21-10-2005 VIP's
Gige and Andy having breakfast at the market
Egbert had just left when we received two other VIPs: Andy and Irene. We had just finished to sample 10 oligotrofic lakes and were now ready to start in some ‘dirtier’ ones. On satellite images we had identified 2 or 3 lakes near Ceara Mirim –about one hour from Natal- and now we ‘only’ had to find them in the field. It took us about half a day to find the first one, but after that it went fast.
We -our fifth guy was still the one and only Rosemberg- decided to arm our base camp in Ceara Mirim and that turned out to be a good choice. It is a very nice town with buildings from the 19th century that are surprisingly well kept. We found a simple but clean pousada and because they did not serve breakfast we started the day at the antique public market. We could choose from tapioca, meat, rice, cake (the Brazilians have the easy-to-get-used-to-habit to eat cake for breakfast) and bread with a huge piece of fried coalho cheese offered by various ladies in small stands. OK, so far for the ‘Loney Planet’ announcements :-).
Gige folded up in the tent
Work went very well with just two minuses: 1) Gige had to sit folded up in my little tent (alias ‘the sauna’) doing the laboratory work because we were unable to find a replacement for the stolen tent; and 2) the sediment of the lake was so hard that we were not able to take sediment cores which was a pity just now Andy was here.
Most likely the sediment was this hard because the lakes dried up in the past. Drought was exactly a lake property that we tried to avoid in our dataset…
Andy preparing the cayak corer that we never got to use
Counting and weighing the fish - foto by AL
Irene and us having breakfast at the market
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