Wild Travel: Giant Millipede in Brazil

Here is a video I took whilst on fieldwork in Northeast Brazil - a Millipede of unknown species (suggestions welcome!) crawling across the floor in Bahia.

Campo Formoso Weeks Four and Five: When the rains came

The weekend after my post ordeal I had planned to spend a little time relaxing, and the rest of the time preparing my equipment to being work when my student, Natalia, returned on Monday. However, the rain that began on Friday continued all weekend, which confined me to the house almost entirely, and I started to discover a rather worrying number of places where the roof leaked. On top of this, when I finally got around to doing some work and trying to assemble all my equipment which had finally arrived, I realised that one vital piece was missing - my supervisor had accidentally forgotten to include the power cable for the laptop, which would be necessary to download my data. The laptop is so old that it won't even turn on without the power cable. This discovery pushed me to a point of total disbelief. How can so many things go wrong in such short succession? I quickly began devising a new work plan, knowing it would be at least a week, probably two, before the cable could be posted here - assuming it ever arrived!

Natalia arrived that Monday and it carried on raining continuously for another 4 days. Sometimes it got a little lighter, or even stopped for a minute or two, and I started to feel optimistic that maybe it would stop for a while, but then it came back, harder than ever. The rains began to cause real problems. Although it made digging colonies slightly easier because the soil was softer, it removed all internet access for me because my laptop would get wet, and it turned the roads near the farm into a mud bath. Natalia and I were quickly running out of food, a situation exacerbated by the temporary loss of electricity for 24 hours, during which the fridge had no power. But with 30 minutes of treacherous dirt roads between us and the nearest shops, we started to worry. There are two 'taxis' a day which run from the farm into the town of Campo Formoso, one at 6am and one returning at about midday, acting almost like a bus, collecting many people along the way. However, we weren't sure if the taxi would be able pass along the muddy dirt roads, and if we made it into town successfully, there was a good possibility we would be stranded if the midday taxi couldn't get back. We decided to postpone until the following day.

Campo Formoso Week Three: Brazilian Bureaucracy

The two weeks since my return from Salvador turned out to be the busiest and craziest so far. When I arrived in Campo Formoso we had half an hour before the shops closed, and Aline offered to take me to the phone shop to try and get a mobile internet modem to take to the farm. After a short chat with the shop assistant, it transpired that, contrary to her previous advice, it might not be possible to get one without a CPF number, the Brazilian ID card system. She recommended that I go to a nearby town, Senhora de Bomfim, the following day and speak to someone there. So the next morning I dragged myself out of bed bright and early to catch the 7:30am bus. When I arrived I met Natalia, one of the students who has been helping me, and we proceeded to spend over 2 hours in the phone shop, mostly waiting, to get a modem. Natalia was kind enough to use her ID to get the modem, and eventually we were successful. I was extremely relieved to know that I would not be completely isolated in the farm house for the next two months.

The rest of that day was earmarked for final preparations and then moving to the farm. So we spent several hours, intermittently getting soaked in the rain, and sweating in the sun, wandering around Campo Formoso buying food, motorcycle batteries, plastic boxes and all sorts of other things. Finally, we returned to the house to pack up the remains of my stuff before taking a taxi to the farm.

Just to make matters more complicated, the equipment I was waiting to arrive from the UK, which had been scheduled to arrive on Monday, was still not here, days later. So whilst trying to pack, we were also trying to track down the missing package. Eventually it became clear that the package was stuck in Salvador - for some reason Campo Formoso was not able to receive international packages. I thought that the best option was to arrange to have it sent to Aracaju were one of my friends could post it to Campo Formoso. Satisfied that this had all been organised, Natalia and I called a pick-up truck taxi, loaded up all our stuff and headed to the farm. When we arrived, she went to open the door and as she tried to turn the key in the lock, it snapped in her hands. What more could go wrong, I wondered! Luckily we were able to remove the broken key from the lock with a pair of pliers and miraculously Natalia had a second key so we were able to get into the house fairly quickly. Natalia immediately got to the job of setting up her television set to see if she could get signal, and likewise I immediately set up my computer to see if the internet worked. Almost predictably at this point, neither worked. The farm house is a complete blackhole of telephone signal, internet signal and television signal. A little later we discovered we could find phone / internet signal by walking 5 minuted up the hill and sitting in the middle of a field. Not exactly ideal but better than nothing!

The next day I was excited to finally get started on my work, and we headed out early to look for colonies. We found one new colony and collected some additional data on the 8 we already had before we reached a part of the track through the woods which was impassable. So we walked back up to the farm house to borrow a machete before heading back again. Having got past the short section of thick vegetation, we began finding more colonies with ease. It was so easy to find them, in fact, that we found more than the 9 I had hoped to find that day within just a few hours, and reaching a second, but much thicker patch of impassable track, we gave up and headed back, satisfied that we had plenty of colonies to work with anyway. That afternoon I headed up to my internet field to check my emails etc, and discovered a number of urgent emails from my supervisors saying that the Brazilian postal system was not reliable enough to risk doing having my equipment sent this was and that I needed to contact the post service immediately, cancel the request to send the package to Aracaju, and make plans to head to Salvador to collect it.

I would not be able to go to Salvador until the following Monday, so on Friday (my birthday) Natalia and I went out to find more colonies in the immediate vicinity of the house, a task which was easily finished by lunchtime. At this point, Natalia left, as she had plans elsewhere for the weekend, and I spent the rest of my birthday sun bathing, reading and talking to friends in my internet field. It actually a rather nice turn of fortune that I ended up with no work to do for half of my birthday, as I had a lovely relaxing day. The weekend alone in the farm house was not great, however. Although I initially relished the solitude, I got bored and lonely quite quickly, and at night being alone there felt a little bit too much like the beginning of a slasher movie for my liking. But, I survived, trying to find work to do; typing up data, revising my work plans, collecting dead ants from around the farm house, and busied myself in the evening cooking, reading and watching films.

Finally, it was Sunday night and I went to be very early, knowing that the following morning I had to catch a bus at 7:30am. That afternoon I had gone to speak to Tivi, my contact at the farm, to check what time the regular taxi went past in the mornings. I pre-prepared in Portuguese what I wanted to ask, but despite clearly (I thought) asking him a question, he just nodded. I tried to point out to him that this was not an appropriate response to the questions "What time" but he just nodded again. Frustrated, I persisted and eventually he uttered the words "seis horas" (6am). This was what I had thought, but I was less than convinced that he even really understood what I was saying. So when I dragged myself out of bed at 4:45am on Monday morning, and walked the 20 minutes up hill to the farm entrance where the taxi came past, I was a little anxious about whether it would turn up. But, right on time (there's a first for everything, right!) the taxi arrived, crammed full of Brazilians, and I got in. Within 30 minutes I was at the bus station (over an hour early). In standard Brazilian style, despite advertising opening hours of 4.30am - 10pm, there was nobody in the ticket office. So I sat and waited. Finally, about 40 minutes later, and with only 20 minutes until my bus left, a woman strolled up and opened the ticket office, so I bought my ticket, had one final cigarette and boarded my bus.

7 hours later I arrived in Salvador, exhausted. I took a taxi to my hostel, checked in and got the details together to head out to collect my parcel. The hostel owner called a taxi for me, but I had to wait over an hour for it to turn up (this option was still preferable though because it was safer to take a taxi we knew to be legitimate, and who was willing to wait for me while I collected the parcel). When the taxi finally arrived, we headed out to try and find the address I had been given for the post depo. Unfortunately, I hadn't been given the name of the company, we only had a street name and a building number and once we found what we thought was the correct street, the buildings turned out not to be even vaguely in consecutive order. Confused, we drove around for a while, asked a few people and I was beginning to reach the point of complete exasperation when the taxi broke down. The driver got out, opened the bonnet and started fiddling around with the engine, simultaneously chatting to a man who was standing nearby, asking him if he knew where this address was. It quickly transpired that we had, without realising it, broken down on the very street we were looking for, so the driver suggested that I walked up the street and looked for the building while he tried to fix the car. Slightly nervously, I headed out alone in search of the post depo. I felt sure I was going to end up being mugged, and was particularly nervous since I had needed to bring most of my valuables with me as means of ID / contact in case of problems. Luckily, a few minutes later I heard a car horn beep and the driver pulled up beside me. A few minutes later we found the depo and began the saga of trying to explain to the gun carrying security guard what I wanted and who I was. After about 10 minutes he let us through, and we headed to reception and gave a man the tracking number. He then disappeared into the back for what seemed like forever, while I anxiously waited. When he returned, he brought the news I had been dreading. The package wasn't here. It has been sent to Aracaju, because apparently my supervisor had never called to cancel this request (?!). Deflated, we headed back to the hostel and I paid the extortionate taxi fare. I didn't begrudge him the money though, as he had been completely invaluable in communicating with the people at the post depo, and had gone way above the call of duty to help me.

I spent the entire next day trying to contact people; my supervisor, Aline, Fernanda in Aracaju, the FedEx liaison officer... By the evening I had got, not very far. I had been told again by FedEx that the package was in Aracaju, and managed to get an address where it could be collected from. I had failed to speak to Fernanda, however, and I was anxious not to get on a bus until she had the package in her hands. I spent another night in the hostel, and hoped desperately that tomorrow I would get the news that Fernanda had collected the package, and I could get on a bus to Aracaju safe in the knowledge that my equipment would actually be there when I arrived. 

The following morning, I got up early and headed down to the internet cafe to check my emails. Of course, it was closed. So I sat and waited for half an hour or so until finally it opened. When I got online, I was met by a barrage of emails - including one rather anxious one from Aline telling me that the package might be sent to the UK if I did not collect it soon. I hurried back to the hostel, bumping into my taxi-driver friend who had helped me at the post office on Monday, and arranged for a lift to the bus station. Within an hour I was showered, packed and heading to the bus station in the pouring rain, hoping to catch the next bus to Aracaju. I succeeded and boarded the, rather expensive, gold class bus to Aracaju (the only one available at this time of day). About half an hour or so down the road (passing signs for Praia de Forte which only made me sadder) the bus ground to a half by the side of the road. A few minutes later the hostess came up stairs to tell us that the bus had broken down, and they were trying to fix it. I couldn't believe it! How was it possible to have this much bad luck? I was relieved when, 10 minutes later, the engine started up again, and we continued on our journey. However, it wasn't long before we pulled over again, the driver complaining of the same problem. This happened a further 3 or 4 times before they finally managed to fix the problem permanently, and miraculously we arrived into Aracaju only half an hour late.

Here I was met by the best news I had heard in ages - Fernanda had collected my parcel! That evening we went out for a couple of beers with her friends and celebrated. It was actually nice to be be back in Aracaju with my friends and I felt sad that I would have to leave again tomorrow. I was also rather concerned that getting on another bus might push me over the edge.... I felt somewhat concerned for the well-being of the other passengers. Nevertheless, the following afternoon I boarded a bus to Salvador, to get a connection to Campo Formoso on an overnight bus.

My ordeal seemed as though it might finally be over, when I was awoken rather abruptly by the bus driver at 6am to say that we had arrived in Campo Formoso, a full hour early. A little peeved (because I would still have to wait for Cleia to meet me at 7am), but relieved to be free of public transport, I got off the bus. An hour passed and Cleia didn't arrive. I tried to call Aline but to no avail. Another hour passed. Still no sign of my friends. Still no answer. Finally, I decided I couldn't wait any longer, and I gathered my things and headed out to walk to Aline's house. It was raining, however. Not heavily but a consistent mist which had drenched me after a few minutes. I continued to trudge, uphill, in the rain for half an hour or so before I finally made it to the house, and rang the bell.

No answer. "That is it" I thought. "There is nothing else I can think to try except wait for Aline to come home". Deflated, I sat down on her step. Finally, a few minutes later, the garage doors opened and I was met by a rather confused Aline, who let me into the car and helped me to find Cleia - who apparently had been delayed by 2 hours because there wasn't a bus that went to the bus station here. For reasons completely unknown to me, it hadn't occurred to her that she could simply get on another bus to Campo Formoso and walk to the bus station. No. Instead she had decided to sit and wait, leaving me to do the same, for 2 hours. Needless to say I was a little frustrated with this explanation, but too tired to try and argue about it in Portuguese. Finally, a little good luck came my way when the taxi driver got all the way to the farm (up worryingly muddy hills) without problem. With my equipment in hand, I went back into the house and collapsed into one of the best naps I've had in a long time. It was over. Finally.

Campo Formoso Week Two: Taxis and Troubles

At the end of my first full week of field work, one of the students I had been staying with invited me to visit her in the nearby, and slightly larger, town - Senhora de Bomfim. Aline seemed keen to get me out of her hair, so I slightly reluctantly, agreed to go. My reluctance might seem a little strange but Cleia and I had barely exchanged two words during the preceeding week, probably mostly due to the language barrier, but I felt a little awkward spending 2 full days with her. When I arrived, my concerns were initially confirmed by the uncomfortable walk back to her place and an afternoon of difficult communication which left me with the distinct impression that she was laughing with her friends, in my presence, at my lack of Portuguese.

However, that evening we went out for drinks at a nice bar in town with an outdoor terrace, and she introduced me to a Nigerian friend of hers who spoke English and Portuguese fluently. After a few beers we all began to relax and have a good time. Sunday I awoke relatively early, considering the level of alcohol consumption the night before, and after lunch I sat down to type up the weeks data. This ended up taking most of the afternoon, but I was relieved to have it finished and spent a relaxing evening with Cleia and her housemates. 

My second week in Campo Formoso has presented a whole series of new field work challenges which have driven me, at times, almost to distraction. It begin with the discovery, over the weekend, that Aline, the lady who has very kindly been putting me up in her house, has some major mechanical issues with her car. This is the car we had been using to get to the field site, and by Monday it was clear it was going to take quite a bit of time to repair, so we needed to find alternative transport arrangements. Unfortunately, the site I had hoped to work at this week was at the top of a mountain, albeit a relatively small one, and after the first day working there the taxi driver refused to take us up again. Even taking a taxi to the farm site, which was relatively easy to access, was going to cost R$50 a day (about £20) and for various other reasons that I won't go into, my field work just became impossible. So, we decided it was necessary to move to the farm house asap. This farm house is in walking distance of my ant colonies, but is, to say the least, a little bit basic. Nobody has lived there for, who knows how long, so it needed a serious clean, and all the basic living amenities (plates, cultery, bed linen, etc) buying. So that has been my week this week. Trying to organise moving to the farm house and making the place liveable.

The day of cleaning was a rather interesting one. Four of us set out at 8am by taxi to the farm, with cleaning products and personal belonging in hand, ready to turn the run-down farm house into a place we could live for the next 2 months. About half way there, we were met with quite a steep hill which had always been easily passable in the past, but after the heavy rains in recent days had turned into a mud bath. Even in the 4X4 taxi, it was impossible to pass. So we backed-up and tried an alternative route. After a few minutes drive we met a patch of road so full of rocks and stones it was also impassable. It became clear we were going to have to walk. So we took as much of the stuff as we could carry, and marched up the hill under the now-baking sunshine. Less than a minute later, and half way up the muddy hill, one of the locals in his pick-up truck decided to just go for it. He got a decent run-up, got as much speed as he could and pelted it up the hill. Remarkably he made it to the top, and he offered us a lift to the farm. We gratefully accepted, and climbed into the back of the truck. However, as he took of the handbreak, we started rolling back down, and after a few, slightly terrifying, attempts to get going, he announced that he was now out of petrol. So, we got out again and set off in the heat to walk. We made it most of the way to the farm house before someone else picked us up in their truck and drove us the rest of the way.

After a long day of cleaning, the place finally looked like it might be liveable, so we headed back to the house. The following day I planned to get the final bits and pieces together before heading to Salvador for a birthday weekend by the beach. However, when I awoke on Thursday morning, I found a note from Aline slipped under my door saying that she was ill and needed me to leave for my trip a day early, as she needed medical attention and couldn't have me stay with her. So I rather hurriedly packed up my things, altered my hostel booking and headed to the bus station to begin my 7 hour journey to the coast. More on that adventure, to follow!

Mosquito Update
After my torturous first week here, with nearly 300 mosquito bites, I learned exactly which of my clothes were bite proof, and managed to dramatically reduce the number of bites I was getting. Not being able to get into the field has also helped to buffer me from the bites, and I probably only gained 10 or 20 over the course of the week.

Whether it is due to the absurd number of bites I got last week, or my body finally adjusting, or my improved defenses against bites, but I haven't really been noticing the few I do have as much. The odd scratch, here or there, but they are no longer driving me insane!

Campo Formoso Week One: Rice and Beans

Ah, rice and beans, the staple of the Brazilian diet, how I've missed you....

My journey to Campo Formoso, Bahia, began at 8am, sleepily boarding a bus to Salvador. Thankfully I had my lovely friend Fernanda to help me to get my luggage there and sort out the formalities, I don't know how I would have coped without her! As was the case in Argentina, the long-distance buses in Brazil are really quite good - very comfortable seats which recline most of the way back, and regular stops to get food (or smoke a cigarette!), although they do insist upon over-air-conditioning to the point where I was actually far too cold most of the way. The other less comfortable aspect was the on board video. After about half an hour of traveling, they put on Legally blonde 2, badly dubbed into Portuguese. I was so tired that I didn't mind too much because I was able to sleep through it, but when it finished, they let the title soundtrack play on repeat for about 10 minutes before finally pressing play, and making us watch it again. If this is their idea of entertainment, frankly I'd rather be bored!

But if I thought this was bad, it was about to get much worse. I arrived in Salvador feeling pretty good, I'd managed to sleep through Legally blonde 2, twice, and felt quite refreshed from my sleep. But Salvador was about 5 degrees hotter than Aracaju, and more humid, and as I entered the bus station I realised that everyone in Brazil was also trying to travel today. I was the thursday before Easter, a holiday in Brazil, and the station was absolutely teeming with people. Every available patch of ground had a hot Brazilian person sitting on it, and with all my luggage, just trying to navigate as far as the bus company to buy my next ticket was quite an ordeal. When I found out I was going to have to wait here for 4 hours for the next available bus to Senhora de Bomfim, I was just about ready to kill someone. Thankfully for everyone concerned, I managed to find a place to store my luggage, which just about appeased me sufficiently to prevent a homicidal rampage. The 4 hours at Salvador passed slowly, but finally I boarded another freezing cold bus and got comfortable for the 5 hour journey to Senhora de Bomfim, where my new friend Aline was waiting to drive me to her house. When I finally arrived at nearly midnight, I brought my bags into the house and went straight to sleep. At least I didn't have to be up early the next day!


The following day, Good Friday, was also a holiday here in Brazil, so we went for lunch with Aline's husbands family, who own the small farm where we are staying. Although they didn't speak much English, they were very welcoming and more than happy to point out which of the dishes they were serving contained fish (which was most of them) so that I could avoid them. I have a feeling they only prepared a beef dish because I don't like fish!!

That afternoon they offered to take me up to a nearby mountain to have a look for some ant colonies. We set out in their pick-up truck and I quickly discovered that the Brazilians had dealt with the problem of driving up the mountain, not in the usual way of building long roads which wind slowly up the incline, but by simply putting a dirt track directly up the hillside. Nevermind that it was ridiculously steep and full of pot-holes! It was a beautiful sunny day, and from the top of the mountain the views were wonderful. On top of that we quickly started finding ant colonies and within a couple of hours had found 5. I was even lucky enough to see one of the dinosaur ants catch some prey!

The next few days proceeded in much the same way - time spent out in the field looking for ant colonies, and finding absolutely loads of them, and meals of rice and beans with various family members and friends. I started to put together a field work plan for the next couple of weeks while I had Aline to help me. Getting out into the field is great because there are so many dinosaur ants here, and it always feels good to start collecting data. I also found a second site, located in the forest, which is really good for data collection, and has an almost constant supply of cool, weird, tropical insects (and arachnids).

The only downside of my field work now is that the forest site is absolutely teeming with mosquitoes. More than I have ever seen in one place before. Unfortunately at the moment my field work involves a lot of sitting or standing around, doing behavioural observations, which makes me ideal mosquito bait. Yesterday I foolishly wore some slightly thinner trousers than I had been wearing previously, and apparently the mosquitoes can bite straight through them, because when I got home and had a shower that evening I found I was completely covered in bites. Luckily my body is starting to get used to them now, and they don't swell up quite as much as they had been doing previously, but they are driving me absolutely crazy.

As I mentioned above, I'm currently staying at a small farm in the town of Campo Formoso. Along with chickens and geese, they also have some ducks (including some very cute ducklings) and some tortoises which they found and are now taking care of. They have two adults who recently had babies which are now about a month old. After having lunch at the main farm house for the Father-in-law's birthday, I helped clean them out and they were just adorbale. There are 10 babies who, as soon as we took them out of the box, tried to make a break for it and scattered across the concrete floor.

I'll be spending at least another week here in Campo Formoso before hopefully heading to Salvador for a few days to celebrate my birthday with some friends from Aracaju, and then back here to get set up at a different (larger) farm closer to my field site where I will probably be spending the rest of my time in Brazil.

More updates soon!

Mosquito Bite Update
I finally summoned the courage to try and count my mosquito bites. I give you only a very rough estimate, because there are far to many to count now, but:

1 week in Campo Formoso; ~ 271 mosquito bites