What We're Up To

The three of us -- Karan Chhabra, Katie Swails, and Sandeep Prasanna -- are Duke students spending eight weeks in the south Indian rainforest working on a series of short documentary films about environmental issues in order to aid the outreach programs of SAI Sanctuary, a wildlife sanctuary in the Western Ghats region. In the process, we'll also be organically farming, aiding in the construction of biogas plants, and chasing rare plants and animals.

Follow us as we navigate through the jungle and much more!

You can learn more about the DukeEngage program at dukeengage.duke.edu. You can also find out what the SAI Sanctuary, our hosts, are working on at saisanctuary.com.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Jetlag (See also: Junglecasts 2 and 3)

An autorickshaw is a three-wheeled vehicle that runs a tiny, presumably two-stroke engine that makes a very loud buzzing noise. There are no doors; there is a motorcycle-like handlebar instead of a steering wheel, and the back seat only has room for three college students. In rush-hour Bangalore traffic autorickshaws are slightly less than a smooth ride---but jetlag sees no such distinctions. Jetlag is falling asleep twice on an autorickshaw in the heat and noise of a Bangalore evening; then, of course, having a hallucination that I dropped something while on the auto and yelling at the driver to stop, jumping out of the rickshaw and running at least 50 yards back up the street to find what I was sure I had dropped, and sullenly returning to the rickshaw when I found nothing. (Meanwhile, Sandeep, forgetting how to say "he dropped something" in Kannada to the driver, told him instead that "[I] fell out.") When I got back, Sandeep and Katie were very understanding but quite sure that I hadn't dropped anything, and there is no evidence that I ended up missing anything. The image and sensation of a white bag falling out of my hands and into the road, however, are still firmly in my memory. This is jetlag.

UPDATE: I finally found my bags this afternoon, after being tossed from airport employee to airport employee like a rugby ball (at 7 a.m.) and delaying our plans to travel to the Sanctuary by a day. So now we're going tomorrow. On the bright side, now I can take a shower!

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