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...!