Wow! What a week! Again, very different - maybe next week will start to get more normal again...

Independence Day March through Livingstone

Monday was 24th October, making it Zambia's 52nd Independence Day, in which they celebrate their independence from the British. Britain treating another country and it's citizens terribly... I have to admit it was slightly awkward! There was a large march through the centre of Livingstone followed by a series of performances from dancers, poetry recitals and bands. We joined in the march, walking behind our ALERT banner, and it was good fun and really interesting to see how different people acted - some very seriously marching in silence, while other groups were dancing and singing and clearly really enjoying themselves. We were however clearly out of place, and all felt slightly awkward joining in rather than watching from the side. We were certainly the only mzungus (white people!) marching, and as we walked into the field where the performances were held, everyone else was introduced on loudspeaker and they simply skipped over us. Maybe that was because they simply didn't know who ALERT were - generally people don't know ALERT, but they know Wildlife Encounter which is a separate tourist company, but which is very closely linked to ALERT - or maybe it was because they genuinely believed that we shouldn't be there as non-Zambians. Having said that, it was still all very friendly and a lot of people waved at us as we passed them. After the parade we watched some of the acts, then went for lunch and ice cream at a local restaurant, which was extremely welcome after marching and then standing for a while in the African sun! Headed to the local curio market too and totally cleared out my purse (oops....) before we headed home and hit the pool to cool down. A small kid in the pool decided he wanted to play with us, so we finished the day with a very amusing game of being lions, hippos and hyenas in the pool with him! One of the community interns decided she wanted to be an ostrich... Few things more amusing than watching someone attempting to watch an ostrich swim! I'm definitely going to miss her when she goes back to America in 2 weeks time... Watched the sunset from the pool, then headed home for dinner. All in all, an extremely fun, interesting, and relaxing Monday!

Tuesday went back to normal, with trees in the morning, followed by lesson plan for tomorrow's conservation education in the afternoon. It seems that the mupani bees have decided it's now too hot even for them, so we had another quick and easy session. Again it helped that having had to set off late and be back early (the joys of broken cars - we had to share with the people going to book club at a local school) so our head researcher had chosen another easy plot. I really enjoy trees, which is good because it means that a) I can be the one not complaining, and can keep smiling when everyone else is grumpy because they're stuck with their least favourite job, and b) because we still have about 12 plots to do in the next month! We went out for dinner on Tuesday night to Cafe Zambezi. I had the kudu stew which had been highly recommended, and it was indeed very tender and juicy... unfortunately I think I just don't really like kudu! Never mind!

Mummy and Babies!

Thursday was another slightly odd day... We were doing elephant research all day, and the afternoon was just normal research - with only the researcher, the driver and me. If I'm honest, that is how I like it best. The more volunteers and other interns that are with us, the less there is to do! But still, can't complain that they're normally here helping out - always good to have extra pairs of eyes for spotting. Our current elephant volunteer is amazing at spotting the bushbuck! The morning however, we did not have the researcher, and our boss is ill having been bitten by a spider... something I am very much hoping to avoid! This put me in charge of the vehicle, but I had no idea where we were going!  We were supposed t be driving the section of the park that we have never done, looking for any signs of elephants. I'd been told "don't worry, the driver knows where he is going, you don't need a map", but due to a miscommunication, the driver had no clue where he was going, and we spent the entire morning driving the wrong section of park! Oops... Boss wasn't happy... But at least we confirmed previous data that the elephants don't use that section!

Friday was an extremely frustrating day... We had snare sweep in the morning, and found 17 snares. No issues there - that's 17 lives saved! But the rest if the day was elephant IDs... and that almost killed us...! First of all, that long staring at a screen trying to decide if 2 ears match is enough to send anyone crazy. Secondly, the sheets of paper on which we've been recording the elephants present at each sighting, had been very helpfully thrown out... so we had to spend a ridiculous amount of time just scanning through photos that we had already processed, trying to find which were missing from our lists! So annoying... Third and finally, as a joke one of the volunteers highlighted half of the folders in the female elephants file on the computer, pretending like she was going to delete them... and then did by mistake! That was over 50 elephants just deleted, and if we hadn't been able to restore them, would have set us back months! As it was, it turned out fine as we managed to restore them all, but that wasted another 30 minutes again... Like I said, frustrating day!

Not a bad sunset view....!

Saturday was regular elephant research for the early and afternoon sessions, and IDs for the mid morning session. This was a good day, but it can definitely be said that there is tension building among the elephant team... I'm trying to maintain the good teamwork we used to have, but I'll admit it's getting harder. Hopefully having Sunday and Monday off (we're all doing different things on Monday) will help. We saw breeding herd 7 again quite close, and it's the first time in about 3 weeks that we've seen elephants on this side of the river! We know they're still coming back to the park at night, but in the day they go either to Zim or to the islands in the middle of the river. I can't remember if I've said this previously (I probably have), but breeding herd 7 is the easiest group to recognise. The 2 adult females are Sierra (F52) and Gabrielle (F60) who have 1 tusk between them! They've also recently been joined by a new female and her juvenile, and the juvenile has a limp, so again they are easy to spot. We were told about a lot of groups of elephants yesterday, but we couldn't find any of them! We'd get a phone call "there's elephants behind the David Livingstone Lodge", drive over there 2 minutes later and there would be no sign of elephants, or even any recent activity! I reckon people just have fun sending us on a wild goose chase!

DEVIL'S POOL!!! Totally not an awkward photo
with a random guy behind me...

And finally to my 2 days off this week (yes 2 not including Monday!). Today (Sunday) I have had a very interesting and enjoyable day, unlike most Sunday's when I go to the pool and just relax and read my book! This morning, I and a group of volunteers went with one of the ALERT staff to his Pentecostal Church in Livingstone. It was a 3 hour service and it was fascinating to see the difference between this and a UK service. At home, the services are very quiet, calm and relaxing, discussing life and how God affects us, with the readings and sermon interspersed with hymns. Here, the service essentially started with a party! The only way I can describe the first 30 minutes would be like a "religious rave"! It was insanely loud, with everyone dancing around, singing, clapping, and even screaming. Behaviour like that would get you instantly kicked out of the churches I go to in the UK, but here it is encouraged. It's the African culture I guess - there's so much more singing and dancing here all the time, it would almost be strange to have a UK-style service here. The preacher was fantastic, talking for well over an hour but holding everyone's attention the entire time. Again, he didn't talk like the priests and vicars that I've encountered in the UK, but it was certainly equally effective! Again, in the UK if people were shouting out during the sermon, they would heavily frowned upon (at least in the churches I've been to) and possibly asked to leave, but here it was encouraged. I found it amazing to see the differences, and will hopefully have the chance to go again sometime. We went out for pizza afterwards which was really nice too. Then my other day off... The plan was only to take the mid morning session off, but thanks to my stomach playing up (an event that you somewhat get used to here...!) I decided it would be sensible to rest up for the rest of the day too. But the mid-morning session? Definitely not relaxing! Devil's Pool! It was amazing... A group of 4 of us went to the Royal Livingstone Hotel, and from there took a speed boat to the top of Victoria Falls, the Smoke that Thunders. We saw elephants from the boat which was cool, and then reached Livingstone Island. We looked down the gorge which was really impressive. At the moment there is no water flowing over the edge between Livingstone Island and the Zambian side of the Zambezi, and it's just impossible to imagine what it will look like in a few months time! At the moment it's more like Victoria Walls than Falls! From there, we swam (yes I have now officially been for a swim in the Zambezi River!) across to a group of rocks in the river, and sat on those as, a few at a time, we were able to jump in, and swim to the very edge of the falls... It's SO beautiful! The water flowing over from there is shallow (dry season is the only time that this is allowed for a very good reason!) but still fast flowing and forms an incredible cascade as it tumbles 108 m to the rocks in the lower gorge. You can lie on the edge and look all the way down, and the gorge is just filled with rainbows dancing in the spray. Another one of those moments that just totally takes your breath away, making you feel so tiny and insignificant on the planet, and it's just absolutely magical. They take well over 100 photos of you sitting and lying on the rocks at the edge, then you swim back across the river and have a big breakfast before getting the boat back over to the Royal Livingstone Hotel. We stayed there and just had drinks for a good 3 hours before coming back to camp. It was an incredible experience, and while it was expensive, I can't help but feel that at some point I may have to do it again... maybe next dry season if it reopens in time before I leave!

Apologies for the stupidly long post this week (it's taken me well over an hour to type!) but I just couldn't miss anything out! Awesome week....

Well this has certainly been an interesting week... Extremely different to usual!

Vervet monkey

Who? Me?

Started off with normal Elephant Research and IDs, for the first couple of days. Haven't really seen all that much this week, and they've all been miles away. I feel quite bad - there's a new elephant volunteer, and she's only had one sighting within about 100 m! She did get to see them swimming though so that starts to make up for it. We've had a few sightings, but the hotter it's getting, the fewer we see. Conservation Education was also different this week - we planned the lesson as usual, then my previous activity overran so I missed the actual lesson, and then no children turned up anyway so the guys who did make it just had to sit tight and wait and see if anyone would come... They've just done their exams so it wasn't especially surprising to be honest.

Cormorant flying down the river

HIPPOS!!

The rest of the week I spent doing a Game Count with the Zambian Wildlife Authority (ZAWA). It was really interesting seeing how the way they work is so different here. Firstly, everything works on "Africa time" - when they say arrive at one time, they do not mean that time, which means that trying to plan as you would in the UK simply doesn't work! Makes things good fun, but also kind of frustrating. We saw lots of animals, though to be honest I think there was fewer than usual. Of course there were - this was the point we were trying to count them all! As the most experienced person from ALERT after the researcher, I was placed in charge of one vehicle, while the researcher took the other, so that was really cool. I'd been given a schedule and map so didn't have to work that bit out, but I was in charge of who did what and so on which was cool. The first day I was in the ZAWA vehicle, a fairly uncomfortable pickup truck, which left me very bruised from bouncing over the rocky roads! We saw the rhinos which was awesome! All 9 of the Mosi-Oa-Tunya white rhinos were there, but cars aren't normally allowed near them, so when they saw us we got chased! That was cool... though I'm sure if they'd gotten much closer I'd be saying something different! The 3rd day of the game count was definitely the best though. We arrived and ZAWA told us about an island in the river that they wanted to do a walked transect of. The thing was that the only place we could get a boat from was over an hour from the island, and we sailed right down the length of the park. We basically got a free 3 hour boat cruise by the time we'd gone back up again. The island was beautiful, and had loads of bushbuck and birds to see. The hippos in the river were fantastic and came so close! Got some awesome views. The birds were cool too, with loads of herons, egrets, and cormorants. We had such an awesome morning on the boat, and then we headed out on Elephant Research, and saw a herd of 9 big males swimming across the river. Beautiful sight!

My Monochromatic Friend...

Saturday night was the last night for one of the lion volunteers, so we went to a Zambian/Mexican restaurant in town for dinner, which was really tasty and SO cheap! We finished the meal and I realised that I'd missed the end of the evening plans, and that we weren't just heading back to camp after dinner, when the round of tequila shots appeared! We went first to a bar in town (Limpoz) and danced there for ages. It was really great fun, and we had a few drinks, and the whole night turned out brilliant fun. We got home at 1am, and then crashed into bed... Was a brilliant night all round.



So, a very odd week with some interesting ups and downs, but as always it turned out awesome!

The view you get when being chased by 9 white rhinos...!

            Wow! So having read back through my diary and blog posts last week I realised that it’s 8 weeks now not 7! I really have completely lost track of time… All I know is that it’s continuing to get hotter by the day… and that at 8 weeks down, I would now be preparing to get on a plane if I was a normal intern with ALERT! A normal internship is 8 weeks, with a few staying 12 or even 16… No one stays 52! I’m very much an experiment for them too.

Another awesome sunset from the park

            So what have I been up to this week? A lot less elephants than usual, though still plenty of them. A permanent battle here is vehicles not working. We have 4, and all of them have died in some way at least once this week! As a lion project, the lions of course get priority, which takes up 2 vehicles - one for people, the other for a lion’s portion of meat! Another truck is needed for the community projects, because obviously we can’t just not turn up to the kids club or schools. Apparently they had over 100 children at kids club this week! Having said that, we’ve managed a decent amount of elephant research, and seen quite a lot of elephants. Yesterday we managed some research without the vehicle. We were sat in the office and suddenly heard this very loud rumble, and it turned out there was a huge adult female elephant standing about 5m behind us! We have no idea how long she was there - they’re SO quiet when they want to be! Thankfully, she didn’t care in the slightest that we were there, so there was no need to run to the furthest point of the office from the door that we could!

Toka doesn't like cameras...!

            Thanks to the lack of trucks for elephant research, we’ve had a couple of extra ID sessions, but it’s also allowed us to go up to Dambwa twice this week to see and help out on the research on the semi-wild pride in the release site. This means sitting for an hour watching what lions do best: sleep! We record what they are doing at every 2 minute interval, and on 3 hours worth of these, my lion got a “V” for “Visualising” for 4 of the 90 readings… Every single other one was “R” for “Resting”! Lions are renowned for being lazy, but the Lion Researcher for the Dambwa Pride did say they were being particularly lazy this week! This is for determining if the pride is behaving as a truly wild pride would, and for observing the group dynamics. It’s interesting (though maybe not so much if I was doing that every day!) and certainly makes for some excellent photo opportunities. I’ve had a hard time this week deciding which ones I want to use on here!

Zulu and his Children

RS2 has to be one of
the most handsome lions ever...

            We also did one session of trees that was good fun. Walking up to the plot we were thinking it was going to be an awful one - roasting hot, the bees were already in our faces, and the forest was actually more like a forest than a bit of sand with a few trees so it would have taken hours to do. However, when we actually reached the plot (the plots are randomly selected coordinates within the Dambwa Forest so we have no idea what we’ll be faced with until we arrive) it turned out to effectively be a clearing the exact size of the area we would sampling, and the wind picked up which cooled us down and repelled the bees! We were done really quickly and ended up coming back to the office and doing some extra elephant IDs.

Tree research!

            The last activity of the week to tell you about was Snare Sweep, since there is still no Conservation Education due to exams at the school. Snare Sweep was very satisfying this week, as between us we found 34 snares, so although it’s very sad that there are so many, that’s also 34 lives saved. Also fun because our Lions Manager who was out with us found a family of TINY baby warthogs asleep in a hollow tree! They were super cute, though no photo because it was too dark to not use flash and didn’t want to disturb them. Also at one point came out onto a bit flat bit which we usually see maybe 1 or 2 giraffe on, and there was 9! Very cool to see…

The final bit of exciting news is that I have FINALLY managed to get the photos on my laptop sorted (briefly - I know it won’t last long) so I can hopefully add them to the last couple of weeks of posts.

I don't even know what week this is! Completely lost track.... 6? Both feels like I've barely arrived, and that I've been here forever!

Reflections

Taking a dip

This week has been awesome again, as I'm back to full bounce. I've been on elephants pretty much all week. The number of elephants has definitely declined. We're reaching the time of year that they begin to move back over to Zimbabwe and stay there, rather than switching back and forth. We're seeing fewer and fewer large herds, and the groups that we do see are mostly bachelor herds, consisting purely of adult males with the occasional pubescent male mixed in. The breeding herds are becoming a rare sighting. Having said that, yesterday was a particularly fun day of elephant research - having had car trouble (when DON'T we have car trouble? We'd already gotten one totally flat tyre that morning that made us late) we headed back to the office early, to find a breeding herd of 6 elephants (2 adult females, a pubescent female, a juvenile and a calf) just chilling out in the offices! There's a square of grass surrounded by each office, and they were just grazing on that, and being curious about the various doors - the calf was small enough that had he been any braver I'm sure he'd have been in the resources room wreaking havoc everywhere! They stayed there all day, and just as we decided we'd got all the information we needed on them, we discovered that there was actually a total of 37+ elephants all around the offices, just that the rest of them were less brave in coming in that close! The rest were all feeding around the now empty lion enclosure that held the quarantine lions before they could be moved to Dambwa. I'm still having computer/photo trouble, so I think I'm going to have to spend the rest of the day deleting photos that I don't need to make some extra space on my camera card - I took a lot of photos of that big herd! The other elephant news is that I've got a new friend to help me out - a Spanish research intern started on Monday for 8 weeks, so I'm working with him a lot which is good fun, and gives Dabs and I someone else to discuss elephant ears with! There's been a lot of IDs to do this week, but we've now eventually made it through the final sighting from July, so now onto the August sightings! August may just kill us - there were herds of 90 elephants on multiple occasions, and a brief glance at the photos from the 8th August is showing that this was when their camera was playing up a bit... ALL of the photos are out of focus for that sighting at least! HELP!

Dust bath!

There was no Conservation Education this week, thanks to Wednesday being World Teachers Day so there was no school as all the teachers and many of the students went on a march around Livingstone, celebrating the work of all teachers around the world. This meant that other than elephants, I've only done a morning of trees, and half a morning on Snare Sweep. The snare sweep we found 9 snares between us, and lots of litter that we picked up too. No elephants or buffalo to avoid this week! I'm not sure if 9 snares is good because it suggests there aren't any, or sad because it means we missed most of them. I like to think it's the first, but we can't ever know. Trees meant heading back to Dambwa Forest for the first time in a coupe of weeks - with Dabs away we've missed a couple of weeks so there's some catching up to do! It was really good fun this week. The mupani bees were out in force again and making a total nuisance of themselves! They really do make houseflies and bluebottles seem like the least annoying creatures ever! Thank goodness they don't bite too... We managed to survive and enjoy ourselves despite them this week thanks to the various methods of covering faces. I had a scarf tied around my head the whole time, while the other girls had a t-shirt, and the netting bag that one of them uses to wash her clothes in! The others struggled more... We got slightly less filthy this week too! Maybe those tress hadn't been burnt so much as they often are...

M4, Qasir

Being watched!

That's it for this week I think - time to get back to photo sorting AGAIN! AAAAAHHHH! And thanks to the lack of photo space on my laptop, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a while for photos to appear with this entry again.....

Guess what?! Another good week - imagine you’ll get bored of reading this soon! Unfortunately, thanks to my stomach and head deciding they hadn’t played up in a while, the second half of the week was less good… Thursday I just slept, and Friday afternoon I didn’t manage to go out on the truck either.

Reflections at Dry Manzi

Again I’ve mainly been on elephant research this week, though unlike last week, unfortunately no herds of 70+ elephants at a time…! Still no Dabs to help me with identification of elephant photos, so I’ve spent a lot of time staring at a computer screen by myself again, trying to decide if this ear matches that ear, and if this elephant is male or female, adult or pubescent and so on. I’ll have my helper back soon… or rather the head researcher will be back and I’ll be back to being the helper soon! Got a new helper too arrived today, so there’ll be an extra pair of eyes on the look out for elephants, buffalo and bushbuck when we’re out in the park. Monday we had a herd of 15 big males who walked halfway through the park, past several perfectly drinking spots, before reaching the one that they wanted. Part of that group was M1 (the very first elephant that ALERT identified) also known as Piet. Not especially exciting as he’s seen fairly frequently, but in the previous 5 weeks of being here, I’d heard “That’s Piet… Oh no that’s not Piet.” so many times that it was quite fun to be told that it finally was Piet I was looking at! Saturday was when we saw our biggest herd of 24 individuals. However, they’d decided to be exceptionally awkward with us this time! Of all the days to hang out in the sewage ponds, where the road is super bumpy to get to them, and lets just say the air is not exactly a fresh pleasant scent, it had to be when I just recovering from a stomach bug didn’t it?! Thanks elephants! Having said that, it’s fully understandable - a large containing all the water and vegetation that they need, that’s also nice and cool… delightful really! The funniest experience this week had to come from a vervet monkey… and I’m beyond gutted I didn’t get a photo! In case you don’t know, vervet monkeys, for whatever strange evolutionary reason, have really bright blue testicles, and there was a volunteer on the drive with us who said she really wanted to see this… and just as she said it, this male vervet goes shooting up a tree to a fork right at eye height, and straddles himself between the branches, full flasher style! It was just the funniest moment any of us had had that day, and we were all nearly wetting ourselves at the volunteer’s face - a look of pure shock, mixed with trying and failing not to burst out laughing! So funny…

Taking a dip in the sewers!

Elephants on parade

Conservation Education was slightly disappointing this week. We followed the lesson plan as it was laid out, and we thought it sounded like a good plan, but they just didn’t seem interested… I don’t know if it was how we presented it, or if it was just the topic itself (poaching), but they just seemed bored… Having said that, they all seemed to come away understanding the major points etc. at the end, so fingers crossed they at least learned something from it, even if they didn’t seem especially enthralled!

White fronted bee eater

Monitor lizard

We spent Friday morning doing a snare sweep in the park that was very satisfying. We found 13 snares between us, 2 of which I spotted which is definitely a good feeling! And even better, there were no elephants or buffalo to have to move away from this week!

 Sunset at Victoria Falls

Victoria Falls with some new amazing friends <3

Last thing to talk about is what I did on Sunday after writing last week’s post. First, I was asked to write a research proposal for a new part of the elephant study… asked on Saturday to be done by Monday… when I’ve never even read a research proposal before, and only half understand the study that I’m meant to be proposing… Talk about throwing me in the deep end! On the other hand, all about learning, and clearly shows that they’ve liked the work I’ve done so far if they’re asking me to take on new stuff like that! After that, I FINALLY made it to Victoria Falls! I went with 2 American girls who are here as lion volunteers, and it was really great fun. We had a great time, explored all the different walks on the Zambian side of the gorge, including walking right down to the boiling pot - a knackering climb back up when you’ve done no real exercise for 5 weeks! Was proud of how easily I managed it at the time, then realised the next day I should be less proud when my calves were aching with every step! Had a really lovely afternoon there, and then finished off with the sunset over the falls. Fantastic!