Manjula goes blogging...

After Kuala Lumpur I went to Pondicherry, or Pondy as it is called by residents. I hadn’t been home in 7 years and among other things I was particularly curious to see how much the town had changed. Certainly, the hustle and bustle in this quiet former French colony had increased, but what surprised me was the loss of beach along the town. I remembered a long stretch of substantial beach where we would collect bivalves buried in the sand to feed fish in our marine tanks or search for guitar fish that would wash up with the waves at night. The fishermen would haul in their nets and sort through their fish on the beach and place their traditional fishing catamarams up on the sand to go fishing early next morning. Now that beach has completely disappeared.

This beach erosion has been caused by a recent port built just south of Pondy. The breakwaters at the harbor entrance hinder the natural movement of sand by winds, currents, and the seasonal monsoon, resulting in a pile up of millions of tons of sand south of the breakwaters. Apparently the engineers for the harbor project had foreseen the problem and installed a sand dredger that would pump sand continuously onto the eroding northern side of the harbor. However, the Pondicherry Port Dept. took over the project and the sand dredger was never put to use - as a result, the pipelines have rusted and the submarine tunnels flooded. To put a band-aid on Pondy’s beach problem, the government placed large boulders along the seafront, but with the loss of natural sand barriers offshore, there is little to mitigate or dissipate wave energy, especially during storms and cyclones. The boulders will soon be washed away and the sea wall along Pondicherry’s seafront is in danger of collapsing.

Fishermen who can no longer fish from Pondy in their traditional, non-mechanized boats have now taken to removing and selling mussels and structures around the Pondy piers that all supported a rich marine life. I have never heard of sea turtles nesting in Pondicherry, though the occasional olive ridley nests on the beaches north of the town and eggs are sometimes sold in the Pondy market.

Fortunately, the beach problem is not completely irreversible and some friends are working hard to restore Pondy's charming seafront.

(1984 photo credit: Mitra et al. 2001)

Posted by Manjula Tiwari at 09:24 PM | Permalink

Now I know I told Matthew I wouldn’t blog any bad poetry,

but I have been feeling generally blogless this week and this is the only thing that’s popped into my head. So, I think I will go for it…something written in the early 1990s :)

Let me give you some background: I was on Great Nicobar Island. It had taken almost all day to get across the island to this beach known for its high density of nesting leatherbacks. So, of course, I had to check it out right away. By the time I had surveyed the beach to my satisfaction, it was dark and drizzling and I was tired and wet and covered with sand. I was so much looking forward to a bath and bed. The bath consisted of a mug and bucket procedure in a little clearing surrounded by dark trees, an open sky, sounds of the night, and flickering insects - very peaceful! Bed meant laying down a plastic sheet, putting up a mosquito net, using a backpack as a pillow and falling swiftly asleep. But both bath and bed were still a-long-walk-through-the-forest away. As I trudged along, here is the “haiku” I put together (don’t cringe Matthew!):

Long dark night, weary feet
Light!…….Home?!
Only a firefly…

Posted by Manjula Tiwari at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

To get from Port Blair, the central town in the Andaman and Nicobar Archipelago to Campbell Bay on the southern most island, Great Nicobar, required a four-day journey by ship. When I was not seasick I would sit up on deck watching the flying fish and when we docked at an island I took the opportunity to explore. But my favorite part of the journey was watching the embarkation and disembarkation process when we stopped at an island without a port or a jetty. The first time we arrived at such an island, I stood on deck looking at the idyllic, tropical island in the distance and wondering what would happen next. The ship anchored offshore and blew its horn…..nothing happened for a few minutes and then from around the corner of the island came a group of Nicobarese men and women rowing a slim canoe, much like a Polynesian canoe - there was something so primeval about that scene… Meanwhile people on board lined up with their new purchases ready to disembark. As the little canoe drew up alongside the tall ship, a gangway was lowered, and what followed was fascinating chaos. While the two boats bobbed up and down asynchronously in the choppy waters, people staggered up and down the swaying gangway trying to time getting onto and off the gangway very carefully, others jumped off the ship deck, bleating goats, squealing pigs, and furniture were raised and lowered by rope, young boys climbed up the rope, vegetable baskets fell into the ocean - a very energetic process. I was particularly curious to see how they would get three large drums of oil into the little canoe with everything else. But the drums were simply dropped overboard from deck and by the time the ship was ready to raise anchor, all three drums had washed up onto the island and were being hauled up the beach by a Nicobari…

Posted by Manjula Tiwari at 06:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I met this enchanting old lady enjoying her smoke when I was visiting the Karens - a tribe of Burmese origin in the North Andaman Islands - to hire an experienced boatman to navigate among the many islands that form the Andaman archipaelago in search of sea turtles. I never did find out how long it took her to smoke her local rendition of a cigar…

Posted by Manjula Tiwari at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Banquet dinner at Kuala Lumpur was a very fine traditional Chinese meal of several courses. In addition to other delights, there was octopus on the menu, and the topic of conversation shifted briefly to strange things eaten. I promised Larisa I would blog my gastronomic stories, so here goes:

I think I was first initiated to strange, edible items when I joined the Madras Crocodile Bank in India after college. I suspect it was part of my education to be tough and unsqueamish in the field. We worked with and lived in the vicinity of the Irula tribe - traditional snake and rat catchers of southern India - and as a result my conservative palate was broadened to accept barbecued field mice, minced monitor lizard curry, and roasted termites. Around that time I was also introduced to frog legs (highly irregular in the Indian diet!) by a student from Oxford who was conducting his research on gut contents of a local species of Rana. The legs invariably ended up in the kitchen until the day he used a little too much chloroform on his frogs and dinner made us all very, very sleepy.

These introductions only whetted our appetite and our sense of adventure and we further expanded our list by diving off the south Indian coast to pick things off the rocks to cook. So, by the time I was launched into my first sea turtle project in the Nicobar Islands, I hardly winced when the Nicobari tribals offered me boiled fish covered with hundreds of little black crawling insects in a gesture of hospitality…

Posted by Manjula Tiwari at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)