Week 4 was somewhat less good than the previous 3… I just haven’t been all that well, but I’m ok again now.

I am destined not to get to Victoria Falls - this time I got to the stage of the taxi being on it’s way when I started feeling sick and headachey so decided to stay at home and sleep! That turned out to be a good decision when I got steadily worse and ended up not working on Monday either, and just stayed in and read books all day! Tuesday I was back at work though and getting on with life again. Again my week has mainly been elephant research, driving around the park looking for them, and studying dung piles to see how fast they decay. This will be used to produce an equation to estimate elephant numbers based on dung transect surveys in the future. The most fun part of elephants this week was probably yesterday when I spotted them myself for one of the first times! Normally our driver sees them (literally a couple of trunk 40 m away in the thicket and he’ll spot it!) and I spend 3 minutes just trying to work out where he’s looking, and for that reason it was ages before he even believed me they were there! Particularly since we were driving at about 60 kmph at the time… But there they were - adult male, adult female, and a juvenile. It’ll be ages again (if ever!) before I spot another before David, but IT HAPPENED!

OMG! A person!

I had Conservation Education on Wednesday afternoon as usual which was both great fun, and very effective this week! We were continuing last week’s topic of intensive farming and the issues with it, and the focus was to be on tobacco farming. Dabs walked in at the start of the lesson and announced that we’d scrapped the original lesson plan, and we were going to talk about the extremely serious deal that had just been signed to build a huge tobacco farm on the outskirts of Livingstone, between the airport and Wasawenge, very close to the National Park. At first the general comments were along the lines of this being good as it would bring in jobs and improve the economy, but as the discussion continued it got steadily more and more sinister, until I swear they thought Livingstone was going to be completely destroyed! I’ve certainly never seen anyone look so relieved as when we told them it wasn’t really happening… but it’s always possible, and could be a threat in the future. I really struggled to keep a straight face at times though!

Spent one morning on Carbon Monitoring Research in Dambwa Forest which should have been fine, but we were one person short so didn't have enough hands for the work, which made it super slow so we did''t finish. Far more annoying though were the mopani bees - small insects which don't sting or bite, but drink bodily fluids so are determined to get into your ears, eyes, nose, mouth and even pants! And there were THOUSANDS of them! There were times when I really couldn't see anything because they were so thick in front of my face... Not to mention that the Dambwa Forest has barely any trees (deforestation, hence the monitoring programme) so you're stood out in the African sun for hours at a time, unable to open your bottle or mouth to have a drink without filling your mouth with bees! Ugh - they were unpleasant... and only going to get worse as the season continues and it's already hitting 38 degrees celsius in the shade! Having said that, it was a good excuse to go and get ice cream afterwards! 

Washing the rape leaves for lunch at culture day

Human climbing frame!

Friday was definitely the best day of the week though. We started off with a snare sweep in the national park, walking through the brush and collecting up all the litter and snares we could find. Only 6 this time, which suggests we were in an ok area - normally they’d expect to find closer to 60! We got back late from that, and then the truck died (as it does just about every time it’s used!) meaning that we were very late for the mid-morning/afternoon session! We drove right out into the rural farmland areas, to a tiny settlement where we had a culture day. This meant learning how to be a Zambian woman: wearing a wraparound skirt (good thing I still had my trousers on underneath because it fell down a couple of times!), doing the cooking, keeping an eye on the children, and serving the men their lunch (which must be done kneeling), while the men sat around, chatted and drank beer! We made beef stew, nshima (a corn based meal which you boil to produce something with the consistency of mashed potato), and shredded rape leaves which are chopped into these tiny pieces by hand with a knife - none of us could manage that to the quality they wanted! When not cooking, I basically became a human climbing frame for the many small children running around, who were extremely cute, but clearly spoke no English so I had some somewhat one-sided conversations with them! They would literally appear and just start climbing you until they were on your hip and then just hold on! The baby crawled into my lap at one point while I was failing to chop the rape leaves, which gave an excellent excuse to let someone more skilled take over for a bit! The kids also adored my camera, which got thoroughly abused with every button pushed at once by some kid or another! Haven’t yet noticed any problems with it since…! After lunch (which thanks to being late arriving we didn’t start until gone 3pm!) we had a quick dance session, which was good fun though I don’t think I could ever shake and shimmy the way they manage to! The truck died again on the way home so we were very late back to camp that night… and last night too for the same reason…!

So that’s it - week 4 was still a really great week, with the culture day being fantastic, but could have been even better had my stomach behaved throughout… I was going to get ill at some point, I’m just impressed I lasted this long!

Male bushbuck are so beautiful!