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