a touch of home sickness came up on me.

I got my Christmas present from my mom on Monday! And you will never guess what the best and most optimistic mom in the world sent me; PEPPEKAKEHUS or a ginger bread house. She said something about giving me some work or a project when I asked her on the phone about what she had come up with, and I promise you that she was right. The house did not exactly arrive in one piece, he he. It had had a hard journey as you can see from the pictures, but I have done my best to rescue the pieces and I think that I succeeded fairly well. And note that the candy, icing sugar and the cotton were also in the package from Norway! Nothing was missing.

But then I must admit that a touch of home sickness came up on me. Ohh, the snow and fresh air, sitting around the fire in our cabin in the mountains, all the food and the breakfast in Christmas morning, to actually spend several days together with my family without any disruptions of any kind: I miss you and look forward to Christmas in 2011!

Merry Christmas under the palm trees

So, how was my Christmas then? As I have expressed before is the tourist beach not my favorite habitat so another volunteer and I made a plan about spending Christmas on the turtle beach in solitude. The problem with the plan was that we could not really explain to the other volunteers why we did not want to celebrate together with them. I was even booked in on a beach hut because they expected that I wanted to come. So we ended up celebrating Christmas on the tourist beach. Christmas dinner was enjoyed in a restaurant where some of us got their food three hours after ordering it,the calamari was not properly grilled, the ashtray never came to our table and I never got my cognac. When we complained to the manager he raised his voice and begun arguing. In the end we got 300 Rupiee in discount on a bill on 5800 Rupiee (we were about 20 people), but after everyone had paid we discovered that they had overcharged us at least 300 Rupiee so there went that discount. So never go to Café del Mar on Palolem beach in Goa.

Of course I am very pleased to say; I told you so! We should have gone to the turtle beach. The evening continued with a walk on the beach to find a party or restaurant that did not play the same club/techno music that had accompanied our Christmas dinner, but this should turn out to be impossible. At one or another point Kathrin and I lost the rest of the group and decided to go to our hut, buy a beer and play our own music. I think this was the best decision I made that evening. We had a very nice time sitting in the plastic chairs outside our hut enjoying the view to a Christmas tree made by two branches of a local variant of pine with blinking red and blue lights.

Merry Christmas:-D

Sea turtle mama!!!

We have seen a sea turtle mama lay her eggs! After five weeks of not sleeping properly in the night because of patrolling I have not bothered to walk all the patrols lately so I was far away in dreamland when Mukesh woke up me and Kathrin and told us that there was a sea turtle on the beach. I think that the first thought of both of us were “ha ha, good joke, now let us sleep”. One would think that we would get up with a start, but both of us turned over in over in our sleeping bags and kept our eyes closed until our brains started working and we understood that there was an opportunity that he could be serious.

And there it was! We could not go close to it while she was laying her eggs, but when she begun to “walk” back to the ocean we could take pictures and touch it. She laid about 100 eggs. When she had disappeared into the ocean again the guards from the Forest Department moved the nest closer to the “turtle protection center”, which is the shelter we sleep in, to more easily survey it.

Why the turtle hatchlings were kept in a bowl.

I wrote earlier that I would try to find out why they kept the sea turtle hatchling in the bowl and if this could harm them. I spoke to the manager of the wildlife sanctuary and he told me that there was no problem to keep the hatchlings in the bowl. What might harm them are direct sunlight, strong lights and if they were kept inside the enclosure around the nest when they comes out of the nest because the net can harm their mouth.

Quality time with Sirwa

Sirwa has left me alone! She went back home the 18^th of December to spend Christmas with her family and to begin to work again after new year. Before she left we had an intense program of quality time ever day for two weeks. We had a list of things to do and when she left we had ticked of all the points on the list; cinema, going together to the turtle beach, kayaking, getting our legs waxed (ehh, yes), walking around in Margao, visit a spice plantation, take the local bus, bike to the super marked, take pictures, buying fruit at the local marked and buy train tickets for Stig and me to Kerala and Hampi. And now she is gone and I have to manage on my own. I look very much forward to see you again on Hidra in June, Sirvipirvi!

Jungle “trekking” and nights on the beach

And how is our work actually going...? Well, the situation on these projects are that there is not so much project. It is kind of OK because I worked a lot in Himachal, but it is a bit annoying too. IDEX is a serious organization, but in my opinion are the wild life-programs a bit outside their field. We have seen sea turtles and that have been great experiences, but we do not do any work here. The Forest Department has their people working here and they do their job. The same is the case with the wild life sanctuary. I think that there are some work to do if you are a super-volunteer who know what you are doing and are very independent and eager, but unfortunately are most of us unqualified, confused and disillusioned common-volunteers and we end up doing nothing.

What saves the stay here in Goa is that the group is very nice and we have a good time “hanging out” on the beach or being seven people picking grass for fodder for the deers in the rescue center and raking leaves off the road in the jungle. There is a play ground at the rescue center where we can climb, swing, hang up side down and do head stand and we also have lots of time to look after frogs, take night pictures on the beach and learn tola, tola Hindi.

And I have begun teaching English again:-) In the afternoon I go together with Amber for one hour to teach English to adolescent girls in the slum in Margao. The girls are very nice and eager to come to class. I enjoy it very much!

I am going to Thailand!

When I was still home my wish was to volunteer in Thailand working with issues regarding Karen refugees from Burma/Myanmar. At that time this sounded as a too big challenge and I did not know how I could approach it. After some time here in India it did not sound as impossible as before and I called my friend Deena who is Karen and I mentioned my idea for her. She was immediately positive and contacted a friend in Thailand and then it was done; I am going to Thailand the 3^rd of March and I will stay there until 28^th of May. You will have to read this blog for some more months;-) I will of course write more about this.

If anyone should happen to be interested...

I have just posted my Master Thesis in Culture Studies on my blog. You can fint it on the bottom of the right column. It is of course in Norwegian, though. I finished it in September 2009 at Telemark University Collage (Institutt for kultur og humanistiske fag, in English?). I think that it is interesting in this context beacuse I wrote about tourism, travelling in foreign countries, nature and culture meeting. The case study is done in Kyrgyztan, but the analytical questions can be asked anytime a meeting between two strange cultures takes place.

Baby sea turtles!!

So, finally time to see some sea turtles! And not a few either, I think they said it was about 80. While we drow to the beach the hatchlings decided to get out of the nest. Mukesh got a phone call from the forest department guy who asked where we were! "We are on our way, wait for us!" :-) When we arrived the turtles had hatched, but they were collected in a bowl to wait for the officer from the Forest Depatment and a reporter from a newspaper. It can be difficult to understand things somtimes when we do not speak the same language. Why did the baby turtles have to wait for the officer? And spend more then an hour in a bowl exhausting themselves before getting into the ocean? I will try to get an answer from Sameer next time we go there. It was a mixed feeling to release the hatchlings; it was great to get the opportunity to see it, but I felt bad for keeping them in the bowl and a bit lost or empty when they entered the ocean and were gone forever. The ocean is so big and the baby turtles so small, and there is no place for humans in this animals life. I hope some of them will come back to the beach to lay their own eggs sometime.

Going on patrol again

Oj oj oj, maybe we will see 90 baby sea turtles crawl out to the ocean tonight!!! One of the two nests on the beach we are patroling are supposed to hatch now any time. The sand over the nest collapsed (about 3 cm as it is supposed to do) two nights ago and that means that tonight is the night:-D There are 97 eggs in the nest. I have to go and get ready for another night on the beach. The last 10 days I have only spent 2 in my own bed, the rest on the beach waiting for the hatching. Because of the patroling we sleep about 4-5 hours each night so now the nest has to hatch so I can get some sleep! As I might wrote before I have got company of two other girls on the project and we all enjoy the camping on the beach.

Goa -time for some updates

My sea turtle project in Goa

Hmm, so what is my project? Well, after three weeks I think I have an idea. There are three parts of the project; patroling the beach, clean ups on the beach and information campaigns at governmental schools near the beaches. So this sounds like a project. BUT... There are already volunteers from the local community doing the patroling on the beach, the beach is clean and the students at school do not speak english. And a few more things; it takes more than one hour by car to go to the the turtle beach and there are no turtles. So where is the project?

Ok, it is not as black & white as this. Our patroling on the beach is not needed so I would not call it work, but we do get the opportunity to see turtles. Since 2005 there has been five or six nests on this beach, Galgibagh beach, each year. So far this year there has only been one sea turtle who has nested here, but the season lasts up to April so there is still time. This one nest is expected to hatch any day now, so we are at the beach every night and if nothing is wrong we will see about hundred baby sea turtles come out of the sand and crawl to the ocean. The patroling on the beach is always in the night because the sea turtles will lay their eggs under cover of darkness in the night and the nest will also hatch at night time. We drive from the camp after dinner at 9 pm and reach Galgibagh beach at about 10.30 pm and walk the first patrol. This is to early in the night for the sea turtles so the reason why we do this patrol is to remove any obstacles on the beach like tree trunks and such. So far we have not removed anything, but we usually sits down for some time to tell gost stories or gossip about the camp so this patrol is nice and some times very funny too. We go to sleep somewhere between 12 pm and 2 am. The next patrol is at 3 am and now we look for the sea turtle laying her eggs. She comes up at high tide and now that is around 1 am to 3 am and this is the time when it is a chance of seeing the grown up sea turtle. The last patrol is at dawn to look for nests, but we have not walked this one because we want to sleep and the local guys do it anyway.

This is what I have been doing on the project so far. I have been the only volunteer on the sea turtle project for these first three weeks, but I have been together with the guy on the wildlife project because he has also been alone and we have the same project executive from IDEX. So we have been on the beach in the night from Monday to Friday and in the morning we have gone to the wildlife sanctuary to do Nick's project. That project is suffering of the same "there is a project, but not really-syndrome" as the turtle project. From next week there will be four girls working on this project, so I will not judge it yet. Maybe there is a project there somewhere if only the volunteers are eager and stubborn enough. The wildlife projects for sure do not need us, but maybe we can pretend for a while?

Back to the sea turtle project again and the information campaigns and the clean ups of the beach. So far have I not done any of this. If I had been stubborn I guess I could have done something, but the lazy, unmotivated atmosphere in this camp and the ajustment to a new project have not given me any energy to do this. It is neather so motivating to be alone on a project, but not any more. Yesterday two new girls arrived in the camp and they will join me in the project. From next week we will prepare an exhibiton about sea turtles for the primary school. We will make posters about why they are endangered and how we should behave if we see sea turtles or nests. But how to run an information campain for students who do not speak English when we do not speak Konkani or Hindi? Aswani, our project executive, think that it will work out with the help of the teachers at the school, so we will try and see how it goes. This project started up last year, but I have not really got a clear impression of the volunteers experiences with the information campaign or if they actually ran any. Aswani has only been on this project for two months so he do not really know either.

At least there is the cleaning up and litter picking on the beach. Galgibagh beach is clean after Indian standards, but a bit up from the beach and into the vegetation there is a lot of plastic litter. The other beaches in the area are like the ones we went to in the north of Goa with "hairless beach apes" (see "Weekends on Goan beaches"), restaurants, shacks and litter, so here it will be enough to do. The recycling of plastic is not very common here in India (or it is kind of; the cows eat everything), so after collecting the plastic litter we will make a big fire and burn it all. Hm, environmental awareness? I think that it is better to collect it and burn it than to leave it, but if someone has any views on this, do not hesitate to comment on it.

The IDEX camp and my project




Walking around in Margao with my camera

Here in Margao I decided to take the walk in the alleys right away and not wait for the last day of my stay as I did in Palampur. Margao is the second largest city in Goa, but as Gao is a very small state it does not mean that it is very big. According to wikipedia the population was 78.393 in 2001. I really like the city, and as Sirvej always has a lot of shopping to do, anything from printing pictures to sew dresses at the tailor, we have walked alot around there. This city is really a mix of everything just like Palampur and everything in India, but in a very different way. Goa was a Portuguese colony up to 1961, so you have the Portuguese heritage as you can see in the architecture. Margao is a quite modern city and you can find anything you want to shop there.




Weekends on Goan beaches

Goa has become a very famous tourist place in India the last 15-10 years. Why? I do not know. OK, it probably has something to do with the white beaches, the green palms, the blue sky and cheap shopping. Unfortunately has my mother been too succesfull in teaching me that beaches only means sand in your eyes, ears and towell. I guess that the beach is not my favorite habitat. But as we are in Goa and all the other volunteers seems to love the beach it is impossible to avoid it. And, by the way, I chose a project where I am working on the beach! The turtle that beach is very nice, so I guess that it can not be the sand that is the problem for me. Then it must be something else and what it the difference between the turtle beach and the other beaches? "Hairless beach apes frying in coconut oil"! Those who do not know this phrase have missed out on the best cartoon ever; Sherman's lagoon! Go out and buy it now;-) I am always thinking about this cartoon when I am walking on the beach between the sunbeds with people frying in the sun with a drink in one hand, money in the other and an Indian woman by their feet giving them pedicure.

Anyway, the first two weekends we spent on the beach. First we went to Baga beach and the state capital Panjim in the north of Goa and the next weekend we went to Palolem in the south. As I wrote abowe Goa is a small state and it takes about 3-4 hours by bus to go from north to south. Our camp is located almost in the middle so it is easy to go by bus to every corner of the state. And so we have! It cost about 20 rupies (3 NOK/0,4 USD) to travel one hour by bus and the busses are running all the time. And if there is no bus you can always get a ride on a motorbike that is going in your direction.




I hope this blog was not to long to read. My ambition is as always to write often and not so long, but as you see I am kind of failing on that one. I hope you still will follow my blog and it is very nice to get comments, even if it is only; "Hi, I have read you blog."

Good bye to Himachal Pradesh

OK, I know that it is much easier to do things right away before they build up to be big projects. For example is it much better to wash your dishes right after you have eaten instead of leaving it in the kitchen for a week and then spend two hours washing. And it is better to study everyday instead of reading the whole curriculum in two weeks day and night before an exam. And it is better to blog every week than to postpone it, but I think I am not the only one who have discovered that doing things right away just does not always happen:-)

I have figured out how to show the text to the pictures in the slideshow, but the text do not show properly when the internet is slow so I removed it again. Therefore you still have to go to Picasa to see it.

And I am sorry for spelling mistakes. I do not have spelling- and grammar check on my computer. I am using the Dictionary, but sometimes I publish a bit to fast.


Chandigarh Rock Garden

I have to begin with our last weekend in Nort-India. Oh, it feels so long ago. It is strange how the feeling of time changes with a new environment. We, the usual Norwegian gang and Safia from England, went to Chandigarh, a city just across the state border from Himachal. It is on the border between Punjab and Haryana and functions as a capital of both states. This city is famous for its modernist urban plan and architecture and is supposed to be the cleanest city in India. Its plan was made by the swiss architect Le Corbusier, or there was several architects involved, but Le Corbusier gets the hounour in the short version of the history.

We took public bus (which we are getting more and more fund of) from Palampur, 9 hours in the night, and then spent one night at hotel there. In total we spent 18 hours on the bus and 32 hours i Chandigarh. I had struggled with a cold for some time wich came back every time my immune system was not on top and this weekend I felt a bit nocked out. We saw the city by hiering a taxi for 5 hours and driving around to the sights. My favorite was definitely the rock garden made by Nek Chand; a sculpture garden made entirely from industrial and home waist and spread over an area of 160,000 sq m.





Last-day-party with the girls from English class

The community visit gave new life to our English class and all the girls began to come again. I think we all felt that we got a better understanding of each other after the visit. The last day we had a party with all the girls, sa usual some brothers also showed up and a mother and a grandmother too. We had alot of fun and alot of food. At the community visit we had booked time to get our legs waxed by one of the mothers who do this as a profession (I do not know what that is called, not even in Norwegian, beauty-something?). So we went to their home after the party to get our legs waxed and we ended up having dinner there and get dressed up as brides.





Walking around in Palampur with my camera

Palampur is as most other towns; it has two main shopping streets and as a foreigner you get stucked in this main streets. The last day I figured out that I should bring my camera and have a look at what was behind the shops. And how I wish I was a professional photograf, or at least knew more than I do. It is just to begin to practise. There was so many nice motifs. The alleys are a mix of new and old, asphalt and gardens, rich and poor houses and details, people and animals and suddenly someone asks you to take a picture of their doughter. Of course you are happy to take the picture, but you can not print pictures for everyone who ask. But then I thought; why not, I have time if I do it right away. So I went to a photo shop and gave them the photo files, but the shop keeper could not print it before the next day and I would leave for Dehli the same night. Ah, bad luck, so I left the shop. But then I thought that the girl could collect the pictures her self. So I asked him to print the pictures anyway, paid the 20 rupies (2,8 NOK) and got his business card. When I went back to the girl and her family to give her the business card they invited me in for chapati and pickles. This could not happen in the main street. Now I just hope that she got the pictures because during the whole time we could not understand a word of what the other said in their language.




This time it was our time to be on The List; the departure list.

And to say good bye to Bundla camp and spend 40 hours on train to get to next stop: Goa!
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