. Probably that was the day that I have seen them travelling more, but I wasn’t tired and enjoyed the tourist tour, thought it was little bit exhausting trying to find out who was who… If I had known then that it would take me four weeks to do it right from a far distance (not including tall trees and nightfall) and I’m still expecting to be able to do it with the juveniles…

Well, I know it’s an abrupt ending for the entrance, but I should study a little bit before tomorrow; the girls worked today and said that the monkeys were most of the time up on the trees, so it seems I will have an awkward first day as assistant. I will try to write some more entrances soon, with brief funny stories about the macaques.