Three Days to Go...

It feels like we've been preparing for this survey for ages! But finally, after almost a year of planning and fundraising, we have booked the tickets - there's no turning back now. At 11 am on Sunday we fly from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City in the south of Vietnam to begin six months of field work to determine the population status of the Javan Rhino in Vietnam. We'll write more about the survey and the rhinos themselves in future posts.

Sarah has been designing this project for much of the last year, amongst other things, so she's very familiar with all the rhino stuff by now.  Meanwhile, I have been working for BirdLife in Indochina, as a conservation adviser. I left my previous job only a few days ago, so this all feels very new and I'm full of enthusiasm for the project.

Today was my first day in the WWF Hanoi office. I was taught how to blog and how to tweet (is that a verb?). I’ve shunned these new technologies for as long as I possibly could, but now I will be twittering with the best of them. I went for lunch with Tran Minh Hien (Director) and Ruth Matthews (Programme Manager). They are very excited about the project, and I think that they’ll miss having Sarah around the office too. After lunch I did a bit of last minute shopping for the project and headed out with Sarah and John Pilgrim (still of BirdLife in Indochina) for a pie and a pint. There are no pies out there in Southern Vietnam's wilderness….