market-ing

So I was out with La the other night and she mentioned that the reason she wasn't staying with me that night (I live forever away from everyone so a fair number of weekend plans involve sleepovers) was because she and S were taking their mothers to the Irene Village market the next day. I invited myself along immediately, with the disclaimer that I tend to go nuts at markets.

As much as I am trying really really hard to not be a hoarder (my parents house is cluttered and just gets worse all the time and I am trying very hard to keep my new home a sanctuary, and that sanctuary nature partly depends on it being relatively empty and clutter free. That and having the dishes washed, which is harder than I expected). I have been practicing restraint by going to thrift stores and not buying armloads of random junk.

Anyway I met them out there early (they swear by getting there at opening time, and seeing the state of the place at 11am I understand why) and we went off shopping. I got two new 'children' for my burgeoning jungle (I have a tulip names Petunia, some daffodils named Gary, 2 cacti with a rather inappropriate name as they are the love-ferns of a particularly vindictive person, an african violet (Violet) and now tw more plants, Basil and Rosemary (named appropriately if not inventively).

I also managed to pick up some chandelier button earings (yesm they are a thing), another set of earrings that are a fork and a spoon (everyone except P1 loves them) and a filligree heart necklace that is cheesy but I've wanted one forever.

kind of like this (not my picture)

After that I limited myself to gifts for the impending baby shower season, managed to walk away from an awesome lampshade that I don't have a lamp for and a pewter lizard doorstop (I do need a doorstop but it's the principle or something) and got accused of haggling by an artist until I admitted that I have a small place and I only have space on my walls for things I really like. As much as smiley elephants are cool, I would end up stabbing one after a bad day at work.

After a while La folded from shoppers-fatigue and an impending appointment and left me with the other three, who really do believe in going through every. single. item. at. every. single. stall., and I passed the time wandering around until S and I stopped at a funny little stall with canvas paintings. I fell in love with a simple little painting and thought about it for a while. It helped that the artist was not pushy, but happy to discuss his motivation for painting it and what it meant to him and I was able to see it, but still know what it was that spoke to me.

At that point S's mother decided that I clearly had no decorating ability, and I couldn't possible have only one bright blue painting, and bought me matching one to make a set. I took them off to a framer and now I am waiting for the quote and the paintings. I can't post a photo because I don't have one, but I will as soon as I get them back.

I also loved a HUGE mosaic that I can't afford, but the artist promised to make another one for me when I have saved up, if the original one has been sold by then. So instead of painting light grey stripes on my yellow living room wall, I'll wait until I can get the mosaic and then paint the whole wall grey to go with the multicoloured amazingness (once again, should have had the presence of mind to take a picture).

so all in all a successful day that has left little by way of regret except some rather stiff legs from walking so much (getting unfit). Next up, exploring the Braamfontein markets I think!

I think I am in love

With Werner Herzog

Since Grizzly man introduced me to the joy of meeting the love of your life at a mediaeval-themed diner, and the song of the coyote:

if you didn’t get that far, listen to the song here instead:

I want to sing along in a helicopter too!

Anyway the point of all of this (besides sharing the total awesomeness of being completely random), my folks were overseas recently, and my mother got me a documentary by Werner Herzog called ‘Encounters at the end of the world’ –

basically he goes to Antarctica and interviews some rather interesting characters.

P1 says as much as they were all crazy, I’d totally fit in down there. I might have been offended if I didn’t agree.

Can I go and find interesting people now please?

You want me to WHAT?!?

When I was eight years old I tried to jump off a high-dive board into the swimming pool at school. I realised for the first time that I was afraid of heights as I sat down, clutched the edges of the board and shook uncontrollably until I was able to crawl back to the platform.

By the time I reached 15 or so heights had become such an issue I found myself unable to stand on a desk without shaking, and walking over bridges made me incredibly nervous.

So anyway when I was fifteen I went on a school camp where rock-climbing and abseiling were two of many incredibly cool activities (like archery and raft-building) and I decided that it was time for me to get over all of my nonsense and climb that silly rock face.

Much screaming and crying and shaking and swearing in front of the headmistress later I got to the top! Unfortunately abseiling did not go as well, as I freaked out, went into hysterics and clawed my way up the rocks to the top again (I tried about five times, including once with an instructor next to me holding my hand).

Since then I’m largely better with heights. I climb things whenever I get the opportunity (kind of like poking at an old scar to see if it still hurts) and I discovered years ago that if there is a lizard to catch I lose all fear of anything, and so I’ve become relatively comfortable scrambling around rocks.

The fear of abseiling stayed with me though, and even though I was invited a few times I was always too scared. At the same time it was annoying. How can I be the fearless lizard-hunter if I’m terrified of dangling off the side of a cliff?

Anyway on Saturday evening as I was fixing up my nap-smudged eyeliner (I know you’re not supposed to sleep with makeup on, but does taking a nap count?) I got a call from Leia inviting me to go abseiling on Sunday. I agreed immediately (which was rather funny because I think she was expecting to have to beg and stuff).

So early on Sunday morning, she arrived with coffee and took me off to meet the other crazy cliff-danglers. And they pointed out the first place we’d be abseiling from/off/at/on (?)

You have got to be kidding me!

“Don’t be silly it’s only 50 metres! You’ll be fine…”

By this stage the others went to admire a little waterfall (complete with dismembered cow-head)

while the view of the bridge started doing this to me:

We got to sit around and wait for Leia and another guy to set it all up, and the bridge loomed over us, looking higher and higher by the minute. Fortunately the others were really nice and one of them even had blue hair so we compared notes and all chatted about silly things while I felt my heart-rate rising with each passing moment.

By the time we got to the bridge I felt like I was somewhere between throwing up and passing out. One of the other guys went first so that he could help people at the bottom and he very happily climbed over the edge and slid off.

And then it was my turn.

Let me just say: kneeling on a tiny little pipe while shaking (and apparently ghostly pale) and being unclipped from the safety line because it got tangled is NOT fun at all.

It is a good thing I hadn’t had breakfast.

I didn’t cry (yay!) but it was close.

I clung onto the bridge so tightly I ended up bruising my palm.

And for some reason once I had finally done the ‘letting myself slip off the bridge’ step (talk about going against every instinct known to man…) while being photographed a LOT and not really caring much at all (I cared later). I opened my eyes and looked around and… it was really pretty up there!

So i said so, and everyone laughed a lot and took MORE photos of me (smiling and with my eyes open this time) and then i got to work getting down to the ground because the harness had shifted slightly and become rather painful.

(this isn’t me, as I kind of had my hands full while trying to avoid an ugly death)

It LOOOMS!

(This isn’t me either)

All this next to the crazy bungee jumpers leaping around…

(I thought they were supposed to go straight down?)

(It may look graceful here, but you didn’t hear the guy screeching like a girl…)

From there we had a lunch break and then headed off to the next spot – a cliff-type thing that looked a lot shorter from the ground than from the top. We got to swim in the river, take a nap and generally enjoy the scenery for a few hours

While Leia and co set up the ropes.

For the record, I don’t care that those ropes can theoretically hold up a car. They’re SO thin! And the little spindly trees…

I had a full-on freak out and said lots of nasty things. To help matters my ropes got tangled up again which meant I had to do some square-dancing on the cliff-edge (step left, then right, turn around, turn back, step right…). Leia responded to my stream of verbal abuse (I don’t remember much of what I said, I was terrified and having nasty flashbacks to my previous experiences) by laughing, which made me yell even more. I do remember her explaining that she was giving me some slack on the safety rope and I yelled at her and made her take the slack in immediately.

Slack is scary.

and of course once I’d got going, yelled at her for laughing (you can’t grip properly if you’re laughing…) and had to negotiate the whole falling-over-backwards thing after a pesky ledge I made it down, collapsed into a quivering heap and confirmed via the radio that I was alive, albeit shaky (you should see the photos I took after this point, they’re completely blurred…).

I felt kind of bad for all the things I’d said, particularly since I hadn’t died and so most of it was entirely unfounded. Plus I hated that although I had finally ‘beaten’ the fear, I was still scared and it didn’t feel like I’d accomplished anything. A few minutes later the guy in charge radioed to ask if he could use my camera up top (I’d left it up there), so I gave him one condition:

“Can I do that again?”

And I managed to smile most of the way down the second time!

The bushpig guy

I’ve been working on writing about one of my encounters with some of the children who live here, but it got long and depressing, so I figured I’d finally tell you the story of the Bushpig Guy.

Last year the other student as here for two weeks while I was working very hard and not catching lizards due to the horrible drought. I had told her about the other side of the conservancy where I’d taken a detour once for some reason (might have been a geocache but I’m not sure) and wound up trying to drive along while taking pictures of some of the most beautiful rocks ever (I managed to do this without incident, although the pictures didn’t come out too well).

As it was cold and threatening to rain (it was actually another month before we saw any real rain) I figured I’d show her the rocks I’d seen while chatting to the farmers about trapping there (I was desperate) and acting as translator for her (she needed a ton of sites across a large area).

It wasn’t long before we started to notice differences between the western and eastern sides. Our side has large-ish properties with several generations of farmers in one place, while that side has small properties that are usually converted into guest houses, school camp locations or hunting lodges.

The people were very different too, although not any friendlier than the farmers we knew already. These were keen to help (we found out later that the head of the governing body had sent out an email warning the landowners of our impending arrival) but often barely knew their own land. They generally sort of knew where there might be rocks, but they weren’t always sure.

On top of that the properties were so small that there was no way of sneaking in and out unobserved. Usually the farmers on the Eastern side would let me trap on their land, if I could figure out a way over the fences. They would never leave a gate open or anything.

The people on the Western side asked a lot more questions about what we were doing and why and also gave us phone numbers so they could let us in, and occasionally showed us around. Some of them, one we got deeper into the conservancy were far more what I was used to, but rather than being a bit brusque and formal they would tease me by pretending that they didn’t understand or by asking question after question until my Afrikaans ran out. As it was, although I’m more than sued to explaining my project, hers required vocabulary that i didn’t have, so I was working around words I didn’t know by describing things rather than naming them – so anything fancy was out of the question!

One guy (his staff still called him ‘baas’ which upset me) was convinced that we wanted to steal his giant garden gnome collection which he had cemented across the outcrop in his front garden. We found out later that he’d actually filled all the cracks in the rock with concrete as well so it had been a bit of a waste of time. He also threatened to get his shotgun and kept trying to interrogate the other student, even though she wasn’t south african and spoke no Afrikaans beyond ‘north’ ‘south’ ‘bathroom’ and that sort of thing. Eventually he told me to stop trying and speak English and so I made her speak for herself.

There was also the guy who was convinced that we wanted his bull, which was kind of creepy and rather grouchy looking (a bit like the owner) as well as the motel right at the entrance that defies description. All i can say is… nope, can’t. Except that I had to have my foot stamped on before i could stop giggling at the dodgy silhouettes on the walls, the animal skins stuck to the ceiling and the photographs of drunk people all over one wall. One day i will get up the courage to get photographs because nobody will ever believe me!

Anyway ne of the last places we stopped at was way off the main road, I’m not actually sure how we found it. We could see some rocks so we drove up about three little roads and found a house so we stopped to see if the owner was home. After much debate we found the front door (remarkably difficult sometimes) and knocked but nobody answered.

This isn’t too unusual, people are often not around, nobody really locks their doors and i hate poking around to find them, so we went to the back of the house to see if there was someone there.

Halfway there we found a giant bathtub, painted green, surrounded by ferns and agapanthas and funny hanging plant baskets. The pipes all connected to the house, so there’s no reason to suspect that it wasn’t a fully functioning bath, just next to the house rather than in it. I’ve used outdoor showers before, and they’re amazing, but usually they also involve some kind of privacy screen or thick clump of trees or something, this was out in the open and the guy didn’t even have a gate.

We decided against exploring further and went and knocked on the front door again. This time I looked down and saw a blood-covered chunk of bone on the doorstep. I turned to the other student

“The-ah-bone-ah-weird! We have to go now!”

Before she could answer the door opened to reveal a small guy in a really dodgy tracksuit and a maltese poodle which grabbed the bone and ran off. After some spluttering I went through the usual dialogue and he was very nice, gave us directions for the easiest way to the rocks and went back into the house.

As we walked back, giggling and discussing the strangeness of it all, he reappeared behind us.

“Hey, do you girls want to see something?” My mind was screaming NO!!! but he’d spoken in English and the other girl agreed immediately so we followed him back to the house where he vanished and re-emerged with a baby bushpig!

It was the cutest thing I’ve ever ever seen, tiny with little baby bushpig patterns and hardly squealing at all! He let me hold it, but it didn’t like me much and I gave her back to him where she settled down and went to sleep. Apparently her mother had died and so he took her in as she was too young to survive. Having encountered a few in the field I shudder to think of having her as an adult, but she was really really cute!

I didn’t get a picture as I didn’t have my camera that day, although I went and knocked on the door whenever I went back there to trap lizards. I never saw him again.

And I lived in terror of arriving in time to catch him taking a bath.

Those poor farmers…

As a lot of people have been commenting on the strangeness of the people out here, i figured I’d provide a slightly more well-wounded view of what’s actually happening. You see, although life out here is a bit… odd… at times, as far as the locals are concerned they’ve been invaded by a crazy lizard-girl!

Exhibit A: i was trapping a long fissure along an outcrop, but the lizards were too smart and would evade the traps regularly. as it’s hectically long and I’d had to carry extra traps in preparation of trapping the whole thing I didn’t want to go home empty handed, so I watched where the lizards were going, hid behind some bushes, waited for one to emerge and jumped out yelling “AAAAAAAhhhhAAAAAAAhhhhAAAAAAhhhh” (Whitney Houston would have been impressed!).

Worked like a charm!

So I did it again, with a little more imagination and a few flourishes. of course right then generations 4-through-6 from next door happened to drive past. I had NO idea I was so close to the road! Of course they stopped to watch and I’d just caught a lizard so I couldn’t stop and chat, so I waved, yelled a “hello! I got him!” and ran off. I’m pretty sure the representative fro generation 4 shook his head as he drove off.

Exhibit B: I had spotted some rocks along the main road. I had no idea who the land belonged to, but I’d spoken to everyone in the area who was around and there was an excellent chance that it belonged to the same guy who owned the outcrop with the dam and the crocodiles.

It took me about twenty minutes to get up there (climbing sandstone-granite mix and dodging giant thorny vines while carrying trapping paraphernalia is always fun!) and trapping went well. All in all a good day! until I tried to go home.

The thing with climbing is that going up is usually easier than coming back down. Often if it’s not too far I’m happy to let gravity help but there are these vines that have massive thorns (they’re about the same width as pencils) and I didn’t really want to land on them, particularly with my very precious lizards in tow.

After about forty-five minutes I was halfway down when I slipped and sat down rather hard on a rather spiky rock. My pants (which I’d sewn back together any times by then) ripped and i just managed to stop falling further, although I was pretty sure the rock was going to leave a scar (it did).

A moment later someone drove past, stopped, got out of the car and said “Hello! Hoe gaan dit?”

I smiled, explained that I was working with lizards and he said “Oh! you’re lizard-girl! I’ve heard about you!” We proceeded to have a long conversation with me sitting on the spiky rock and wishing he would go away. When he asked if I needed help I declined, and pretended to be looking for chameleons in the foliage.

So you see, the farmers aren’t the weird ones! I’m sure I’ve provided many stories to keep them occupied!

Jorana

I spent a great deal of time trapping on the farm of one of the parents of the ‘unfriendly’ couple. He has a huge dam, and I found that if I parked there, did a balancing-act across the dam wall (which isn’t all that scary, I could probably have walked normally) and then wriggled through some undergrowth and thorn trees I would end up on a string of nice big outcrops.

They weren’t really all that inaccessible, which was made evident by the piles of reed-type things that were always lying around drying in the sun.  I always presumed that they were being dried out in preparation of weaving something but I never saw anyone else there and so I went about my business as usual.

The lizards there are HUGE! My usual guys have a body length around 6-7.5 cm. The ones I got there were 8 cm at a minimum. It makes a difference! I learned pretty early on that they got to that big because they’re crafty. I’m talking trap-evasion as never seen before… where one string of traps usually works, and two definitely does, these guys would almost tap dance around three of four (and I could swear I heard them giggling).

One day I was trapping when someone started yelling something at me. I looked up and saw that I could see the road from where I was, and a woman was yelling something in some language I’d never heard before. I did the sensible response, smiling, waving and answering with “Hoe gaan dit?”

She left after a while and I carried on, only to have her materialise RIGHT behind me. Not usually all that alarming, but you must remember I hadn’t seen another human being in a good two weeks at that stage, personal space is entirely relative, and mine was HUGE.

After a few false starts we got talking, it turned out she and her family had come from Swaziland to find work (not an unusual scenario in the area) and she lived up the road, working on a bunch of farms in the area whenever they needed someone. It took a while to get this information because she spoke an odd mixture of Afrikaans, Zulu and Swazi. The farm workers generally speak some combination of a few languages, and most of them can manage enough Afrikaans for me to have a conversation with them, but this lady was a bit trickier than usual. She introduced herself as Jorana (“NOT Joanna! These silly farmers, they all call me Joanna and that’s not my name!”)

Of course trying to explain what I was doing was slightly trickier, she understood ‘catch’, ‘research’ and ‘the farmer said I could!’ but she battled to understand what I was catching. As I hadn’t caught anything yet that day I couldn’t exactly show her one either, so I ended up describing a lizard in great detail.

Suddenly her face lit up. “Ja! Ek het hulle gesien! Kom ek sal vir julle wys!” Well I’m not complaining if she can show me where they are, it might be the areas I’d already tried, but there might be a different outcrop of a pile of rocks I hasn’t noticed. I followed her a little way before I realised she was taking me back to the road. Strange, but Ok…

She stopped on the dam wall

“Daar’s hy!” huh? My lizards swim? I asked if she was sure and she went on and on about how you don’t always see them but they live in the water.

This brought back memories of looking for baboons for Luke’s project once, when some road-maintenance guys told us that the baboons hide underground in tunnels that they dig under the grass. I figured she was just superstitious or something, but when I asked she insisted that she saw them often. I asked if she was sure – small, green with orange tails… she shook her head. No, not pretty colours, but the akkedis, they’re in the water.

After much debate, even more descriptions from me and a trip back to the outcrop where mercifully a lizard (not one I wanted but at least it was a lizard) had emerged she suddenly figured it out.

“Oh! ‘n goggatjie! Jy’t gese ‘n akkedis!” Call me crazy, but generally lizard is ‘akkadis’ while ‘gogga’ means insect or general creepy crawly thing… finally she explained that the the people working the area, lizard was ‘gogga’ (something I’d heard before in the kalahari) and she’d thought I was talking about ngwenya (or crocodiles) hence the trip to the dam.

It was a very valuable lesson as I’ve learned that most people around here call my lizards goggas, and now I can say “het jy akedisse gesien? Gogga, nie ngwenya nie!” and they tend to follow what I’m going on about!

Before she left Jorana gave me directions to her house and told me that if I ever needed help I must go there and take her children as field assistants for the day.

Moral of the story: if you ever have to do fieldwork, take flashcards or something, it would make life easier.

And if you’re walking in the bush and someone yells “NGWENYA!” you should probably run.

Have a great week!

The Bathtub guy and the Leafblower Lady. Part 1

Anyway I realised that I never explained the whole leafblower-farmers wife thing. And that must be rectified! Unfortunately I have so many things to write about the people here that I will have to do it in smaller segments. Here is part one!

To start off, I’m living on a ‘farm’ inside a conservancy, which is basically a collection of little farms. Some of them are traditional farm-farms where they grow grapes or macadamia nuts or cows* and some of them are more game-farmesque. I’m on the East side of the Conservancy (it’s 30 000 hectares in total. That’s pretty big I think) which is mostly inhabited by old families that have been there for generations. They don’t like dividing the land between children so basically as soon as a son gets old enough to help run the farm and get married his wife moves in with the family and things carry on as normal. Some of the wealthier farmers even build houses right next to their homes for the eldest son and his wife.

It’s not unusual to find five generations living on the same farm. That’s the tricky part for me, because it’s very difficult to figure out who to talk to when I’m asking permission to trap lizards on their property. I’m very careful in these areas because there aren’t always fences and I can get very confused as to who owns what. And these guys are not against whipping out a shotgun at a supposed intruder (or so I’ve heard). The trick is to figure out who the oldest male family member is and ask him for permission before asking the younger guys who actually run the place. Just because Oom Piet is 94 and hasn’t got a clue about what’s going on, he’s still in charge. The easiest way to find the one ‘in charge’ is to phone the house at around 4pm, when they’d be bringing the cows in. That way you’ll be sure to get one of the wives on the line and they can be most helpful!

They are very kind people in general, although I don’t think that too much has changed in the last few centuries. Sure the veldskoen are replaced by crocs, but the two-tone khaki and kortbroek, comb-in sock sporting farmers make me feel like I’ve stepped into a Herman Charles Bosman novel sometimes. One day one of them will break out the peach brandy and pull out a pipe…

Unfortunately as charming as the old way of life may seem, there are nasty aspects. I’m fortunate in that I’m white and I speak Afrikaans which immediately makes me ‘fit in’ a little bit. I also don’t speak to any of them in formal Afrikaans, I use ‘jy’ rather than ‘u’ to put me on their level (and because I’m not very good at formal Afrikaans). Their farm workers still call them ‘Baas’ and wives obey husbands and so on. When they meet me they tend to get a bit confused. What is a 20-something girl doing driving a bakkie and running round after lizards. Shouldn’t I be married by now? They tend to get around it by deciding that I’m just a weird-looking guy. I get smacked on the back, shaken hands with, told about the rugby… and the wives look really confused.

We were told at one stage to avoid a certain farm because the people there weren’t nice. I’d already had to chat to the local butcher (who is also a horse farmer) and someone who was convinced that I was after his rather mangy bull (it looked at me and I freaked out a bit) so I was rather afraid of that place. They have a lot of dogs too which isn’t unusual around here, but they were all vicious-looking.

Anyway after much  discussion with Malcolm, my favourite pig-farmer and local gossip, it became apparent that the people were not all that bad. What had happened was that two of the mega (like 6-generations at once) farming families had spent generations peacefully ignoring each other, until the daughter of one of them married the son of the other family. They weren’t banished entirely, but sent to live on a distant corner of a farm and nobody would speak to them.

Towards the outskirts of the Eastern half of the conservancy is a creepy ramshackle house. We’re not quite sure if it belongs to the people who live there or to their grandparents who own a lot of the land in that area. They run a weird stall-type thing that sells water features made out of broken pots. The weird part: they make the pots, then break them strategically and us them to make water-features.

The only people I’ve ever seen in or around the house are three or four youngish guys. If you go in they put you on their duct-taped couch, offer you French Toast and say things like “There are GIRLS in the conservancy?” (True story, fortunately it didn’t happen to me). When they get bored they take their shirts of and take turns driving up and down the a stretch of the highway on a tractor.

No you didn’t misread that.

That’s all for today, I have to be up early tomorrow!

 

*you buy those cow-hoof things from Pick & Pay and start them off on your windowsill in some damp cottonwool

Before my fingers drop off from frostbite

It's FREZING in joburg right now! So cold in fact that people are letting their animals heal by themselves or something because I was at the vet for four hours this morning and I think we saw one animal and I sold two bags of dog food, and did some data analysis. Getting up and getting to work is awful because besides the cold and wind, today it's also raining, which makes life totally miserable...

At one stage I was freezing, despite the heater and several layers of clothing, and so I took the opportunity to make a cup of coffee. At that stage I had been sitting round for about two hours. Of course in the two minutes it took me to make coffee people arrived and one of the other employees helped them, leaving me feeling rather guilty that I'd only helped three out of four potential clients in the morning!

Anyway I was reminiscing about some trips today and I figured what better time to talk about where I would really really like to be right now (rather than trying to resurrect my calculus skills on a data-set that is way bigger than I had thought...)


The obvious choice: the beach! Lying on the hot sand, sleeping off the last dive. Walking along the edge of the surf. Digging around in rock pools and looking at the weird and wonderful animals there. Building random sculptures out of sand, digging giant holes and making wind shelters and then falling asleep against the temporary wall of sand...

Namaqualand - the most beautiful place in the world! Going exploring in the evenings where it's light until late because it's right on the west coast. Climbing rocks (and fences...) and trying to navigate when everything is so huge that any kind of distance perception is lost and estimations are way off every time.

Sitting in the kalahari, watching the random wildlife. I can't take credit for this photo, it's Luke's (The rest are mine). This was actually while waiting for our friend and his research assistant to fetch some giant mealworms for the owls.

The Kalahari, a bit further south. Something about the desert makes me want to climb rocks and watch the sunset.

Beautiful, no?

A road between Namaqualand and the Kalahari, where we saw desert dunes for the first time. Basically any road that is somewhere warm, stretching away further than I can see...

Like this one, on our way up from the Western Cape towards Namaqualand.

Or this road in the kalahari.

I'm really feeling the need for a road trip!

Just my luck!

So today, as my last official day in the field (until August/Septembers bumper 3-month session) was the day to tie up all the loose ends. I went off to the rocks to take some measurements, and was completely weirded out by having my laptop on the rocks... I went to one that's really close and I was super-careful, but it was still a strange feeling to have the sun beating down on me while I typed in calibration coefficients and other things that I really don't understand!

After that I headed off to release my second-last batch of lizards, taking my camera along to get some photos of them. I needed a couple of samples from females for some lab work when I get back, so I took some traps along with me. I also figured I'd do some trapping for the masters student who was visiting not so long ago. Shes very new to the whole trapping thing and not wildly successful, and while she was here I helped as much as possible, but I was essentially chasing a different species and as it happened they weren't overlapping too much at the time.

So I caught a few females for me, and a few of her males, when the wind picked up and I decided to let my lizards go (they'd been safely kept in a bucket under a tree, because otherwise you end up re-trapping them which is super-stressful for all concerned) and so I went to pick up traps.

One of the traps I had wedged under the back of a rock, between smaller rocks and a clump of really thick grass. It's a small access point, but I lost a lot of potential data to it so i usually shove a trap under there just in case. I pushed the grass back to grab it, and thought:

what a weird looking lizard!
That's not a lizard is it?
Holy crap it's a snake!
Oh no, it's a snake's TAIL which means the HEAD with the pointy scary bits is free under the rock and if I reach in and grab the trap it could swing around and attack me!

I would like to mention here, that I have no problem with snakes. In the right setting, I think they're awesome. I had a snake living behind a cupboard in the house here for months (ok, I did freak out a bit when I saw that one). Once, when we had an exhibition at university and there was a snake on display and he was cold I walked around campus with him around my neck all day (really does wonders for getting through crowds). I just have a slight problem when I have no idea what the snake might be, and I'm a good hours drive from the nearest hospital.

So I did what any self-respecting zoologist would do. I got a stick. No, not to hurt the poor little guy! I tried to drag the trap out from under the rock with said stick. The snake swung around and managed to get his chin stuck on the trap. And he hissed and I may have got a bit of a fright and jumped back slightly.

And then I was stuck. Basically, when trapping lizards, you put out long lines of traps, and if there's even a tiny gap under or between traps, the lizards skip over or under or through the gaps and don't get caught. Turns out I'm pretty good at getting them flat, because this one was wedged. I needed a stick with an opposable thumb. Of course, by now the snake was beginning to freak out at not being able to move, and probably the crazy human waving sticks around, and he started hissing and opening his mouth very very wide for me to see his little fangs (which, in hindsight were pretty cute). I was scared to pick the trap up by hand because I had no idea how stuck he was and if he was to freak and jerk free...

So I got a second stick and somehow managed to manoeuvre the trap out and on top of the rock. And then I realised that I had no idea how to proceed. No freaking clue. So I did what any self-respecting young scientist would do. I got a longer stick. Somehow I managed to use it to work his head and front part of his body free.

Well that was brainy.

He carried on gaping at me, and I tried to free the rest of him, which resulted in him swinging around to attack the stick, and getting his head stuck again.

So I got another stick, and managed to get the end into a sort of fork, and pinned his head over the rock away from the trap. He didn't like it, and then I was stuck again because the hand holding the stick holding his head meant that there was no hand to hold a stick to hold the trap down while I freed the rest of him.

So I had to work the stick between him and the trap, holding his head away from it, while I used the point to hold the trap down, and the other hand to move a different stick to get him off. It took a while.

Around then I heard a car nearby. Nearby being the road, which is about a fifteen minute walk from where I was, but close enough for me to start worrying that I was going to get unexpected visitors at the house - with the long hours trapping and measuring and being a bit sick, the house is a huge mess at the moment, and I started freaking that they might go there and I hadn't washed the dishes...

Anyway, I finally got him off the trap, much to my relief, and then realised that I was faced with a sticky snake (no pun intended). He wasn't too bad, but I couldn't just leave him! For my lizards I use cooking oil which dissolves the glue if you rub it on them, but there was no way I was going to manage that the conventional way. I keep two small bottled of oil in a pocket for when I'm trapping, so at least I was well stocked! I held the snake away from me with on stick, and hurled the contents of a bottle onto him. He was not impressed 9to say the least) and then I poured the other bottle in front of him and chased him over the resulting puddle.

He seemed to get away well enough, although that section of rock is going to be hazardous for a while! And he went into grass, so I'm hoping the worst of the oil-glue solution will rub off on that.

The moral of the story: if you want to do something nice for someone, trapping reptiles for them is probably not the best plan!

Oh, and I didn't have visitors after all.
And I looked the snake up, and it was venemous, although not one of the really bad ones. I feel a bit justified in keeping it as far away from me as possible!

The weirdest ideas

So I had a pretty normal day, went trapping, caught lizards came home, took a nap, measured lizards... what on earth is there for me to blog about?

WAIT! I know! I went to this giant crevice network today, its usually good for a few lizards, but it's massive and you have to trap metres and metres of it to catch anything, so I usually plan a windy day (it;s quite sheltered) and then spend a morning there. So I went rushing off there today, saw a ton of lizards all running into the middle section and I went to set traps.

I decided to start from the left, so I scrambled up to the crevice, put the first trap in and then started thumping it around and adjusting it. The traps have to lie flat, otherwise the little buggers just crawl underneath, so there's always some scraping around to find the best spot. Then I saw something moving. "Hmm, that's odd!" I thought. "Maybe a skink is trying to hide but it's too small or something" so I looked closer.

Whatever it was came a bit closer too. Its tongue started flicking, and then it came even closer. Yip, there I was, messed-up knee, traps in hand, clinging rather precariously to a rather steep bunch of rocks, with my head halfway into a crevice having a staring match with a rather large snake. I felt like I levitated back about 5 metres, until I realised I'd just taken a step back, and so I rather quickly packed my things up and went somewhere else.

Something made a noise a bit later and I really did levitate - vertically!

In other news, my jackal friend is back! wow I should write children's books "Jackal said 'yip!yip!' Helen said 'Yay!'" I've missed having him around to watch or listen to in the evenings.

So anyway I was thinking today, while trapping, about whether or not the colour of nail-polish you have on your fingernails and toenails says anything about your personality. Toenails are covered more often than not by shoes, and so I would think that they might be a slightly more reliable reflection of a person's character, whereas fingernails are something of a statement.

Any thoughts?

Super-substitute! (Not really super but super enough)

So I woke up this morning feeling fantastic (possibly helped by a rather large mug of coffee). I just knew that it would be a great day. I got up, got ready and left to go to the lab, and proceeded to get stuck behind every slow moving car in the southern hemisphere. no problem, I'd found another old cassette tape that for some reason has the soundtrack to My Fair Lady, so I was quite happily driving along, enjoying the sunshine and singing along (windows closed of course, nothing like a funny look from a biker to throw off a perfectly good morning!).

Anyway I was a few blocks away when my phone rang, and on the ther end was one of the higher-ups at the zoo, in tears because the zoo staff decided to go on strike today and there was nobody to feed the animals. I went through immediately and was left alone pretty much taking care of all the lizards.

Despite a slightly close encounter with a cranky sungazer it all went well and I was moving from one area to another when I heard the strikers approaching, vuvuzelas blaring (WHY they must scare the animals is beyond me, why not just march around management's cars in the parking lot?) And I (very heroically of course) turned and ran back inside.

fortunately one of the institutions that works out of the zoo was running a tour and I'm quite well acquainted with the tourguide and so I gave them an impromptu lecture on the various lizards and lizards in general, and was able to keep them occupied until the danger ahd passed and I could go and climb the fences into the tortoise enclosures to feed them.

For the record, the tortoises were starving and rushed to the food, and it was the cutest thing ever! After that I joined the others and got covered in baboon poo while a friend of mine was nearly attacked by said baboonand I learned the skill of cleaning a water dish through the bars of a cage by skillfully manoevring a hose pipe (although that last orange peel will be in there for all eternity).

Once we'd finished there we went to start on the next section to find that the strike was over and the real zoo staff were back at work. So we went for lunch. And then I saw Thandi, the baby mandril and played witha meerkat and did all the usual stuff I do at the zoo, before going shopping! Where I discovered that, while MAC has some awesome stuff, the staff have no idea how to use it and I ended up feeling like I'd spent half an hour in a room full of... ladies of the night?

So I didn't actually make it to uiversity today, but I had a totally awesome day. And I'm so glad I wore sunblock! Although closed shoes would have been advisable!

When something new is something old, but also entirely new...

So on Sunday night the nerves set in a little bit. I was ok, handling everything as I do, when my family forced me to do another trial run in front of them. So I got the notes and the pictures and proceeded to go through it all again. And they sat and blinked at me. It was awful! Like talking to a brick wall or something. I know back in the day when they were studying it was much more formal and interacting in class was totally frowned upon, but really! Even when I asked direct questions they just stared blankly.

Then I figured out at about 4am that I had a stomach bug (I will spare the details) and basically ended up staggering in on Monday morning having had about two hours of sleep and feeling like I was about to pass out.

Everyone at the lab (including the lecturer who I was teaching for) thought that I was about to collapse from an awful state of nerves. In a fit of solidarity they decided to wait until I was finished to make coffee (coffee makes me talk faster) and Luke and Megan and I headed upstairs to set up.

I was very lucky in that the first half involved them watching a video and answering questions which gave me time to calm down a bit, and then I gave them a break and got started.

And it wasn't too bad! It was the weirdest feeling, to be talking to a room full of people who are quiet and taking notes, but at the same time it wasn't weird at all. After the first few minutes I forgot that I was supposed to be nervous and I was more frustrated when they weren't participating enough. For the record, the obnoxious show-offs in the front row? Lifesavers! And towards the end they got more involved and I got through everything and I even let them go early.

So in a fit of bravery, I decided to give the next lecture, yesterday. With only one day to plan and not really understanding how to teach the stuff without it being boring and Luke being off getting a gangrenous limb checked out by the doctor, it was a little bit more nerve-wracking, but they were way more involved and it was a lot of fun, except that the loudmouths starting getting a bit difficult, but until the last five or so minutes they were fantastic and I enjoyed it. And to their credit, the last five minutes was just before lunch and I don't blame them for being a bit fidgety.

So that was my amazing lecturing debut! It was actually not bad at all and I'd like to do more someday (although not right now, my research is suffering under my teaching load already), but at the same time it wasn't very different to the teaching I've been doing in the labs for the last 5 years! It helped that I knew the students from labs and that there were only about 70 of them, rather than the huge first-year classes of a few hundred. And I had the awesome moral support of Megs and Luke, and the support form the lecturer who trusted me enough to let me teach his classes without forcing me to let him sit there which would have been WAY too much pressure!

And there was the little issue when the chalkboard got stuck and I have to do some fancy stances to try to move it...

So that's it, I'm alive, it's over and I don't feel like I've really done anything new! Except that in a fit of insomnia last night/this morning I downloaded a chess game on my phone and I can't beat it! It's driving me crazy!

Don't kick the narcoleptic!

So the conference was actually quite interesting, and I found myself enjoying it far more than I wanted to admit! I met some nice people (of course I ended up sitting with a bunch of zoo-keepers, I seem to attract them!) and heard some interesting talks. It was at a dam that was more like a small ocean, it had waves and everything!

My talk was ok, I think. There were a lot of questions and I had fun as always (I love the question session in a masochistic kind of way, it's when you figure out if you REALLY know your stuff or not!) and I was asked a question about my lizards by the guy the lizard was actually named after! HOW cool is that? Yes. I'm a nerd.

So After about 24 hours of being there I got my uber-cool conference bag (it has a tomato frog on it) and drove the four hours home in some pretty intense rain. The traffic was appallin once I was nearly home, so I detoured to visit Lara for an hour or so to wait it out, and ended up staying for nearly 3 hours. She passed all her exams really well and now has a second degree! We also fell about giggling to a bunch of random songs that I had on my Ipod. I hadn't seen Lara for pretty much 4 or 5 months, except the occasional really quick hello, so it was really amazing to spend some time with her and remmeber how much her friendship means to me.

Soppiness over, I finally got home at about 10pm and had to pack for our departure at 6 the next morning. I managed relatively quickly and then couldn't sleep because I was so excited.

So basically, I elft home at about 6:30am on about 10 hours sleep total for the previous week, and very little sleep in total since about August. That kind of exhaustion is weird, because instead of the classic yawning and stuff, you get toally wired and bouncy and then occasionally your body decided that it's had enough now and you must sleep. So the first horizontal surface encountered becomes a temporary bed.

So halfway tot he beach I fell asleep in the car. It's really not that unusual to sleep in the car, but my friends seemed to find it amusing. It was only a short nap, and ended when I had a dream that we were driving up to a traffic circle and turning right, but I could feel (in reality) the car turning left so I woke up and said "We should turn right at the traffic circle!" Turns out we were at a stop-street, but we came across a bunch of traffic circles right after that which was quite creepy!

Over the weekend I gave several repeat performances. It didn't surprise me, I usually sleep a lot between dives, and on this trip there wasn't much organisation so the dives started being quite close together and I ended up not having my usual collapse-on-the-beach time so I slept whenever else I could.

What I don't understand is how people found it so incredibly funny that I kept falling asleep. For crying out loud I hadn't slept properly in about four months, it wasn't an amusing quirk, it was a necessity for survival!

I will write more about the trip at some stage, I'm just trying to get my thoughts about it all sorted out in my head. I also think I should catch up on some sleep, I'm still waking up at 6am automatically...

But I just want to say: if you have a friend who believes in power-naps, don't kick the narcoleptic!

So...

Remember that song on the mission impossible soundtrack called "So..."? It's stuck in my head right now. Nothing too exciting to say about it. Except that I am not a Mission Impossible nut, just that I was about 10 at the time and the soundtrack was my first ever CD. I didn't even have a CD player yet, but after my brother and I had run in to the CNA (a newsagent) for the gazillionth time and listened to the theme song on the dodgy "try out your CD first!" headphones, my mother ether let me buy it or bought it for me. I can safely say that I think I knew every note and every word and everything on that CD by the time I was 12 or so, as well as developing a slightly weird addiction to Songs by Skunk Anansie (however you spell that. I was 10!). Weird because I was a pretty quiet kid who's only other CD was by Shampoo. Yes, I'm cringing now!

Anyway, it's been a rough week. I was going to post about how miserable I was yesterday, but I only finished all the work I had to do by about 10pm and I didn't have the energy - considering that it's been so hot I have to get up at about sunrise to get any decent trapping done before it gets to molten-lava level of hot.

I was enjoying the quiet of a KIDS-es free house, when we got hit by a mega heatwave. It's supposedly spring, but I've been here in midsummer and it was never this hot and humid before. I HATE hats with a passion, but it got so hot that I had to wear one, which meant that I was running around with hat-hair and a hat-induced headache. Since as long as I can remember I've hated having things on my head or on my hands. In cold weather I will give in and wear gloves, but I really, really hate hats.

Back on the topic - I caught a single lizard in two whole days of trapping! And I wasn't being lazy either, the lizards were there, and I was working darned hard to get them and they were all evading me. There is a series of huge boulders where a bunch of them live - I've caught a bunch their before by putting a circle of traps around it and in the little spaces in between rocks. this time though I'm not sure what happened, maybe one of the storms, or a tree falling over, but there was sand EVERYwhere and I couldn't trap a bunch of the usual spots. And the lizards ran past giggling occasionally.

Just to make things better, I decided that having cereal for dinner wasn't a good thing after about 3 days and so I made some very nice pasta-sauce type stuff with the vegetables I got last time I went into town. I didn't feel like the whole schlep of making pasta, so I thought I'd make myself a baked potato.

The bonus of living here is that we have an awesome microwave with a bunch of AUTO settings. So for a potato, you put a potato in, press POTATO and when it finishes you turn said potato over and press POTATO again. Voila, a perfectly baked potato! So, I got a potato, cut the eyes off and so on, put it in and pressed POTATO. After a minute or two it was done, so I turned the potato over and pressed POTATO. I have done this many many times and never had a problem. I realised a little while later that the potato had been in there for a rather long time. I dismissed the thought and went back to what I was doing. Then I heard a strange noise and I went to investigate.

I am not kidding when I say that the potato in the microwave had full-on burst into flames! The smell was awful, there was black smoke seeping from around the door and the potato was flaming away, rotating slowly inside the microwave that was STILL COOKING IT! I had the presence of mind to hit the off switch and leave it closed in the microwave to stop it getting any more oxygen and rushed around opening doors and windows before removing the charred potato.

Bearing in mind that I'd had a horrible day, been in full sun for several hours and not had much success, I wanted to cry. Instead, I decided to make some pasta and eat my dinner. So I lit the gas-stove and made pasta. The pot has handles that get really hot, so, as usual, I used a cloth to take it off the stove and pour the pasta into a colander. Once I'd done that I looked down and realised that the cloth was on fire - it had obviously dipped into the flame.

For the record, the pasta itself was fine, the dinner was delicious, and i had leftovers to sustain me for two days.

Today was cloudy and cold this morning so I got to sleep in until 7! The sun came out mid-morning so I dashed off to the most dangerous outcrop on the farm and managed to catch 4 lizards! I was really happy - this particular outcrop is really steep and slippery, and can either be fantastic for finding lizards or absolutely abysmal, but it takes so long to get there that if it doesn't go too well you've effectively lost a day. I guess after everything being so difficult, I thought about life a lot and came to a lot of conclusions. I won't share them here just yet, because they're a bit whiny and I have a headache from wearing a stupid hat. Plus it's past dinner-time so I should go and burn some stuff now. But the bottom-line is: I'm feeling better about everything, and I hope I can hang on to my inner-optimist for a while!

An action-packed adventure saga!

I just finished another exciting evening of playing with numbers and scary formulae... and decided that rather than having the world see me as a total and utter loser (I had a breakthrough and got very excited) I would talk about the last few days.

Firstly, I haven't blogged in absolute ages. we had a heatwave - on a cool day (I think it was Wednesday) when I enjoyed myself because I wasn't dying of heat, I measured that it was 28 degrees in the house, 31 in the shade outside and 34 in partial shade. I was too scared to find out what full sun was, as I'd just finished a morning sitting out in the sun and didn't want to know. In Fahrenheit, for you non-metric people (I will save up the rant about Fahrenheit for a day when I have a few cool points (no pun intended) saved up), that's 82 inside (I love old houses for their ability to be cool on a hot day and warm on cold day), 88 in the shade outside and 93 in partial shade).

I know that the weather will only get hotter, and I managed 10 weeks of proper summer (I'm here almost a month earlier this year than last year), but I'm not used to this yet, and I think I got a bit of heatstroke and felt really sick after drinking about 4 litres of water in a few hours - I was desperately thirsty but couldn't drink anymore!

So anyway a few days ago it went cold, and I relished the opportunity to spend a morning in bed (I had a fever and therefore insisted on a morning off) and go into town to get a few groceries. It's almost an hour drive to the nearest shop, and it's quite a pest because when the weather is good I hate having to take an afternoon to go shopping or go to get petrol for the bakkie, so I've learned by experience to use the bad days as much as possible for things like laundry, shopping, writing up results and the all-important sleep.

Quite often though, the rain will last for up to 4 or 5 days, and then you sit and go crazy because you were super-efficient on the first rainy day (or just don't feel like working). Last year my 6-week trip became a 10-week trip because of the weather, although I must admit, I have developed an incredible talent for predicting the weather from looking at the sky in the evenings. One day I will write a list of all the extra things Ive learned on fieldwork and that will be on it.

Back to the point - the day after that (yesterday)it rained, so I couldn't even go for a walk or anything. Fortunately, although it had been cold, it was dry the day before and I'd taken a long walk in the early evening so I was able to sit in the house without going nuts. I predicted that it would be rainy this morning but clear up in the afternoon, and I was wrong - it was partly-cloudy and cool, warming up in the afternoon. I spent the morning driving around exploring new tracks around the conservancy with mt traps and everything ready in case it cleared up. After about an hour I gave up and sat at the house pretending to work, but actually listening to music for an hour or two. Then I realised that the weather was perfect to take a hike to where I thought there might be some nice lizard habitat, which I thought might be near to or connected to a big outcrop just up the road from the house. It was quite a walk to get there, there are a lot of tiny thorn bushes that can scratch through your clothes in quite a painful way. Then, while you try and untangle yourself you invariably walk past a couple of thorn trees. I got away with a few minor scratches today, and no big thorns to the scalp - unlike Tuesday's getting stuck in a thicket saga (ouch!).

It was very exciting, the outcrop I've seen tiny bits of turned out to be quite ice and big, and as I got there the sun came out from behind the clouds and a beautiful lizard ran out and looked at me. I half expected to hear a chorus of "oooooh!" from the clouds at the same time. It was also quite a nice vantage point for a couple of hills that I've never really considered trapping on before, and I could see another outcrop nearby that's not as nice, but definitely is worth trapping at for a day or two!

I decided that I didn't want to go back through the thorn bushes today and I knew that I was relatively close to a huge outcrop that overlooks the house. we call it the Sundowner rock because on most undergrad field-trips we take the KIDSes up there for sun-downers one evening. I didn't realise (possibly because I'm usually on TOP of said sundowner rock)that it's surrounded by a thick tangle of thorn bushes. By the time I realised that an intelligent person would have turned back about 20 minutes before, I was kind of in a get-hurt-either-way situation so I kept going. It was amazing, after the huge thorny hedges (for lack of a better word) I ended up in what felt like coastal forest, with a relatively clear floor and huge vines. A lot of the branches belong to a weird tree that only has leaves for a few weeks a year or something, but the branches are covered in giant thorns. I don't know what it's called but we use a branch to teach the undergrads about thorn structure at the beginning of their plant-identification course. I had never expected to be stuck in a maze of them though!

Part of me was really sad that I never came here as a little kid, there were all kinds of awesome places that I would have loved to play in when I was little! I remember spending hours under the hedge in our driveway... using the petals from the flowers as currency, yellow was highest if I remember correctly. But, I digress, back to the adventures: so I managed to climb over and under and around the thorns without too much damage to myself. A lot of the branches were dead or rotting and I managed to clear a bit of a path. Then I finally reached the base of the sundowner rock (rock sounds small, it's probably nearly a square kilometer, and made up of a bunch of little outcrops connected by a ridge of grass along the very top). and realised that I was facing a 50-100 metre sheer granite wall. I realised that I hadn't been thinking too clearly - this is the East-facing side that I've never trapped on because it's too steep for me to climb down without someone else there to call the ambulance if something goes wrong (drama-queen? me? NEVER!. Fortunately it was dry, even after all the rain - climbing on wet granite is to beg for a Darwin Award - and I clambered up a big boulder to where I could see a deep fissure running up the length of the slope - looked like the best spot to hold on! On top of the boulder was a smaller, but still considerably large and stable looking rock, so I climbed up, to feel it rocking gently underneath me. I froze and climbed back onto the bigger rock very carefully and then tried a few other routes up. Nothing felt safe enough for me to try. I'm not a stranger to falling, and I usually don't mind pushing my limits somewhat, but the idea of falling that far down onto a tangle of the massive thorns... not so much.

I looked around and decided that my best option was to get off the rock and walk along the base of the cliff (for lack of a better word) to where I could see there was a bit more of an incline and a few handholds and things. there was a big tree at the base of the rock, so I leaned my foot against it so I could shuffle down and jump off. Well, to cut a long story short, the tree was hollow and rotten and fell over. I got the fright of my life and did some spider-man-style backpedalling and then jumped off the side of the rock.

After all of that the climb was pretty uneventful, the incline was slopey enough for me to climb and my shoes were fantastic. I got new shoes a little while ago because my old field-shoes were all but worn out. I had to try a different brand and I haven't liked them too much so far, but today they definitely did the job!

to jump topic completely (it will make sense shortly) one of my favourite memories is of a school trip when I was 15 or 16. The staff at my school stated calling me the "happy camper" because that was the week where I came out of my shell and actually poke to people and participated. I had always been super-shy but for some reason that trip I wasn't and I think it was very much the turning point for me where I stopped being quiet and well-behaved and became... me. Anyway the trip was a week of kayaking, raft-building, archery, obstacle courses, hiking and... rock climbing and abseiling. I was near-phobic of heights, to the point where I could hardly stand on a chair without getting shaky, and that week i started my long journey of getting over it. I think if I could show my 15-year-old self the places I climb now, I would never have believed it! I managed to climb the 20 metre rock face, which was a huge step for me! Of course, most people did it in five to ten minutes, and I took almost an hour, stopping only to swear loudly at a sometimes friend of mine (I think I was the most-quoted person on the trip as nobody had ever heard me swear before either). i felt quite bad about it later as she had been trying to shout encouragement, while I had been trying to focus, but she claimed to be proud to be the person who finally got me to yell obscenities. For the record I didn't manage the abseiling, going into hysterics and climbing back up after a few metres, but I can still remember the cheering when I made it to the top!

Anyway, the guy who was running the climbing section became a good friend of mine on the trip. he was a huge Afrikaans guy with dreds, called Isaak and we used to chat about life in general most evening. He was the type who would go crazy staying in one place for more than a few months and had backpacked around Botswana a month or two before, and I asked so many questions about his travels that it amazes me that he didn't smack me on the head and tell me to shut up.

so, to the point of the story, while I was climbing today I kept hearing his voice in my head saying "the trick to rock climbing is to stay as close to the rock as possible. Don't lean back, lean forward. Plan your route up and then hug the rock. Stay as close to the rock as you can." It was kind of weird. I haven't thought about that trip for ages! For the record, a friend of mine went to work at the camp a few years later and the staff there remembered our group. Might have to do with an unfortunate injury I inflicted on the boss during a game of pool volleyball/rugby (word of advice: if I have the ball do NOT grab on to my foot from behind. I will kick. Hard). Isaak has, of course, moved on by now and nobody hs a clue about where he is.

So after all that I sat at the top and admired the view of the farm. The rain has cleared the dust haze and I could see forever! Plus it gave me a chance to recover from the adrenaline-shakes. And I walked across the outcrop and down the path to the main road. The other day when I missed the path and got stuck in some thorn bushes I smelled something odd and thought I'd stepped in some baboon dung. The smell was worse today, and pretty unmistakable. An animal has died, near the path. How on earth people do jobs with decomposing bodies, I have no idea, I ended up running back to the house to escape the stench. Which was fun - not the stench, the run. Last year I went running nearly every day but I haven't yet on this trip.

And then I sat and fought with formulae and numbers and finally finished a section of what I've been working on for the last 6 weeks. So all in all it's been a good day! And now that I've finished my evening cup of Rooibos and evening biscuit I'm going to head off to bed so I can get up early and machete an easier path to the new sites before I have to start trapping.

Either way, I think I've more than made up for the recent lack of posting by the length of this! I didn't realise how long it was getting...