by Malcolm Parsons

We arrived in the small Magar village of Chitre in the afternoon of the 17th, just a short walk down the hill from Gorepani.  Having established that there was only one trekking lodge open in the village, we promptly moved in and later that day chose our first jungle site. 

Our hosts have fairly limited English, so our Nepali is improving a lot since our partners left - we are enjoying the challenge of finding out more about village life in broken Nepali and English.  Our hosts are also showing a great interest in our project - every morning they inquire about whether we have caught our "special mouse" or not, in Nepali. 

After consulting with our hosts, we chose one of their maize terraces as our agricultural site.  The 7 foot tall maize plants made for an interesting site and we had soon created a maze of little paths with only the lines of mouse traps to guide us out!

After trapping was finished in the first two sites, our host Buddie took it upon himself to show us where he thought would be good places to try putting trapping webs.  After 45 minutes of tramping through the jungle up a valley we arrived at an old landslide site surrounded by old forest.  We put one trapping web there and the other round the corner up another valley. 

Although we spent our mornings checking the traps and the evenings baiting them, we had some spare time in the middle of the day to explore.  One day we decided to walk to the nearby village of Shikha to post our postcards.  After an hours walk down the valley we arrived at a small picturesque village, and found the post office.  Unfortunately we had been so concentrated on our mouse-trapping up till then that we forgotten that it was a Saturday - the Nepalese day of rest!

As most of the farmers were making the most of a few dry days by lifting potatoes, we didn't manage to get many farmers for the interview - however we did get a couple of students from the local high school.  The interview was more challenging than the previous ones as our original translators had left but it I think we got more out of it as we had to focus a lot more on communication.

As we approached the end of our trapping we were looking forward to returning to warmer climes, but also feeling a little sad at having to leaving the friendly village of Chitre.