Stuck in the Mud

     Now I know what I am up against. We had a late start yesterday because the rental car didn't arrive at the hotel until 11AM, and we got detoured for lunch at this cool market thing where they recirculated water over the tin roof to keep it cool inside. We then set out for Palian. The drive between Trang and Palian was beautiful; both of sides of the road where heavily vegetated. In most places, the vegetation looked like it was being cultivated in some way or another (because nature doesn't build in straight lines, lolz Prometheus). The trees were unlike anything I had seen before, however. They were tall and skinny, and they had these weird little ceramic bowls attached to their trunks about a foot off the ground. My dad said they were rubber trees, and he was correct! I did not know that there was so much OTHER agriculture going on in the same place as where these shrimp ponds would be, and I cannot imagine what nutrient budgets would look like if estimated for all the different practices taking place here... Probably would not be pretty.
     The ponds were not always visible from the road as I had originally expected. It took some searching with the GPS unit to find them, but, finally, after driving down gravelly side roads and weaving through rubber trees, we arrived at our first ponds. There were a few people milling around who appeared to be caretakers, but they just looked up at us and went back to work. I got the sample, and performed the water quality tests near the car. Testing the samples in the field proved totally unreasonable, however, because I felt rushed by the nearby caretakers' growing curiosity in us, and also because there were bugs swarming everywhere. We needed to come up with a new plan.
     We decided to wait and perform the water quality tests later, at the hotel. In order to do this, we needed to buy a bunch of bottled water, drink some of it, dump the rest out, and then fill each bottle with a different sample. I used the GPS waypoints that I took with the handheld device as labels for the sample bottles, and by the end of the day we had 10 hard-earned water samples rolling around in our trunk. Most of you reading this would not believe the things that I did yesterday in order to obtain these samples.
     The first challenge was at the third sample pond. The road was sort of questionable, but it seemed like we could make it close enough to the pond for me to jump out, grab the sample, and come back quickly. After collecting the sample, we started to drive out, and we just got totally stuck in this mud slick. We tried to push it out for a long while, we stuck branches under the wheels to provide traction, and we even tried lifting it. Finally, we were at a loss, and we trekked through a beautiful rubber tree plantation until we found someone to help us. The man we encountered had a bad knee, so he could not come help us push, but he did call his buddies that brought a TOW TRUCK out into the woods 20 minutes later. They winched us out of the mud slick, and only asked for the equivalent of $33!
     The next set of challenges arose from the different states of the ponds. Some of them were in the process of being drained, and as a result the water level was very low. The banks of the ponds were too high for me to just reach down and fill the bottle, so I had to climb down onto the slick black tarpaulin and slide into the pond. For the ones that were drained, the water was NOT pleasant smelling either, but science is sacrifice, right (lol)!? I also perched on a concrete outcropping at one point and lowered a bamboo pole with a bottle tied to it into the water a couple feet below. I spent a lot of time lying on my stomach and on my side trying to reach the water, and there was more than one person who came over inquisitively. I was surprised; my assumption was that the people would not want us near their ponds, but once they understood what we wanted, they were always okay with it, and oftentimes offered to help!
     After this long day of collection, I came back to the hotel and spent 2 hours testing all of the samples. The results were surprising in some cases, to be expected in others. I am a little worried that the range for which my tests can analyze nitrogen content is not expansive enough to capture how much there actually is in the water. To be clear; there were some readings that were on the highest gradation of the test, and I am wondering if the actual content might be even higher than that... We are setting out for day two of testing during which we will complete the Palian sample, and hopefully start some of the Kantang sample. Luckily for me, Trang is a small province, and the roads between the towns are relatively fast. Stay tuned!