Got some vacation lined up (yea!). Hiking to Silver Peak in Killarney Provincial Park followed immediately by bus-train-walking in Eastern Europe. Yes, for some reason this year, I've managed to end up with trips booked back to back. Perhaps subconsciously I've succumbed to the 'adrenaline junkie' travel method--barely leave yourself enough time between trips to unpack and repack just to test your endurance. Whatever the explanation, I've got these piles of stuff started in my living room, one for hiking, and one for Europe. This I tell myself, is helping me prepare for both trips at the same time. Also I'm trying to accumulate a sufficient body of knowledge about E. Europe to allow me to navigate successfully. Below for example is a map of the tram line in Sarajevo, which I hope to use to get from the airport to the city centre. In fact, the tram line does not connect to the airport, so I will have to take a bus (I think) from airport to tram line. This also has become one of my things: taking on the public transit system instead taxis. Also part of the adrenaline agenda it would seem.

The Kakumba watershed in the 'winter', or perhaps more appropriately, in the dry season. Farmers burn their fields for a variety of reasons most of which are actually pretty reasonable, but the end result is greater erosion, declining soil health, and ultimately a loss of ability to feed one's family. The challenge of reversing the community habit of burning fields is a great one, as our project manager is Congo is contemplating.

Yesterday, I saw monkeys! Seeing monkeys in and of itself is not that big a deal, but it is the first time I've ever seen monkeys at one of our project sites. Most of the places where I work are, let's say, very agricultural, and there's not that much room for wildlife. But the Congo basin, as I've probably mentioned before is the site of the second largest rainforest in the world and even in the farm communities where we are (just beginning) to work, there are still pockets of forest left. It is one of our hopes that, together with farmers in the area, we can intervene to not only help people protect their precious farmland, but also to help them protect the wild areas that still remain nearby. This is in a sense the notion of preventative medicine versus curative medicine. Or dealing with the problem early instead of waiting til things have gone way too far.

And just so you don't think that there are monkeys just falling out of trees everywhere here, you should know that in order to see these ones, we started hiking around 7 am and reached the spot in the photo around 8:30 so, hiking over what I would say is pretty rugged terrain.

It's true that this photo looks a lot like a picture of a bunch of trees, but I swear to you that there are monkeys. Had I taken video, you would see the branches moving around as they jumped from tree to tree.