Beloved and complicated Bolivia 2: Sieving your life and the elements

After arriving from an eight hour car trip to our base site in the city of Cochabamba, we then went to a remote site in the middle of the Andean mountains. This was our first study site, and took a 4 hour drive, plus a 4 hour hike to get to. We found a gorgeous landscape at an elevation of 4,100 meters, hardly visited by humans, and surrounded by grasslands with patches of gorgeous, highly diverse forest (our reason to be there). We were there to work and camp for five days.
The extreme absence of humans, the silence, the wind, the birds, the sound of the branches of woody plants when bending in the wind, were all evident from the moment I left the car. Breathing seemed so evident, not an autonomous action anymore, the air was pure and crisp. An enormous freedom; freedom from pollution, from noise, from commitments, and from normal life. When I go to remote areas for field trips I find my life cleared out from all those things that seem to be like mosquitoes around my head. I clear the clutter. I like to think that these opportunities are like a sieve, I sieve my life, and I hold onto the things that are useful, and matter to me.

Nature. Enjoying one of the best things of this field trip: nature at its maximum expression. Can you believe these flowers growing at an elevation of 4,000m?

Nature. Enjoying one of the best things of this field trip: nature at its maximum expression. Can you believe these flowers growing at an elevation of 4,000m?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is true that in this situation we also had a lot of challenging work to do. We had heavy gear and equipment to both carry and work with. Here is when you find some of the elements in their full expression:

Air/oxygen. How we overlook it, and oh dear, I missed it while I was there! At an elevation of 4,000m you have almost half of the amount of oxygen available compared to when you are at sea level, and I can tell you, it is little. As I mentioned in a previous post, when you walk, you notice it, even when you first talk. Walking is hard! My male colleagues in the field were counting their heart rate, and they found that even in a resting position (lying down in their tents before sleep) they had a heart rate similar to the one they would have when running at a low elevation. That, ladies and gentleman, is hard. You struggle to breathe and your performance is far lower than what you are used to. Even though it was hard there was still a silver lining as we would have to stop quite often to recover a more gentle heart rhythm, and were “obliged” to have a look at that gorgeous landscape. I didn’t complain.

 

Khomer Kocha site. An example of the amazing landscape I had the chance to appreciate every time we stopped to catch our breath. Notice our helpful driver on the left of the photo, he helped us carry our equipment for several hours and then drive himself to his home (taking him another four hour drive).

Khomer Kocha site. An example of the amazing landscape I had the chance to appreciate every time we stopped to catch our breath. Notice our helpful driver on the left of the photo, he helped us carry our equipment for several hours and then drive himself to his home (taking him another four hour drive).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Water. It was not ideal, but there was a reason for us going into the field during the rainy season, but I won’t get into the details of it here. Imagine those abundant and inescapable tropical rain storms, add summer temperatures, and now mix them with high elevation: a recipe for thunderstorms. By the evening of the second night we noticed how the clouds that were under us were now coming closer and we sheltered in our tents. Not much later we noticed the rain start, heavy rain…. Well, not just that, but also an enormous and angry thunderstorm. You would see the light from the inside of your tent like camera flashes shooting at your tent (the paparazzi in the high Andes?). Three seconds later the sound of thunder would follow making my hair vibrate. Coming from an Andean country myself I had experienced this many times, but never so close. The thunderstorm went on like this for the whole night. Although I was restless I was tired enough after the intense working day to fall asleep.
When I woke up at 4.30am, my tent was a pool, and my sleeping bag had soaked up as much water as available (a lot of water!). Everything was wet, including inside my tent. I went out to check on my colleagues. They seemed to be okay, they were all sleeping. Although it was cloudy the storm had stopped. There was snow outside… it was cold. We just managed to change our camp to a higher, more drained area, and a new thunderstorm started. For safety that day we remained in our tents. That was the longest day of my life. I had to stay for the whole day lying down inside a wet sleeping bag and tent (in which I didn’t fit sitting as it was very low). That was a hard day.

 

Striking. The thunderstorm, very, very close. (See the lighter patch in the bottom right? That is the lake next to which we were camping). Photo courtesy of brave Chris Morris

Striking. The thunderstorm, very, very close. (See the lighter patch in the bottom right? That is the lake next to which we were camping). Photo courtesy of brave Chris Morris

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Were the elements against us? I don’t think so, it is all a cycle and thanks to the abundant water supply we had plenty of water to drink and to recover after our exhausting hiking days. There is no way we would have been able to carry so much water there… we needed that rain.

 

5

Delicious freshly made. Our very well equipped colleague Chris brought a fabulous water pump that would produce litres of filtered water from wild running streams in just minutes!! Here in action.

Delicious freshly made. Our very well equipped colleague Chris brought a fabulous water pump that would produce litres of filtered water from wild running streams in just minutes!! Here in action.

 

 

Sun/heat/fire (?). When it wasn’t raining, it was hot as a sauna during the day. Imagine the radiation at that elevation? From the international scale of 0-11+ for UV index, considering 11 extreme, we were above the value of 14. I guess it is needless to say how we felt. Our high metabolism trying to pump as much oxygen as possible to our body while we were working did not match well with the heat and the radiation. Of course we used sun cream protection, long sleeves, hats, sunglasses, etc. But that didn’t stop us from experiencing the sun. And although it sounds extreme, I was so grateful when, two nights after my tent got flooded, I saw the sunshine coming up at 5am. I literally took everything out and happily experienced the heat drying everything, aaaahh! Such a blessing.

 Adored by ancient civilizations, and me! the God Sun. Drying up everything, including my feet.


Adored by ancient civilizations, and me! the God Sun. Drying up everything, including my feet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the things I learned/reinforced from this fieldtrip were:
• Coming back to basics, sieving your life, all feels good to me
• I can sleep in a wet sleeping bag in the high mountains and I won’t die in the process
• Everything, absolutely everything has their bad AND good aspects
• As my very experienced male colleague Chris said: “women in the field are badass!”
• Fieldwork, it is such hard work, but it is also so worth it; I couldn’t live without it

Do I also have to mention that when the sun appeared in the morning those were the most amazing sunrises I have ever seen?

Sunrise. Glorious moments at 5.30am at our camp site

Sunrise. Glorious moments at 5.30am at our camp site

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Macarena_Lucia_Cardenas__wSee further posts from Macarena on the 7th November 2014 (Fieldwork and Empowerment), 3rd December 2014 (Beloved and Complicated Bolivia 1) and 14th January 2015 (Giving Back in Field Research).

In fieldwork patience is a virtue

One of the valuable lessons from my fieldwork was that progress can be SLOW, and that working in the field can be a test of patience, as much as it is an opportunity to be energetic and resourceful. My PhD fieldwork took place in the south-west Amazon region, in lowland Bolivia. When I tell people this, the first word to come up is usually “exciting”. The excitement of visiting an exotic country, and travelling to its remotest parts for some real Indiana-Jones-style adventuring. While it is true that doing this kind of fieldwork offers unique experiences, I remind people that it’s fieldWORK, not fieldHolidays. What one seldom hears about is the potential for boredom and frustration. Fieldwork often involves a lot of waiting around for things to happen, people to get back to you, for conditions to be right. These are all especially so when you are in a foreign and/or developing country, where bureaucracy, social customs and ideas of urgency and timeliness can be quite different to what you are used to. In these circumstances there are two options: 1) continue to worry and drive yourself crazy or 2) accept that things will take as long as they take (whilst still doing what you can to make sure things don not take any longer than they need to). The following is an example of an occasion when I learned about the advantages of being patient.

 

In summer 2011 we were in a remote town called Bella Vista, near to Bolivia’s north-east border with Brazil. This was all work for a palaeoecological project looking into the historical environmental impact of ancient Amazonian societies, who have left an incredible legacy of monumental earthworks in this region. Our aim was to take sediment cores from a number of target lakes that we had identified as promising, because of their close proximity to archaeological sites of interest. Since being in Bella Vista, we had already successfully cored one small lake close to the town. This was hard work done floating out in the open in conditions so hot it was difficult to do simple mental arithmetic. Still we managed to get a nice deep core and finish in only one day. Now it was on to our next target lake, Laguna Orícore, where I was hoping for a similarly rapid outcome. A juddering speedboat ride up the river took us to our camp, on the edge of a small estancia (cattle ranch), that occupied a wedge of grassland between the river and the lake. That first day after landing, we went to take a look at the lake and its surroundings. It was a big lake, 3.5 km across, but like all of the enigmatic square-shaped lakes in this part of Bolivia, it was shallow, at only about 2 meters deep throughout. Around the edges of the lake there was a thin strip of forest. The girthy buttress roots of the trees intertwined and overhung the water’s edge to make a natural jetty; quite handy for getting into and out of the water. We had arrived reasonably early and much of the day was left. As such, I was eager to get started, but there was a problem. What seemed like only a moderate wind was agitating the water surface and creating some reasonable sized waves. This was a product of the “fetch” or accumulative effect across the surface of such a big lake. These were bad conditions for coring. To get a vertical sediment core it needs to be taken from a stable platform. Trying to take one from a coring rig that was bobbing around on choppy water was not a way to do that. Being impatient, I was keen to press on anyway, but speaking from his position of experience, my supervisor Frank recommended that we wait for things to settle. Waiting around in that grassland did not seem like fun to me. In the town we had left behind the relative comfort of the WWF ranger’s station, which had hammocks, (cold) showers and beds protected by mosquito netting. At the estancia however, we slept in tents, which were no barrier to columns of biting ants on the march, and at night the cows attracted apocalyptic swarms of mosquitoes. They were undeterred by the smoke from our fire and we found that the only thing that would keep them away was spraying ourselves with copious amounts of high potency DEET.

 

It took two days for the weather to calm down enough for coring. In the meantime, we decided that, given how big the lake was and how long it would take to paddle to the middle on our not very hydrodynamic coring rig, it would be useful to move the steel speedboat that we had driven up the river, across to the lake. The boat and its engine were HEAVY, and helping to move it across the c. 500 meters of grassland between river and lake taught me that a 5 ft Bolivian park ranger was worth about 3 of me in terms of carrying strength. Over the two days we also took the chance to wonder around the landscape. I walked through the riverine wood with our botanist colleague Daniel as he surveyed the plant species. A group of us climbed a rocky outcrop, which lined the north-west margin of the lake, to get a better look at the landscape, and to take pictures, like the one above (see picture 1). We noted that the outcrop supported drought-tolerant tree species, which would be significant later on for our interpretation of the lake sediments. We also discovered that the cracks in the rock were filled with colonies of writhing, squeaking bats, hiding from the sun.

Picture 1

Picture 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
After surveying the wider landscape, we went fishing for piranha in the river, using lines with no poles and bits of beef jerky as bait. My first taste of barbecued piranha was a positive experience. One of the most pleasant things was going for a swim during the late afternoon in the bath-warm water of the lake, and washing off the dirt and the DEET.
When the weather finally settled and the lake was still, we constructed our coring rafts, hitched them to the speedboat and cruised easily into position in the centre of the lake. The conditions were ideal for coring. Had we gone straight in on the first day when I wanted to, we would probably have had the added frustration of a failed attempt. We also used the time wisely by scouting out and getting a better feel for the landscape, and by moving the speedboat over to the lake. In the end, that made our work easier and more efficient, and allowed the chance for a great photo opportunity (picture 2 and 3)…

 

Picture 2

Picture 2

 

Picture 3

Picture 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A bit about today’s blogger: John Carson

 

JohnCarson_w[1]John’s research interest lies in investigating both human influences on the environment and natural past environmental change over the Holocene period (past ~10,000 years), especially in the Amazonian Neotropics. There is growing evidence for a long history of pre-European (pre-AD 1492) human occupation in Amazonia, by populous societies whose lifestyles were settled. As such, a more complex story of the development of Amazonian ecosystems over the Holocene, which involved the interaction between climate, vegetation and human land use, is emerging. John’s approach is a palaeoecological one (past – ecology), which uses biological proxies to reconstruct how environments have changed over time.

He also applies palaeoecological data to help answer archaeological questions about pre-European Amazonian societies. Fundamental questions remain regarding these societies in many regions. How large were their populations? How did they manage the landscape? What is the chronology (timescale) of their occupations? What was their subsistence strategy/what crops did they grow?

John received his undergraduate degree in Geology and Archaeology (BSc) from the University of Birmingham in 2008, completed a Masters in Environmental Monitoring, Modelling and Reconstruction (MSc) at the University of Manchester in 2010, and in 2014, gained his PhD in Tropical Palaeoecology at the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh.

Beloved and complicated Bolivia 1: Field Series by Macarena Cardenas

Following Amanda’s post about the hard reality of fieldwork, I wanted to share the beginning of my journey to Bolivia, which is happening right now. I am writing from a bus and using a tablet, so please be aware that this is far from a master piece.

A British scientist, an American GIS expert and I have all come to Bolivia to extract sediments from high elevation (~3000 – 4000m above sea level) lakes in Bolivia. That means bringing a large amount of equipment and of course, logistics and planning.

Oh dear airline. The first step shouldn’t be hard: leaving England to Bolivia. We arrived at Heathrow airport three hours in advance of our flights in order to make sure we had plenty of time to check everything in. We were flying with AA. When they saw us coming with the boxes of equipment they had a kind of “fried egg eyes” expression, and said to us ” a new embargo policy came out yesterday, you cannot fly with these boxes to tropical South America.” That was the beginning. No information was available when booking the flights, not even when Joe, the British colleague in charge, called the company to ask if we could fly with the boxes (“it’s fine, you just pay excess ” they said at that time). The other option, sending the boxes by cargo, meant (based on previous experience) the equipment would arrive by the time we needed to come back.

Disappointed and laughing - Joe and our equipment at the airport

Disappointed and laughing – Joe and our equipment at the airport

I love how we dealt with the situation, we didn’t give up, we stayed firm, remained open to ideas and kept smiling. We got to speak to the manager who was very helpful, and managed to change us onto two other flights.  Although that meant we had to wait for 10 more hours at the airport (and this involved lots of running around with the boxes between flights) we could still fly.

Old-new country. Our arrival in Bolivia was not easy either: Chris, our American colleague didn’t get his bag, and the equipment almost didn’t make it to the country because of customs. After waiting and dealing with this we got all of the luggage later on.

Do not judge on looks. Our next step was to hire a driver and his car to get both us, and our equipment, to a location 10 hours from the city. Considering that hire firms don’t use the Internet to publicise their services, there is nothing you can do before you get there. Fortunately we had Ulises with us, the most helpful local I have meet so far. We got to the terminal to hire a mini bus. Everyone seemed equally untrustworthy, with everyone offering different things. We decided to go with the one that seemed to have the largest office (which looked to me like an old workshop after a war had taken place).  They even gave us a receipt… Our instinct about their reliability had failed us though since they just took the money and then disappeared. After hours of chasing and waiting (with extremely valuable help from Ulises), we managed to get the money back, and also to get a real driver with a mini bus. (He is now driving us as I write, chewing enormous amounts of “green chicken”, aka coca leaves, that he takes from a little green bag at his right hand side, and which makes him look like a hamster).

Our brave and fantastic driver - Coca leaves in his hand and cheek

Our brave and fantastic driver – Coca leaves in his hand and cheek

It’s not the language that makes us different, at least not the only thing. During this trip I have confirmed that it doesn’t matter if you speak the same language (I have felt a little lost already, even though there isn’t even a difference in vocabulary). There are so many codes, and procedures we learn and follow even without realising it. That is beautiful, and we take it for granted. I like being aware of this, and enrich myself by learning about others.

In the main plaza of Santa Cruz - people, culture and heritage

In the main plaza of Santa Cruz – people, culture and heritage

We laugh anyway. My colleagues and I have been quite positive, and are really enjoying the experience. It’s great to know you don’t have to take decisions alone, and as it is said: three brains think better than one.

What I have learned so far:

● Use your smile and insist at the same time if you want to get something done (not very new really)

● Always check for “late changes in legal procedures” before traveling, especially for the not so legal

● Love locals and have one on your side if you can

● And, team work is so much fun, no matter the circumstances

I will hopefully be able to write more soon with news about the pretty hard hiking we will be doing into the mountains to get some samples.

 

The team, from left to right: Chris, Macarena and Joe

The team, from left to right: Chris, Macarena and Joe