Jonathan and I are both back in Cat Tien. We have had 3 productive days in the forest so far. We had 3 beautiful, clear days so the forest dried out a bit after the big storm on Thursday. We did some excellent work on re-establishing one transect and were very excited about getting the other 2 completed. We were ready to get out to Bau Sau again and get to work!
We now have a motorbike, but the road is usually pretty muddy, so we rented bikes to see how the road was. It took us 2 hours to get out to the lake- it should've only taken 1 but the crank on Jonathan's bike kept falling off. We arrived, ate some bread, then headed in to the transect.
The terrain here is much different than at Ben Cu. The ground is very muddy with lots of volcanic pumice stone. We hiked in about 2 km and began working. After a few hours of looking for trees that should've had tags on them and didn't, we were exhausted and ready to head back to headquarters. As we started hiking back it started to rain, and kept raining. The thunderstorm came and sat right over us. I was SO terrified! The lightning was so close I couldn't even count to 1-one-thousand! It was all around as we hiked down the trail, which had turned into a stream as all the rain flowed down the trail. When I made it out of the forest, with our bikes, I threw them and myself on the ground. I didn't care if I was covered in leeches, I just didn't want to get struck by lightning!!!
The storm finally passed over, we rode our bikes back through the mud and muck, and I just worked on calming myself down.
We've been back to that part of the forest a few times since then. At first I was really nervous, watching the clouds VERY closely through the canopy of trees. I've managed to calm down and like the forest again!
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