Going to Borneo to Work with Bears!

Wow. I really am. Going to Borneo to work with bears. It takes quite a bit for me to get romantically giddy about Indonesia and the work that I am doing, but that just about does it.

I am leaving day after tomorrow, mid afternoon, to fly back to the island where I lived for almost seven years as a kid. I’m not actually going back to anywhere I have been; I am flying into Balikpapan in East Kalimantan, then heading out of town to Sungai Wain National Park. This is home to a sunbear rehabilitation center where I plan to spend the next three months. I’m not sure exactly what I will be doing. I know I’ll be working on the community education portion of the project; the Rehabilitation Center gets visitors from all over Indonesia, and tons of local kids from Balikpapan. I will also probably be prepping a new enclosure for the bears, including putting electric wire around trees so the bears to do not pull them down. In enclosed areas, bears make their way through all the trees, tearing them down to look for grubs and whatever else. There is so much I do not know.

Right now, I am just so excited to see bears again, and get back to Borneo. The house I will be living in has 30 cats. The forest surrounding me is home to three kinds of gibbon, civits, bearcats (binturong), which you can supposedly see if you walk alone during the right time of day. There are trails you can take to wander through the woods. It will be such a contrast from the academic work I have been doing with CIFOR. Of course, I will still be working for CIFOR; I have papers that need to get written and published about the research that I did in Jambi. But that will be second priority to doing whatever needs to be done, with bears. :)