Balikpapan and Samboja

Well, I arrived safely in Balikpapan after 30 hours of largely sleepless travel time.  The twelve hour flight to Hong Kong from Vancouver went by quickly and I was able to substantially complete a submission to the 2011 AAAI CAS conference (my paper being on information transfer in mass-start bicycle racing) conference during that time, and I can now turn my focus to Borneo and the course-work ahead.  After a mostly sleepless layover in Jakarta, where I tried unsuccessfully to sleep on the airport floor, the balance of my travels went smoothly and the Hotel Sagita staff retrieved me and Paul, a fellow student arriving through Singapore, drove us back to the Hotel Sagita, where we met the instructors, the two translators, and the other students with whom will be working for the next six weeks.
           Despite much travel fatigue and jet-lag for all of the students from various locations across Canada and the United States, Brent Loken and Sheryl Gruber, resilience course instructors, took us through some of the readings and laid the theoretical groundwork for the course.  We discussed cycles of growth, increasing brittleness, collapse and regrowth in complex adaptive systems, among other things.  We have since been asked to develop our research question more fully, and we will be refining it more in the next couple of days.  Andrew, a student from Alberta, and I are looking at collaborating our research projects so as to centre around the government policy effects on patterns of crop rotation / shifting cultivation / land tenure.  Andrew wants to look at the governance/policy aspects and investigate how government policies have affected the communities' use of land for agriculture, and how the government policies have been influenced by larger forces like palm oil plantations and similar disturbances. While to the time of writing Andrew and I are still tweaking the exact research question, it looks like my focus will be more quantitative, while Andrew's looks to be more qualititative.
            We also met today to discuss our assignments for the ethno-ecological course, which is a separate course from the resilience research study.  While much of the data gleaned from one course may be transferable to the other, we are told we may research a very different subject matter for the ethno-eco study.  The idea for this course is to apply qualitative research methods (largely anthropological in scope), such as participatory research ("hanging out and doing") with the villagers in order to gather information and data about our research subject. I am considering perhaps looking at some linguistic component, such as comparing some basic words of the Dyak villagers to the more broadly spoken Indonesian, although it may not be doable - still needs some thought and consultations with Janelle Baker, our instructor.
           On another note, yesterday we shifted locations from Hotel Sagita to the Samboja orangutan preserve, and spent some time observing orangutans and sun-bears, which have been rescued from wild.  The orangutans were across water moats, which they will not cross as they apparently hate water, so we could not get very close to them.  The sun-bears are small orphaned black-bears, largely kept in cages and pens.
           On yet another note, I went for a half-hour run today, which felt incredible in the warmth and after nearly two months without running!  I ran some clay trails nearby and found a 200 foot fire tower at a high-point in the land.  At the top was an incredible view of the forest canopy below and I could see a mountain or volcano, which appeared to be on an island across the water.  No pics for that, unfortunately.I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my foot will hold out after that run.
           Tomorrow morning we head out to one of the Dyak villages - a 17 hour drive over, with 7 hours of it over a dirt road filled with potholes.  An adventure to be sure.
           Note, I do have some photos to add, but there is currently an issue with uploading them at a manageable size, and I should get this post out.  I'll try to resolve the issue and post some photos asap.