Baan Ling

There are too many elephants living near our study site, so we live in TKM in a station called Baan Ling, the “monkey house” (no jokes, please). My living conditions are very comfortable considering I am living in rural Thailand. I have a spacious room with my own bathroom and shower, including a (manual) flush toilet in the Western style and cold running (filtered rain)water. I’ve got a nice corner room with a lot of light which is great because we only run the generator for electricity for a few hours at night. Plus, there’s a great hammock!
Others who live at Baan Ling include the rest of Team Langur (Carola, Zach, Richard) and some of the Thai rangers from Team Macaque (Piya, Aim and Tam). We all share a small lab, kitchen, and office. There’s an extensive collection of DVDs and a decent library here from former research assistants which I know will come in handy in the next few months. We also share some basic supplies like bread and ice, but there is plenty of room for individual experimentation with local foods! On the way here we stopped at a fruit market where no one spoke English and had the opportunity to choose fruits we had never seen before (nor knew how to tell if they were ripe). There is also a lot of unusual packaged food like seaweed flavored chips and dried fish strips that seem to resemble jerky. For the most part, trying new foods has been a rewarding experience, though Zach was not the biggest fan of the orange-flavored fermented milk. On the note of milk, many Thais are lactose intolerant so there are tons of soy products over here.