Excursion to Rivas, etc

Its been a while since I’ve had time to post. Monday was technically “Labor Day,” and Rob didn’t have to work, so we did some errands in Moyogalpa (on the island) and Rivas (on the mainland). Our first stop was Moyogalpa, to go back to the hospital and have Rob’s blood sugar retested. This test is supposed to be done in the morning, on an empty stomach, so our plan was to take the 4:00am (I believe that is called O’Dark Early) bus over to Moyogalpa, as the next bus wouldn’t put us in Moyogalpa until 11:30. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a plan. The plan fell through when the 4:00am bus rolled through at 3:38.

A new plan was created when I talked with Jairo (spelling?), who I think was on duty as the night guard. Jairo told us to take a 5:30am bus to the isthmus (a town called El Quino), and we could wait there for about a half an hour and then another bus would come by that we could take to Moyogalpa. We did this and it worked out great.

We got to Moyogalpa around 8am, and Rob had his blood sugar retested. At the moment, I can't get into this issue on the blog—I think it would push me over the edge of Freaking Out. Maybe some other day.

At any rate, we caught the 9am ferry—along with a bunch of other people and also a load of cattle being shipped to the mainland. That made for some interesting smells on the ferry. When we arrived in San Jorge, we had to take a taxi over to Rivas, which is pretty sizable town. We went to a bank and got some cordobas out of an ATM. Then we went into a few stores and got some things, we had lunch, and we wandered around town. I was feeling most pew and still a bit motion sick from the bus, ferry, and taxi, but I did my best to power through. After another foul-smelling ferry ride, we caught a bus from Moyogalpa to Mérida and called it a day.

I’ve spent the rest of the week out in the forest with the monkeys. Maybe I’m just entering Phase II of this whole dissertation fieldwork thing, but I’ve been feeling rather crummy about the kind of data I’m actually able to collect. I know Pablo says that primatology isn’t rocket science, but seriously—its harder than it looks. Its physically draining to be out in the heat, walking uphill over rocks, and powerless to stop the mosquitoes from sucking all my blood. And its frustrating when I’ve waited for hours for the monkeys to start feeding (the kind of data I need), and just when they do so, they disappear into thick canopy while I am scrambling after them through vines and thorns and spiders and who knows what else.

But I suppose it will all work out in the end. I just need to be patient and hang on and know that in the long run, I will end up with enough feeding data to make a dissertation out of this.

Thanks for reading. I’ll leave you with a picture we took of Ometepe Island while we were on the mainland waiting for the ferry, and another picture of Rob playing in some fountain in Moyogalpa—it’s a replica of the island.