Blog for 2009-07-05

From BiodivBorneo09

Morning, Abi and I woke up feeling so good after proper sleep. Though our room was full of termites (kept falling into our face while we were talking), we somehow have adapted to it. I myself started to miss this small room, full of bugs, with lovely curtains, and birds singing outside every morning...Tomorrow we are leaving Deramakot.

After breakfast, we squeezed into 4 pick-ups to go to the sustainably-logged forest. Here, we were demonstrated how trees are felled in RIL – reduced impact logging. Two big trees were set aside especially for our group. I was stunned to see trees probably older than me being cut down within 5 minutes each: shivered and then fell down hopelessly. Along their way, some smaller trees were also dragged down. The stumps were then carved with numbers for further reference. Hmm, the sustainable way is still painful to me!

I felt into sorrow on the way back, could not get the sound and images out of my head. What if the trees can feel these pains like humans? What about the “homeless” animals residing on the trees killed? Luckily, the best-lunch-ever quickly cheered us up. Especially the chicken soup was awesome, tasting exactly like Vietnamese soup!!! In the afternoon, Charles – our paleontologist stirred up some new thoughts with his lecture on fossils. I was shaken the second time in the day to learn that current atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is actually low over 600my scale!

Today was such an eventful one. We ended the day with night-safari! Our group was lucky enough to see a “kuching-utan” (wild cat), a large bird and I also saw one primate moving between branches.