adventures in china

Jocelyn has described tadpoles as marshmallows with tails. You know, they taste really good, and are not particularly good at swimming, big blobs with a little fin at the back, everything likes to eat them. Pretty much marshmallows with tails.

What a special place. It took nearly 3 hours to finally find the overgrown entrance to this nature reserve. After pulling my way through vines and pushing through underbrush on what might or might not be a trail, I discovered a massive set of stairs up a mountain, like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. At the top were a series of trails up to limestone outcroppings. After two hours of hiking, I discovered an abandoned research facility, complete with decaying bungalows for staying overnight, laboratories that were in shambles, and houses with broken windows and torn posters still on the wall. It was very eerie.

Three weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a car crash in my bedroom. Metal on metal, glass shattering, people screaming, all from the corner of my room. I sat up, adrenalin pumping through my dream-filled mind. Am I being robbed again?! Why didn’t my alarm go off?! Are we under attack?! Where is Matt’s laptop? Is it morning?! I leaped out of bed, turned on the light, and realized the air conditioner was in the process of breaking. That was the last time my room was below 85 degrees, until yesterday.

The morning following the air conditioner nightmare, I went to the dorm manager’s office and tried to communicate that my air conditioner was broken. I carefully enacted out the events of the former evening – point to the wall, make a hissing sound like air, say “no” and shake your head, then squeal like a pig to demonstrate that the air conditioner broke after make a loud sound. She sat at her desk, staring into my eyes from behind her glasses with confused fear, masked by a composed calmness – the kind of superficially calm but terrified look a cop gives a man who is on PCP and wandering the streets with a baby in one hand and a crowbar in the other.

After performing the skit several times, progressively increasing the amount of terror in her eyes, I realized I was not breaking the language barrier. Without the ability to speak Chinese I was destined to sweaty nights after field work for the rest of the summer. I turned to leave her office, and as I stepped to the door she said in English “Please, write. I will understand.” I wrote on a piece of a paper that my air conditioner broke in the night. The frightened look on her face subsided and she nodded her head calmly. “Wait tree day, I call technician”

Several days passed. The weekend came and went. I hovered naked in front of my fan to cool down, taking showers and then letting the water fade off my body to enjoy a brief moment of evaporative cooling. Every few days I’d go to the dorm manager’s office, and without having to say a word or act out another skit she would see me coming and tell me “tomorrow.”

It’s sad to think I’ve become dependent on air conditioning. In Wisconsin, I only use it on hot days to keep my frogs cool. I take pride in the extreme temperatures I allow my body to survive in. But it’s different here. It’s not so much that the air conditioner cools the room, but that it dries it out. After spending a morning wading through muggy garden pools and an afternoon in the heat washing buckets on a roof, coming home to a room with an ambient humidity level that’s less than 70% makes the day.

Fast forward to yesterday. Dripping with sweat, my arm is sticking to my desk as I type an email. I look at the floor for a moment to think and sweat drips off my forehead. When you sweat only because you are typing, it’s fucking hot. I get up and turn the air conditioner on. Another hopeless test, one of dozens I have performed on the air conditioner over the course of the last 20 days. This time it’s different though. I hear crackling, air is coming out, and it feels….cool. That night, I wake up to the sound of someone throwing pebbles at my window and realize my air conditioner is spewing pieces of ice all over my room, perhaps coughing up whatever was wrong with it in the first place. Maybe it’s not working correctly.

Today, I returned home from work, sat down in my cool bedroom, and started playing Final Fantasy IV on the DS. Life is good. My tadpoles have been weighed, I have a beer in hand, and my room is a comfortable temperature. Just as I’m starting to battle an Antlion, without even a knock a party of Chinese men comes storming into the room. Three of the men are filthy, these guys do real work, you can tell. One has a tool box, the other two are holding some sort of hose and a gas tank. The last guy is holding the dorm manager’s copy of the keys to our dorm room. They rush through to examine the air conditioner. As quickly as they burst into my bedroom they leave upon determining my room is cool. I follow them out and they enter Brenna’s room. Brenna does not have the air conditioner on, it’s hot in there, and so they climb up and start working on her AC unit. She gives me this panicked, helpless look, a look you would give someone if four Chinese men with unusual tools burst into your house unexpectedly. I run in to save her with my Chinese/English dictionary.

I lead them back to my room with broken Chinese as one stays behind to reattach hoses and tubes and cables back onto Brenna’s air conditioner. A hand is placed in front of the output of my unit. He says things to me in Chinese. I nod. I look up the word for ice in the dictionary and show it to him. He nods. He then turns to his associates and they talk quickly for about a minute, then he brings the remote control for the air conditioner over and shows me how to change the thermostat on the unit. He gives it to me and insists I try. I nod and smile and show him that I know how to push buttons. Then all three men start laughing, pack up, and leave, concluding that the American just didn’t know how to use a remote control. I’m guessing I’m now known in town as the dumbest of the foreigners here, the one who left his stuff by a window and got robbed, doesn’t know how to push buttons, has hair on his face, and is always covered in mud when he goes to lunch. But at least my room is cool.

Found this little frog on the road. He was tough, only had three legs, not even adult yet, and trying to stuff a worm four times his size down his throat. It reminded me of Spike.

I made my first sandwich in months, though it probably won’t that look good to those who have access to sandwiches on a regular basis. It took trips to a city an hour away to get supplies for this lunch, and many experiments with different types of oil and a hot plate. And although it was burnt and oily and didn’t taste much like home, it was still delicious, well not delicious, but it wasn’t spicy noodles or rice!

AWESOME.

No, I didn’t find this guy walking around in some forest. Not even on a path in the gardens. It was on a Chinese student’s shirt in the library! I pointed it out, but he was aware of this. The beetle is his pet. He brings it home every night and feeds it fruit in a cage, but during the day he puts it on his shirt and it just hangs out, crawling on him, never flying away, never biting, just enjoying itself.

Maybe I’m not that weird after all. I keep my pet bugs in plastic boxes.

My experiment is coming to an end. I’ve grown different amounts of tadpoles with other kinds of tadpoles, now it’s time to euthanize them so they can be weighed, measured, and staged (find out how close to becoming a frog they are). Some have grown more than others, and it will be interesting to see in what treatments this happened.

But this shit is tedious! The scientist in me has calculated the amount of time it will take to finish collecting all the data for every tadpole and the results are not encouraging. Over 100 hours of pulling tiny dead animals out of jars of ethanol, placing them on a piece of paper, measuring them, looking at them under a magnifying glass to count their toes, lifting them carefully onto a scale, waiting for the scale to agree on a weight, and then putting them back. This must be done for each tadpole in my experiment, so somewhere between 3000 and 3600 times! I think Jocelyn’s assistant (me) needs an assistant. This kind of science is not as glamorous as hiking through remote forests, jotting down notes and taking photos of rare frogs. I’m going back to just natural history observation type stuff after this.

But, once I ignore my future here for the next month and concentrate on what I’m doing in the lab during one moment it doesn’t seem so bad. I have an MP3 player again, and the lab is air conditioned (my room at the dorms is no longer, I broke the air conditioner somehow), so basically I get to hang out in an air conditioned room for 3-5 hours every day listening to music. If I bring in some coffee, it will go fast. Maybe.

So when I was maybe 9 years old or so I bought a “chubby frog” from Aquarius pet store in Monona. This thing was cool. He sat in a little mud hole all day long, popping out to snag any small insect I threw into his 10 gallon aquarium. One night I woke up to a scream. My chubby frog had escaped, climbed out of his covered cage, under my room door, down the stairs, over carpeted floors, and ended up in my parents bedroom (mom, do you remember this?) He died some years later, but I was always impressed that this seemingly inactive brown blob made it through our entire house in one night.

Now I see them everyday. They’re everywhere, and they don’t just sit in little mud holes. I’ve found them in trees, swimming in water, on plant leaves a meter off the ground, and also in the mud. Here is one I found on a path in the rainforest the other week -

and a few other Microhylids, pretty much miniature versions of the above.

These photos were taken by the Georgia herp guy who came here this week, Zach Felix.

From left to right – Bill, Gwen, Jocelyn, Brenna, me

I think this is a photo of breakfast, where you dress up your noodle soup with that stuff in those bowls.

These are apartments down a side street in town, sort of like the one I had for the first few days I was here.

There are a lot of dogs walking around the streets

This is where you buy dresses

This is where fishermen buy gillnets and other fishing supplies

These things are like trucks with tractor engines. I don’t know what they really are, they use them a lot in Madagascar too.

A very typical street scene. People like to hang out around stores and play cards, smoke, chat.

Street

At this fried rice place near the entrance to the gardens you can get all sorts of good food and fresh juices!

You can also order these “potato cakes”, basically slices of potatoes, fried, and then covered in condensed milk. Sort of like pancakes in a way.

Last night, some friends of a friend of Jocelyn’s showed up. They’re herp guys from a university in Georgia. Real herp guys, like the kind who spend years radio tracking thousands of copperheads and swimming with Japanese giant salamanders.

We took them to Dai barbeque. It’s mouth-numbingly spicy food that you won’t find in any other part of China, the kind of restaurant I like to eat at a couple times a week. Skewered meats, tofu, and fish are mostly what ends up on the table, but my favorite is a fiery cucumber and tomato vinegar-based salad that tastes like it belongs in Central America. Everything is loaded with MSG, and the spices and sauces painted onto the foods you pick out taste like nothing I’ve encountered before.

After dinner we went frogging, normal Monday-night work frogging, just around the gardens. The jetlagged professor and friends did well. We will go out again Wednesday night, this time to the rainforest. I’ve promised them flying frogs! I hope I don’t disappoint.

Snakes! We saw this banded krait last week during a survey, well Brenna and I did. This is the most dangerous snake in the region, one which has potent venom and is common in the area. Fortunately, they are not particularly aggressive.

This one is a baby keelback. They’re common snakes around the gardens because they enjoy eating frogs. While they have “medically-significant” venom, they are rear-fanged so it’s difficult to get into trouble with these ones. This baby I photographed yesterday was barely 6 inches long!