Day 28

This is it our journey here in China is near its end. After 30 days on the road we are ready to come back home and see our loved ones. This time spent here has been a life changing experience, one of these welcome breaks in a busy life that opens onto the other side of yourself, a side that you do not have often the occasion to see. It has been a great scientific achievement which will no doubt will lead us to exciting prospects but it has mainly been about friendship with my colleagues and the pleasure of leave behind all pre-concieved ideas andletting ourselves  be guided by our host Yahui who in the most admirable calm has shared his knowledge and his love for his country. We have met a lot of great people on the way who have taught us some lessons of generosity and honesty. Can I be wise enough to bring back home some of this oriental wisdom and integrate it into my daily life?…Hopefully. In any case it is now time for me to say thank you to all the hundreds of people who have followed us during this expedition and with whom I have shared my daily feelings  and reflections. Hopefully some of you will follow the outcomes of our research in scientific literrature but for all of you, enjoy the summer and let’s try not to live our lives like ants on top of a hot stove!
Rudy

Day 27

Today is a special day as it is our last sampling day. We have so far managed to get 15 samples well spread across China, so the pressure is off and we can start to relax. We started the day with a European type breakfast (ie. Coffee, cereals, yougourts, fruit, cakes & orange juice!). We went down to the local market on board a local taxi - a sort of Dell boy three wheeled vehicle. At the market for the first time since our arrival there were no live fish…all frozen. This is because all the local rivers are dry. We travelled for an hour to the next city and again no fish as all the local river are dried up. It is heartbreaking to see large rivers without any water, not a drop. Especially as rivers are the life blood of Chinese society. The causes of such an environmental disaster are unclear but one thing is certain, it is not going to get better with the cities increasing at such a fast pace. According to Yahui, the government plans to bring water from the south to the north through a system of canals. So no water no fish. On the way back, I asked to stop to take a picture of these dry rivers that I could use later for a lecture. A guy came from nowhere to ask what we were doing, then he mentioned an old small reservoir at the top of the mountain and we decided to pay a visit. After a couple of kms of dirt track where the car nearly sunk in the mud, we arrived at the top of the mountains to find a small reservoir (i.e. essentially a large pond) where local teenagers were fishing with home made fishing rods cut from a tree. The reservoir seemed full of fish and the kids had caught..our topmouth gudgeon! Excited we set up some traps and after 30 mins they were holding hundreds of topmouth and nothing else.Life is so strange. On our last day on a lucky stop we were directed to this quiet stunning place in the middle of nowhere, and after so many difficulties finding our fish during the expedition, it was right there waiting for us in its thousands. The fish have been isolated in the reservoir for over 30 years, very similar to our topmouth population in the UK. The circle is now closed, we are heading back to Beijing where we are preparing ourselves for a long day tomorrow, processing the collection of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Rudy

Day 26

Whooah…morning market today was like a bad hangover, in silence like three ghosts (we left Yah to sleep longer as he has to drive all day) we wandered the road of Kangping in search of the colourful parasols indicative of the market. When we arrived a local fisherman had 8 little topmouth gudgeon waiting for us but said that we should have come at… 4 if we wanted to get a chance to get any topmouth. Very funny.
After breakfast we headed up to the local abandoned reservoir, which was a stunning nature reserve with lots of mature ponds (I took a sample of water + sediments for Genoveva) and set up our traps following the advice of a local angler. When we asked if the fish was present and where should we fish, he said yes there are a lot and pointed out to a location as far from where he was as possible. After an hour fishing, and no fish in our traps we realised that all around the world anglers are all the same!!
We headed up for a smaller reservoir further up the catchment, there we had more luck, we met local fishermen who emptied their traps for us and that was enough for us to get a sample. All done with good heart with no charge, no negative feeling pure altruism something we have forgotten in our part of the world. The lake was riddled with maze traps, which are illegal in China but that everyone uses with a general consensus that it is illegal. This is the most amusing side of China and Chinese people who are full of complexity and contradictions which could at first be unsettling for our rational culture but which is in fact very refreshing as it allows the complexity of life and its daily contradictions to be integrated without having to confront or resolve them aggressively. Their society is full of subtlety and poetry, far from our ‘communist state’ stereotypes and we have a lot to learn from it.
This is a good occasion to introduce some Chinese sayings such as "Like climbing a tree to catch a fish" (waste of time) or" like asking a blind man for directions" (another waste of time) or one well suited for our leaders, "a new bottle filled with old wine" (a superficial change). Enough of that, I am being unfair with our leaders as I look at the sky from the bottom of a well (anybody know what that could mean?).
Lunch time in a local restaurant and guess what we had, fried topmouth gudgeon! Not bad but I will stay with sea bass when I return if you don’t mind.
That's it, we are now heading toward Chéngdé a town three hours from Beijing. Used to be a summer welcome retreat from Beijing for several emperors starting with the first Quing dynasty. I am not sure if we will have time to look at it but there is apparently a jaw-dropping colossal statue of Guanyin.
Genoveva and Rafa good luck for the final on sunday. It is broadcast here at 2.30 am but we will be watching...hopefully with both eyes open :-)

Day 25

The tiredness is starting to take its toll and itis becoming harder and harder to wake up at 5.3am to go to the local market. We didn’t find many specimens in the early morning market today but yesterday we met someone who claimed he could get us a sample of 100 fish. After receiving no news from this contact we headed off to meet him at the seven family village.When we arrived, there was only his wife, two feet in the mud on the side of a busy road trying to sell a few fish in a bin. A few negociations later she agreed to phone her husband who for a substantial payement finally agreed to go and check his traps…then we got our 100 fish! The fish looked different from other places with the head much smaller in proportion to the rest of their body. Genoveva, the fish are preserved in formalin for parasites, life history traits and morphology but fish are individually marked with a fin clip in alcohol for additional genetic analyses. When possible another sample is preserved in alcohol for parasite study and stable isotope analyses.We processed the fish on the side of the muddy road with over fifty women, children and men attracted from all around to see the foreigners who were so interested in such a small fish. They all made fun of us throughout the processing of the samples but all in a friendly maner. They will never look at this fish in the same way again though…Then we quickly headed on our way back to Beijing as we have a couple of river systems to sample before further work on the Academy collections. The weather was miserable, lots of rain and fairly cold. The distances between any sampling locations are massive. It is a bit like sampling in Paris in the morning and staying in Marseilles in the evening.Throughout our journey we have discovered the rural part of China, with clearly defined climatic regions, with the agriculture of maze in the North , wheat in the middle and rice in the south. We also discovered the highest caused of death for Chinese between 25 & 45 years old…motorways. These are lethal and on many occasions I thought that it would be the end of us. The trucks are all overloaded to such an extreme that the roads are littered with pot holes that a team of legionnaires tries to repair every day.Tonight we are staying in Kangping, a somewhat rundown town in the North of Shenyang (Liáoning Province). Here people are more discrete in their surprise of seeing foreigners walking their streets. When they have a chance they ask Yahui where we come from and he replies in a debonaire style ‘Ingua’ meaning England.We will all welcome some sleep as we have agreed on a 5.30am morning (although the hotel manager recommended going to the market at 4…!)

Day 24

This morning after checking the local market we rapidly headed North towards Harbin and the Amur River basin. Torrential rain all day and massive pot holes in the road made our progression fairly slow. This part of the country looks very industrial with an old look of a 70’s communist town as you imagine it from our Western perspective. People here are much taller than in other parts of the country (Russian influence!), are louder when they talk, their dishes are massive and they are not so excited to see foreigners although you still have the occasional Helloooo!
After locating the river and speaking to the locals we rapidly understood that no living creatures could be found in these local black rivers as they are so heavily polluted. So trying to waste no time we went further North trying to find better waters. On the road we found local fishermen in a village called “the seven families” who had already sold out their topmouth gudgeon for the day (highly prized here, I am not sure why) but that they will get some for us tomorrow morning (let’s wait and see). We need a sample from here as the local temperatures in the winter regularly plunge to -40 oC and goes up to +30oC in the summer. It would be interesting to see how the fish have adapted to these extreme temperatures.
Something, I haven’t mentioned so far in the blog (although it fills up quite a lot of our discussion, like old soldiers comparing their wounds) is the state of public toilets in China! You have some really wicked ones with a ditch over which you squat and separated by small walls. When you enter, you have to hyperventilate as the foul smell attacks the back of your throat and from time to time you have the pleasure of seeing a head poking over the wall and saying hellooo!
Tonight, we are all exhausted, a mixture of the driving, the drop in temperature (fit is the first time we have worn our jumpers) and disappointment with our fish collection. We can see that time is running out and we are all anxious to make sure we complete our collection and make this expedition and overall success.
Finally, we had all a deep thought for our friend and colleague Bernd after the football last night (we know the feeling) and say to Rafa and all online Spaniards "Hola" and good luck for the final!
It is midnight here and tomorrow we wake up at 5.30 so straight to bed now and no bedtime story ;-)

Day 23

This was not a day to be remembered. We headed toward Dandong, the border town with North Korea and arrived there at lunch time. In an absolute moment of decadence we had a KFC over looking the border (not proud of it!). This was one of those surreal moments where you are not quite sure where you are.Someone tells you that behind the Chinese flag the coastline is a country where a few million people are suffuring daily and you are swamped by an inevitable feeling of voyeurism and guilt about being on the good side of the fence.
Reloaded with our Americanised lunch we headed up towards the mountains. Yes, Fred China is a big country (no actually it is huge!) and to get to a place and get our fish we need to drive long distances. As part of our study we aimed at collecting this small fish from across the geographical range in the native part of China. It was a deliberate choice to go for coverage rather than high resolution in one location. Anyway, we found a lovely river in the mountains but our fish was not there or according to the locals very low in number. I suggested to Yahui that we should check the reservoir as it is the place where our fish normally do best but we had to pay to get in and he refused saying that was not a good location to fish. So we spent most of our afternoon trying to find such good location but without success. At the end of the day we met a couple of local fishermen who told us that the only place to get the fish as they were abundant was the reservoir… (very frustrating). Anyway, this was not an easy moment as losing face is not part of our host's tradition so we headed up to a local hotel and for some dinner (Californian noodles, equivalent to McDonalds in China during the 80’s). By the way,for dinner the hotel was offering some giant living worms (or parasites) which was not my cup of tea. After dinner, Yahui said “I have an idea why don’t we go and fish the reservoir after dinner as it is still open”…but after further lengthy diplomatic talks we headed up towards the local river to fish and caught…nothing!
We went back to our room exhausted from a frustrating day and felt that the day had escaped us without having been able to do much.

Day 22

What a day! The most astonishing moment so far. We set off this morning from Xingcheng and as usual checked the local market but it was essentially marine species. One of the rare towns that still retains its original city wall from the Ming dynasty. Then we drove deeper into Manchoury territory (Liáoning Province) and we went off road through little villages trying to find the river. After a lot of hesitation about whether the car would make it or not, we finally located a stunning part of the river surrounded by mountains. Not a soul just us, the sunshine and the feeling of being alive. It was magical. Yahui taught me how to use the throw net (harder than it seems) and I kept catching our fish despite poor throws while he couldn’t catch any although his throws were very pro… beginner’s luck! This part of the country is called the Gulin of the North with a well known ice valley (the road we took). We were on a little cloud all day and greatly missed Bernd who would have loved it. This part of China is not as touristy as other part of the China and it is dictated by the wild and imposing landscape. There is a constant breeze coming from the Pacific which makes the high temperature very pleasant. Definitely a place to come back.

Tonight we ended up in Zhuanghe a few km down from Dandong, the border town with N. Korea where we are planning to go tomorrow morning. Yahui has some contacts there so we should be able to get a sample from N & S Korea which would be interesting as all their rivers have a very different history to the Chinese ones we sampled.

For dinner we went to a Korean restaurant which consisted of a barbecue incorporated in the table and everyone cooked their own food. Lovely. To digest our feast we went to the square to play a local game which consists of juggling some metal coins attached to a crown of featherswith your feet . You see people playing it all around China in parks and streets with all generations and sexes. I will bring a couple back to the UK (they cost 2p each) and start this Chinese game as a fashion in Bournemouth. I always told my wife that I was a fashion guru but she had some doubts…;-)

Day 21 photo

Day 21

Started the day well with a good sample of fish from Cangzhou in the bay of Bo Hai (south east of Beijing). We left early but got caught in one of these gigantic traffic jams. Our driver decided to take the motorway the "wrong way" to try and go back to the previous exit. It was the most frighting 15 minutes for a long time! I even took a shot of a giant green truck passing by... Anyway we are all alive and back on track although we have lost 3 hours of our schedule which means that tonight we are only in Xingcheng, a local coastal town not far from the North Korean border. The good news is that we had time to stop and see the Great wall of China, it is Gate number 4 right at the start of the wall (near Qinhuangdao). With the mountains as a backdrop and the tourists gone it was a very relaxing moment.So tonight we stayed in this little hotal on the coast and I am getting bitten by a hoard of mosquitos! Tomorrow we should be reach Dandong on the North Korean border. We will try to get some fish from there as it is a small coastal river flowing to the pacific ocean. From a scientific point of view it is interesting as all these little coastal rivers and the Amur basin used to be connected before being geographically isolated at a later stage. Today the temperature rose up to 41oC with a beautiful blue sky but in the car it was sauna for all despite our air conditioning being on at full blast. On the menu tonight there was dog and other exotic meals...I have to say it will be relaxing back home to go to dinner without having to be apprehensive...unless it is my wife cooking (he he, just joking she is the best cook in town!).

Day 20

Today we have tried to catch up with our schedule and have driven over 850 km. So far we have driven 9723km and we should have another 5000km to do before our return to Beijing. We are now in Cangzou in the South East of Beijing. Our destination is the North Korean border where we have one of our sites. Tomorrow we will pass the start of the Great Wall near Qinhuangdao. Today on our way we crossed another section of the Great Wall near Jingxing. It is always worrying to see Yah our driver to drive for so long with the heat (37°C), I am always worried that he is going to nod off so I try to keep awake at the back, looking in the mirror for some early signs of fatigue… We stopped on our way to Taiyan the capital of Shānxī Province to have the car serviced. It’s good in China, there is no need for an appointment, you arrive, they do the job on the spot (filter + brakes in our case) and you have a room with TV and a bay window to look at the mechanics mending your car. It gives you more confidence that they are actually doing the job they say they do, not like in England!
Today all our discussions were about the defeat of Argentina, we have redone the match more than once. There is no other way of seeing it, Germany played really well. Rob pointed out that England at least scored two goals which made the defeat more respectable. I received a text from Bernd at 00.30 blowing his trumpet from his hotel in Beijing (fair play). I have to say that Rafa said it all along but I just didn’t believe him. Now the last few matches will be in the middle of the night for us so we will see the highlights during breakfast. I have a PhD student who is now in S. Africa instead of doing his fieldwork. Sui , I know you are following us from down there, come back!
Finally, a month before we were at Guilin university (where I gave the lecture) there was a visit of Gerardus’t Hooft nobel prize winner in Physics and his wife. He wrote “to the children of Guilin, please be curious about the world you live in; dream about your future, and plan to excel in whatever your ambitions will be”. I found it so beautiful that I wanted to share it with you as it is also so close to my thoughts.
Rudy

Day 19

Today we caught some fish in a reservoir. The day didn’t start very well as we didn’t find any fish in the market and by 10 we were still empty handed. We finally found a little reservoir and local owners who allowed us to set some traps. A couple of hours later the first two traps were empty, the third one had 5 fish and the last one had 24 fish! Hurray.
Yahui originally made a deal with the local owners that he would buy the fish and stay at their place for lunch but for arguments that would escape any wise western scientist he refused to pay them and went back to town for lunch…I think he was keen to get a specific type of soup that he spotted there last night.:-)
Anyway now we are back on the road trying to catch up with lost time. There is a feeling in this expedition that we are always running after time, a sort of race against ourselves and the demands from referees when we will try and publish the results. I can see the comments, you have only caught 30 fish which is on the low side or why didn’t you get another sample from that location etc…
Today the weather is cooler with a 29 °C max and no sunshine. We have a mutually interested discussion with Yahui on the need to have free access to the internet. His view is that internet freedom is dangerous and a good example is when you see student s using guns in America for mass killings on university campuses. For example, in China you have a limited access to international news and “live” radio programmes are broadcast with 12 hour delays… Not for me to judge.

Day 18

Day18
We visited the early market but as we thought their was no wild caught fish as local rivers are dried up. Then we went to the airport to drop Bernd and got stuck in a giant traffic jam. Xi’an is a huge city but they are currently building a town within the town for about an additional 350000 people (as much as Bournemouth and Poole together!). We have our eyes wide open and we can’t believe what we are seeing, it seems as though its from a bad science fiction film and difficult to imagine where the resources (i.e. water, electricity etc.) will come from. It is clear that conservation of natural  systems is not a priority and puts all of our occidental views into perspective…
The northen part of the country is poorer and it is clearly noticable when going through the different towns & villages. The soil is dry and there is a constant smog giving a yellow colour to the air and the surrounding landscape. The Yellow river is gone in this part of China making the sampling of our fish impossible. We will try to get out of this province asap as we have still a lot to do in the Northen part and the Amur river towards Russia. Then we will go down  to sample on the boarder with North Korea (the river is the border line). Tonight we stopped in Sanmenxia, a very industrial city which saw its glory years during Mao with one of the first large dam's built in China...not anymore.

Response to Rafa: I have to say that when Rob & Bernd play majong it's a bit fishy! As for Spain meeting Germany, no chance with the Messy & Tevez they will eat the Germans alive for breakfast ;-)

Day 17

We stayed in DanJiangkou four hours south of Xi’an, the terracotta army town. We found some aquaculture ponds outside the town where we set up our nets and went for breakfast, packed up our bags and looked at our traps, processed 15 fish then set the nets again went for lunch, back to the traps for an additional 15 fish. Then we had to hurry as we drove up to Xi’an through the mountains. Temperature when processing the fish reached the 40s and Yahui had to use his new fan to give some breeze. The salty drops of sweat pearling down our forehead into our eyes made processing the fish challenging. It was also the 2nd birthday of my little girl Miriam (the same date as the aniversary of the birth of the communist party in China!). It was difficult not to be with her on that occasion and on the phone she seemed so far away…I guess she was. Tonorrow Bernd is taking the plane back to Beijing where he will spend the weekend. It is sad to finish the trip without our red giant but on the bright side we will have a welcome increase of space in the car!!!
From Danjiangkou to Xi’an you pass a small chain of moutains and on the other side the climate is totally different. Still very hot but no water (Mediterrenean type). All rivers are dried up. This is typica,l too much water in the south and not enough in the north!
In the evening as we arrived very late we were restricted to where we could eat for our last meal with Bernd. We found a little street restaurant (barbecue, few salads and a cold beer ;-) and I started a game where we had to think of an emotion and draw a picture to express it. It was to see if we could communicate our emotions without the language barrier. It was great fun, and the people in the restaurant took part. It doesn’t seem that cultural differences were a barrier to communicating our emotions.He is fascinated by our size and took a picture of us saying that when his son is older he will show him the picture and tell him about this trip and make all possible for his son to go to university. He also said that us all being together was fate…
After a nice evening together we went back to our scruffy hotel where a dead rat was lying on the stairs. Never mind, we are so tired nothing will stop us sleeping.

Message from Rob

Thanks everybody for the kind words on England's unfortunate defeat. I think we all agree that the best team won on the day - i.e. the team of officials in disallowing our goal! Anyway, there is no point in being bitter and good luck Germany in the next round, as I'm sure they'll need it!

At the time, the football provided some welcome relief from the constant rain we were enduring last week but now it is blue skies and bright sunshine, including the morale of the team as we have been finding our fish once more. So unlike my nation's football team, we refused to be beat and are marching on!

Rob.

Day 16

We have reworked our schedule for the northern part of oursampling. Some stages seemed to far apart to make it realistic. We want to be back in Beijing on the 12th to process the specimens offrom the museum collection.Tonight we have arrived in Danjiangkou which is a relative small city in Chinese terms but bigger than most of our capital cities! This is a city which has sprung from nowhere in the middle of the mountains mainly as the result of the construction of a large ded (see picture). After 2 weeks here none of us can still come to terms with this side of China. I think mentally we were not prepared to see such a modern society and such wealth.
The new driver is getting used to us and we try to teach each others some of our native language...without great success as the Chinese language is so difficult for us to memorise and the voice intonations are so different. In any case it is a good source of fun in the car when Yahui tries to say "Arc de Triumph" and I try to say "Hongzehu Lake Huihe River"

In two days Bernd is leaving us to go back to Beijing and then London. The car will feel empty and we will miss him as he is the one who is most curious about the local food extravaganza. Tonight he was up for snake yesterdayit was frogs. But Rob and I keep reminding him that on the second day he ordered some pig stomach in a brine which after testing a tiny piece he left untouched rambling something like "it doesn't taste like the one I had when I was a child back in Germany" :-)

I've only slept about 3 hours per night in the last three days and I feel pretty rough despite trying to catch up in the car. So now here it is 00h30 and I am going to bed. Tomorrow wake up at 5h45 :-(

Rudy

Day 15 photo

Processing fish samples after a game of Majong...

Day 15

We have decided to catch up with our schedule and we left Guilin at 9h00 and arrived in YueYang at 8h00. We are all exhausted by the journey. Our new driver Ya is ok although with a less agressive style than Haito. He is fairly young and left his wife and 6 months old baby at home to share the rest of our journey. On our way we stopped at a 100 year old canal linking the Yangtze river to the Pearl river system. Near the canal there was an old woman selling skewers of bitterling and topmouth gudgeon, Bernd and Rob tried...I bought some live ones for genetic analysis! Tonight, on our way to find a place to eat, I noticed a tank full of topmouthin a restaurant, I tried to buy some more but the negotiation with Yahui and the restaurant owners ended up with us having dinner there. She grabbed a live grass carp from the bottom tank that she scaled and cut on the pavement before putting it in a sauce made of chili peppers. This province is well known for very hot hot food and it didn't disapoint us. We all prayed hard for our stomachs to handle it. Then I realised that all restaurants were selling topmouth would you believe. I am not sure who commented that the French and Chinese shared a passion for food and I agree with that but I don't normally eat my subject of study unless it's a sea bass!

This part of China is the birth place of Mao and communism. It is also extraordinary to see giant cities coming out of the ground like mushrooms. The scale of development has no comparison with anything I have seen before. It is difficult to imagine that there will be enough jobs for everyone wanting to live in these new cities? A lot of people here think this is a big bubble. The only thing I know is that in a decade this will be a completly different country.


Any captions yet on the raincoat picture?? Come on I can think of few ;-0 Perhaps you would like to see Rob in his tango man outfit??

Rudy

Day 14 photo!

Day 14

Day 14

Today we have a day off in Guilin where I am scheduled to give a lecture at three (see the lecture annoncement in red). It has rained a lot and when it stops the heat is on with 100 % humidity. Just before the lecture we went to visit a large cave in the middle of the town, Rob and Bernd bought tourist raincoats! I thought this picture deserved a caption competition so please be creative:-) Rob didn't give me permission to blog his picture...:-( never mind you can still comment and I might be able to convince him!

Thanks for your football after match commentaries but they hardly got a smile from our English man and as a French man living in England I sympathised as I feel that I have lost twice!!

There is always something out of the ordinary in the streets of China. A man transporting fish in aquaria on the back of his moped, or the fisherman who defies the law of gravity by setting his fishing chair on two little planks of wood. This is the beauty of this country, the free spirit despite what we can think from our western view. It is extremely refreshing. Tomorrow we are going to hit the road. I have done some washing but with the humidity nothing dries and it now stinks. The journey in the car will be fun...

Before the match!

Day 11-12

In the last two days we have travelled to the Guangdong province (Canton). We haven't seen the sun once since we arrived in China and it now hasn't stop raining for the last 5 days. All rivers are flooded, chocolate brown and difficult to fish. We have now found out that our fish is either not present or in very low abundance in large rivers which is the reason why we haven't caught it in the last three days. It is also a revelation for our Chinese colleagues who in general have very poor ecological knowledge of their fish community. The country is so big that their first priority is to sort out their taxonomy and a vague idea of species distribution.

Tonight we are in Wuzhou and moving back up to Guilin (where they fish with cormorants). There is a colleague of Yahui’s who works at the University there and has already collected the samples for us. I will give a seminar on fish invasion and an insight into our project.

Haito, our driver, is leaving us tomorrow as his dad is unwell and we will have to find someone to replace him. He has been so reliable and good driver so far that we are all worried that we won’t find someone as good. The roads here in China are lethal with no rules on over taking and tailgating at high speed in tremendous rain. Today we had a near miss accident and we all felt that we did well to invest in four new tyres at the start of the trip!

Yesterday, lunch time was the highlight of the day when we had pot noodles! It made a change from intestines, stomach or other local delicacies...I know that you all think that we are a bunch of softies but your perspective on food takes a leap forward after 12 days here.

Bernd and Rob are slowly getting ready for tomorrow’s contest. They try to get round it by saying that at least they are in the second round and that it wouldn’t be shameful to be knocked out by such a good team as Germany or England but the truth is that one of them will be gutted the next morning in the car :-)
Tonight, I took a picture of Rob where he looks bigger than Bernd. I suspect that it is psychological warfare ahead of tomorrow night...I leave you to judge.

Rudy


NB: We are planning to get back to Beijing two days before schedule to revisit the Academy’s fish collection which means that we are going to slightly modify our initial route

Day 10

WWe have been in the Fujan province where there was heavy rain. Roads were flooded everywhere and we had to take a long way around. We didn't get any fish from our past two locations so morale is low. Maybe tomorrow. At the market, I feel like a boxer who gets knocked out by the welfare of animals. Birds, rabbit and guiney piggs skinned alived. It is quite upsetting and difficult to get used to.

Day 9

We didn't manage to get a sample today which is frustrating but that's the way it goes. The roads here are flooded and yesterday we were blocked on country roads as lots of trucks & cars went off the road into ditches and had to be rescued. The rivers are chocolate brown. I can't stand the market anymore, it is so disgusting and animals are so badly treated that it is difficult to eat anything after seeing it. Today we stayed in a very good hotel and they had...english tea & coffee with...cakes! Yippee! Bernd and Rob are facing a tense evening as England and Germany will now be playing each other on Sunday!
In response to Irene's comment, I anticipated the defeat of the blues during the first round which is why I organised the sampling during the world cup. It helps me save face, something I am learning from my Chinese colleagues! Imagine going back to the office after loosing against both Mexico & SA :-(

Day 7

We are getting tired as we normally wake up at 5 am and do not go to bed before 12 midnight. We catch up with sleep in the car but it is not enough. Fish prove to be harder to catch than expected due to flooded rivers but we keep focused and I will have to make some key descisions about our sampling strategy.Breakfast, which consists of hot dishes (beef, duck etc.) rice, dumplings and rice soup is becoming harder and harder for us to face. I have never been very fussy about food but I have always taken cheese, fruit, coffee and orange juice for granted...my mistake. Tonight before dinner we found some local fisherman who have accepted to set our traps, we will check them tomorrow morning. I hope to have more luck than our football team, I am not domenech so the jury is still out.Tonight with the meal we had a rice spirit which had a poisonous snake marinated in it (58o), then we went to have traditional tea served with as much ceremony as for a good Bordeaux.I took a little film that I wanted to put on you tube for you to see but here the site is blocked so when I tried to access it the internet connection crashed! When I rebooted I could only access the Chinese version of Google. Yesterday Yahui said that China was like any other country. Superficially, it resembles an open society but appearances are deceptive, particularly if you try to go deeper for example the internet.
Response to comments:
Isa, the whole of China is a just a succession of aquacultures but the infrastructure is very basic and not suitable for student placement. In addition, the language would be a real barrier. However, an organised visit for them would be an eye opener on how efficient aquaculture takes place. Here most of the fish that Chinese eat are freshwater and not salmonids, very different from France. Lots of freshwater shrimps.Youval, you would love it here, no need to chum heavy to catch tonnes of fish. Good stuff for your catch you are becoming a real pro not only at baseball.Denise, there are so many amazing things on so many different levels that you want to communicate them in real time. It is a bit like when you were little and couldn't keep
a secret!

Day 6

Day five was frustrating as we encountered some difficulties collecting our fish. The time schedule between two stages is short giving us limited option but to do some intensive sampling. In addition we had our first flat tyre so we had to find a suitable garage in Nanjing (large city in central east China). This took us a good couple of hours but luckily I managed to hijack their computer to send a message!

We normally wake up at 5 am and go to bed at 12pm. Today was also a frustrating sampling day. After a lot of effort we have managed to get a decent number of fish for our future analyses but it means that we are now behind our schedule and had to stop 4 hours away from our destination. We have to accept the constraints of the terrain and local culture. This is when you realise that planning something on paper and delivering it is something different. I don't think I fully appreciated how large China is. So far we have only done about 2000km in 5 days. We are all sleeping in the car synchronised by Yahui's load snoring :-)
Otherwise, in terms of landscape the countryside has gone from wheat production (above the shanghai area) to rice production (below), going though intensive wood factories. It is reflected in the northen part being poorer than the shanghai province with more modest houses in the north and large mansions and private ownership of the rivers in the southern part. We have all travelled around the world in the past but still every moment is a moment of surprise with constant contradictions. It is absolutely fantastic. It is also funny to see Yahui, who in our last two stages could already not understand the local dialect and found it very difficult to communicate. Although people are all supposed to speak mandarin they still use their local dialect from valley to valley. Apparently it will become more noticeable tomorrow...

The children in the towns and villages we have been through react to us as my children react to mickey mouse in Disney world! It is a mix of fear and excitement, waving their hands well hidden behind their parents. Parents ask to have their photograph taken with us.

Otherwise we pass the time in the car discussing football. We are fed from time to time with an update by Yahui. Of course he stays neutral in a French-Anglo-German analysis of who should win the World cup...the French (hahah). We have heard that the French team were striking against the coach who sent Anelka back home (if we understood correctly) and we all thought that it could only happen to French players!

Tonight Rob is not feeling great as he has had a sore throat for the last few days and he has started taking antibiotics. Our driver has a stomach upset ( I was expecting that from one of us but so far we are holding tight).

After tomorrow we are going to enter the Southern Region and in response to the comment about the Chinese proverb, they say that in the south province they eat everything which flies except aeroplanes and everything with four legs except tables...tonight we went to our first dog restaurant (see picture). Luckily it is not kosher so not for me!

Day 5

At our last stop we had some trouble finding a decent sample of fish. However, the interesting thing is that with what we have collected we have clear phenotypic differences. Some fish have a very large dark band on the side which goes right through the tail. Genetics will tell us if it is only a phenotypic difference. On the way to our next site we had a flat tyre (it had to happen when you see the state of some of the places we're going) and I am now blogging from a garage in Nanjing a large city on the lower Yangtze River (the capital of the south ). As soon as the car is fixed we are heading off further south.

Bernds stomach is starting to complain about soup and stir fry for breakfast (and no coffee!!!!!)

Day 4

Woke up at seven and decided to go to the local market instead, we found lots of TMG for sale and Yahui bought some (150). Then we went back to the hotel to process the fish. It was surreal, us in a Stalinian designed room processing our samples along the window ledge and talking about football (Bernd claiming that Germany will be winning the world cup…). The Chinese breakfast consists of a selection of hot dishes including eggs, duck, mushrooms and noodles accompanied by a hot rice soup which is not the easiest thing to digest while stuck in the car.We set off for the south at 11h00…we are not getting used to being cramped in the car for such a long distance. I can see it being a major issue for the days to come. Today we passed the Yellow River. Most of the Northern rivers are extremely low when not dried. It is a combination of mismanagement and climatic conditions. In many ways China is a really strange country, a mix between Africa, Russia and Europe at the start of the 20th century. People look at us, laughing at our funny foreign faces and often ask to have their photo's taken with us. They all seem very extraverted, not at all what you would expect after so many years of a communist regime.Tomorrow wake up at 4.30am, direction the local market to sample TMG. We are desperate to go and collect the fish ourselves but it is a difficult message to get across to Yahui who wants to limit our efforts. In this province (Shangong) there should be two different types of TMG called floweri and Parvula and hopefully we will come across these two types in the market. Either these are P.parva that have a dramatic change of look or a separate species. Either way this needs to be checked.I missed the family from day 1 and it seems weird to imagine that I will not see them for another 4 weeks. But our work is so exciting that it helps to fill the void.

Day 3

First day on the road. Left Beijing in torrential rain and drove down to Heingshui county (Hebei province). The roads here in China are deadly. The road conditions are excellent but Chinese people use them to dry the wheat, over tae left and right on the emergency shoulder and practice U turns on the motorway.. . Our driver is not phased by it as he does the same!
We saw the first sampling location which is a large lake which local fishermen fish with fyke nets. We decided to meet them at 7am the next day to get our first sample of P.parva . We saw one P.parva which was the same morphotype as the European one. So far so good.
The car is cramped and it was not long before we had numb legs! It will be interesting to see if we will get used to it…

Day 3

This is it, the car is finally loaded. I am not sure where we are going to put the samples as it seems that there is no space left in the car! This morning we visited the collection of topmouth at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was extraordinary, with access to the earliest collection of Nichols !949. It was clear that there is a huge variability of forms between P.parva populations to the point that some genetic work will have to be performed to confirm the P.parva identity (see attached photos). In any case, it seems that the various morphotypes defined by Nichols are present. Confusing but also very exciting!We are now on our way to the first site, there has been a lot of flooding in the south where we are heading with about 100 people dead. But Yahui suggested that we still continue with our initial schedule.
Rudy

Day 2

  In China when you're not looking for fish a good occupation is food. Last night on the menu there was turtle soup and grilled catfish. The animals were kept live in an aquarium and people chose the one they wanted!

Day 1

We haven’t slept for the last 24 hours and all three of us are struggling to keep awake but it is tactically planned  to beat the jet-lag (wishful thinking). We had a quick trip to the local supermarket for lunch - raw carp, and nice cake for desert (hard on the outside soft in the middle…).

Tomorrow we will go to the forbidden city while Yahui finalises the equipment then a quick check of the Academy's fish collection to inspect their tomouth gudgeon samples (prononced Mài Suì Yú in Chinese). According to Nichols there are 5 species of Pseudorasbora parva in China altipinna; depressirostris; parvula; tennis; fowleri; monstrosa. Although some species are dubious it may reflect the great phenotypic  plasticity of this species or according to Yahui it could reflect the existence of 2 different species in Chinese waters…we should find out soon.

Day-0

This is it! I said good night and good bye to my four lovely children. It will be difficult for the oldest two as we have never been separated that long before and for me. The youngest two are not sure what China means but they seemed all excited about it, going through the house shouting CHINA CHINA!

Rob sent me a last minute update on Chinese customs. One of these is that we should not be surprised to hear the taxi driver "let one go" during the journey...sudenly the 10000km drive by car seems a long way! I will let you know how easily we adapt to the local customs :-)

NB: The expedition will last for 30 days.
Rudy

Expedition Day -3

Tip of the day: When you organise an expedition to China the first hurdle when you are French is to get a visa...7 attempts later here we are ready to kick off.
Leaving Monday the 14th @ 16h30, luggage not ready yet but starting to look like a chemist as we have (lead by the French hypochondriac) prepared ourselves against all kinds of nasty surprises :-).
 On arrival we will do some shopping (waders, waterproofs etc.) as it is cheaper in China, visit the forbidden city and drive off the next day for our first sampling site.So far it seems straight forward.

 Rudy