Falling slowly

So when I was a lot lot LOT younger I used to ice-skate. Yip, every Saturday morning my Dad and I would get up super-early, drag ourselves out the house and make Die Groot trek to the other side of the world (i.e Krugersdorp).

I skated for a few years, loved it at first and ten as my gawky teenagerliness started taking over I began to not enjoy it as much, then hate certain steps and then resent it completely. And then I stopped.

Recently, as we’ve been going skating relatively often, She-Who-Has-Yet-To-Be-Named and I decided to sign up for classes. They’re not too expensive (I think it works out as the price of a session plus R10 or so per lesson), and I was frustrated at my general lack of confidence in trying anything I used to be able to do, while she wanted to be more confident and do a few tricks rather than clinging onto the side.

So last night I battled through some delightful traffic to find that She-Who-Has-Yet-To-Be-Named was nowhere to be seen. I found her eventually, stressing out like crazy over the average age in the previous classes (it’s around 5-8 years old I think), the fact that the classes are visible from the rest of the centre and that she didn’t want to fall. By the end of it all I was terrified too, particularly when we’d signed up (and had to fight a nasty stage-mother and inefficient admin person), put our skates on and found a small group of people over the age of 5 to hang out with.

The adults class was nicely placed out of general public view. It was also a nice size, with lots of really friendly people. Unfortunately I got kicked out within the first two minutes because I could actually skate, and I was sent off to meet my new classmate (yip, singular), a terribly shy girl who might have been six or seven years old.

It was the weirdest thing though: I’m comfortable on skates. I can zip around the rink quite happily, do one or two cool things and avoid the crazy skaters who always seem to try and trip me up, but I had never realised how slightly-nervous I am all the time. after two or three steps with a coach-guy explaining and critiquing and helping I suddenly felt SO much happier and more in control – to a point where I did a lot of steps that I’d tried recently and wobbled/freaked out/wussed out completely.

By the end of the lesson I think we’d covered the entire class syllabus (this guy hasn’t had time to become immune to my “what’s next? Teachmemoremoremoremoremoremoremoremoremore! attitude – the tai chi teachers are completely desensitised by now) and I’m hoping to move up to the next class next week. I tried out my nemesis-of-a-step last night and it didn’t end well, so I will need all the help I can get with it (and it’s in the next class).

After the lesson I went and found She-Who-Has-Yet-To-Be-Named who had had an equally fantastic time (from clinging on to the side they had her calmly zooming around forwards AND backwards) and we went around and she practised very diligently while I bounced around in total over-excitement and tried out everything I could think of and I managed most of them! And I (sort of) managed my FAVOURITE step from back in the day which totally made my night and had me dashing around squealing and (yes, I admit it clapping) in joy.

I think the other people there think there is something wrong with me…

But I’m so excited and I can’t wait until next week!

Crispy around the edges

I know, I know, I promised to keep blogging… (I’m hanging my head sheepishly, just in case you were wondering). And it’s not even like I’ve been swamped here, I’ve been busy, but no more than usual!

Anyway, I drove down on Saturday, and it was the weirdest thing: About halfway to Nelspruit and I got this weird feeling of going-homeness. I suddenly noticed the amazing beauty around me and the weird people driving around me (my personal favourite being the car with the “it’s not PMS, I’m just a bitch” bumper sticker – driven by an ancient man who might have been smoking a pipe – the huge sky, the open fields.

I also had a weird flashback to childhood – my dad used to like annoying me (still does), in my family teasing is the common way to show affection for some reason, and one thing he’d do was to call animals by the wrong names. Maybe it was just the zoologist in me getting started early but it drove me NUTS! Once I got used to it I decided it was ok, as long as we were consistent – so giraffe were always raffe-gee, Kudu were called lions, and so on. And of course whenever we drove past a cow field (which you do a lot in South Africa) we’d have to yell “Elephants!” So when I drove past the Oilfants river and saw a field of cows… it totally made my day!

Randomness aside, I kept driving, through several torrential downpours, and ended up doing some grocery shopping in town on my way through. I knew I was back when I got stuck behind two men in their two-tone khaki and kortbroek (no crocs, apparently rainy days call for veldskoen) having a discussion on ruck-bee in the middle of the canned-food aisle.

I made it to the farmhouse by just after 5 to find that despite the rain, the student and her team who had gone down a day before were nowhere to be seen. They emerged about an hour later triumphantly carrying about 6 lizards – it seems that it had cleared for about half an hour and they were admirably tenacious about catching the lizards that they saw. Two of them were my lizards so I got a nice headstart!

It was weird being there with people when I hadn’t adjusted to being there, and I kind of flitted between wanting to get rid of them and asking them to stay an extra night. Wither way when we woke up the next morning it was raining and so they left and I took a nap. Which lasted for about 6 hours. What can I say, it’s like I’m sleeping in my own bed at last! The insomnia is still there, but it’s down to a ‘it’s 3am, why am I awake? I must sleep… this is so annoying, I need my sle-' and then I’m out until morning stage.

Yesterday was lovely and sunny but not too hot, and I got back into the swing of things until a freak rainstorm chased me off the rocks at lunchtime. I was greeted by a huge eagle on the outcrop when I arrived (it was so close to me!) as well as a black mamba which I think may have been as scared as me. It decided to go under a rock AS I removed my traps, meaning that I looked to see what ‘that weird noise’ was to see it slithering past (about 10 cm from me). I had no idea my heart rate could shoot up so fast! I’ve been a bit jumpy since then, but at least everything is ok.

And today was hot. blisteringly like-being-in-an-oven hot! The worst part is that I know it’s going to get MUCH hotter soon! It was a beautiful day, the sky was that amazing blue that you don’t find anywhere else (other countries have blue skies, but not like ours, kind of like how our oceans are pretty, but in Jersey the sea really sparkled), I saw zebra and kudu on my way to the site, ran into a friendly farmer who (get this) spoke English! and had a pretty successful trapping day.

I got to relearn my climbing a little bit, which was fun! I’m enjoying the new flexibility that I think comes from tai chi and stretching although my endurance is lousy as always. I found a bunch of lizards in an area where I’ve never seen more than one or two, so I’m quite excited – maybe the rains have been as good for the lizards as I’d hoped! There are certainly enough insects around – I’m starting to get a bit offended by the dungbeetles flying into my head! So I’m just hoping that the weather holds out, that the lizards are plentiful (and stupid) and that I stay in the (strange) wonderfully happy mood I’ve been in for the last few days!

Here’s hoping!

Oh and the title refers to my sunburnedness. SPF40 has worked like a charm, but there are a few crispy-fried bits that are going to tan permanently (because they always do!), like my lower back, a small patch on my left wrist my upper lip and tip of nose, a patch just below my right ear and so on.

Remember when? - aka watch Helen try and break the record for the most embeds in a sngle post...

So anyway yesterday was one of those awful write-off days (I'm in a bit of a slump and need to get my act together!). I've become used to working while at work and getting a lot done in the mornings and now that I'm back to full-time studying I'm missing the structure (if not the early mornings).

Anyway to cut a long story short we were kicked out of the lab so that the cleaning staff could turn everything upside down, flood the place and then polish the floor, leaving everything sparkling clean! And so we did what any self-respecting postgrads would do when confronted witha barrier to work: we went and got coffee while grumbling about having to pay for it, when we usually spend all our money on coffee grounds and milk (which doesn't count!).

And so we got chatting and it left us in a not-working frame of mind and so when we were finally allowed back into the lab I mentioned to Luke that I remembered this song from back in the day:


Catchy, no?

And so it degenerated into a long nostalgia session, which I felt that I must share with the world in general. I'm working on a playlist at the moment but it's taking a lot of sifting through the giant pile of cassette tapes I found in my cupboard recently. These are some of the songs I've come across that have given me flashbacks (and byt that I mean some, not all as the ist is very very long!):

Don't judge me (and if you weren't a teenager in the late 90's then don't watch this one, it's AWFUL!) - sadly enough I saw them live and thought they were fantastic!



I struggled as a kid because I had so many very different musical influences. On the one side I had my brother who educated me about grunge and gentle alternative rock (I have memories of listening to Green Day with the volume turned as low as we could so that our parents wouldn't hear the lyrics to 'Brat' Or giggling whenever someone in The Offspring swore. I was also trained to play classical music from before I could even read and I still listen to that from time to time.

I also had the world's most awesome radio show to educate me: The Night Zoo of which I was an avid listener from when I was 12 and got my first radio ("If it's too loud... you're TOO OLD!"). It was always fun to try and hde my headphones from my parents when they came to say goodnight and I often taped the show in case I fell asleep (I think it started at 9 or 10 pm?).

From there, most importantly Thursday night's modern rock chart where I learned to love gems like this:


not to mention going through the obligatory Nirvana, Metallica and Smashing Pumpkins phases. I must admit, I never did the whole Pearl Jam thing, and I still can't bring myself to listen to them much, although their lead singer has a song out that is AMAZING and I had it on repeat for days.Check it out:



Eventually I moved on to The Prodigy and vaguely dancy music as well - to tell the truth as long as it was loud and had a beat I would listen to it.

At the same time I was a teenage girl, and so I had to go through the requisite stages of listening to these guys:



Scarily enough as much as I cring now, I quite liked them then and had many many posters on my walls which had to be burned as soon as I passed that stage. I was also about 13 when Britney Spears released her first album and I was a participant in many Britney vs Christina arguments (I think I switched sides often just to annoy people).

Which leaves me with one last memory (for now). How is it that whenever this song came on people would start line-dancing? I mena I get it that the music is right for line-dancing but how did everyone always know what to do? I always felt like I'd skipped out on a special class or something...



Of course there are so many other songs and so many other memories!

Anyone keen to share the soundtrack to their childhood? Particularly if it was the 90's!

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!

coincidences

Sorry I've been so quiet, this weekend was the sudden return-to-reality that I tend to get whacked with when I get back from fieldwork... I haven't been sleeping well because I'm not used to the noise of the city (even in my peaceful and leafy suburb) and because I've been flying through Green Wing, which I finished watching now and I'm at a loss for what to start next. Suggestions?

So anyway besides dozing off periodically, taking epic naps and falling asleep on my feet, I spent time with friends, went back to work and basically had a nice laid-back weekend. The weird coincidence was that I got a message last week from someone I hadn't spoken to in years.

We were at the same school, but in different years, so our mothers knew each other from school functions, and we had the same music-teacher and so we were put into our first orchestras at the same time (I think she started a year or so after me, I started at 10, and for my first concert I didn't know anyone, which made it rather scary!)

For our first few years in various orchestras (we were in our school orchestra together as well as the local junior orchestra) we were an absolute nightmare for conductors. We giggled constantly, played practical jokes, and often had contests where we would see who could play correctly with more bubble-gum n their mouths (wild-cherry flavour was the best, and I still can't eat it without feeling mildly ill as I remember the record-breaking 12 packs at one time from 1997).

The orchestra community is horribly cliquey, and this extends to children's groups, so there were two 'cool groups' one of them run by the two of us, and the other run by two horrible girls called Alexis and Whitney. We would audition every year for our orchestra and seating placement (you sit closer to the front if you're better than the others) and one year I did pretty well and moved up into the Youth Orchestra, while she stayed back in the junior orchestra for another year.

I doubt we were any different ability-wise, but I played the viola, while she played the violin, so I think I was more in demand, plus I was older and getting closer to the end of high-school and so they wanted to get me into Youth a bit faster. Either way as it happened, I went through, along with one friend who was desperately shy and didn't actually talk, and Alex and Whitney and their entire little group.

It was horrible! It took me almost a year to settle down, the music was difficult, the people were mean because you can't be a cool clique unless you exclude somebody and I was all alone there. it got better after a few months when a new violist arrived and we made friends very quickly and so we began to form a whole new gang, and by the time I was too old to be in the youth orchestra I was very sad to leave.

Anyway the girl I hadn't seen in ages was promoted up to the youth orchestra after a year or two, but by then we'd kind of grown apart. She'd moved schools in the interim and I hardly ever saw her, and as the baby orchestras performed first at every concert and we performed at the end, I don't think we'd spoken for ages. We stayed friendly, but not really close at all, and when I finished and went to university we kind of lost touch.

So anyway on Thursday or so I got a message from her asking if I remembered her and to see what I was up to. As it happens she's off doing community service (a year of community service is required for all health-science professions, two years if you're a doctor) in the middle of nowhere and was coming back this weekend. As she studied in Cape Town she doesn't know many people in Joburg and so she figured she'd get in touch.

We went for brunch on Sunday and it was awesome! As it happens, she's living in the middle of nowhere about two towns away from the middle of nowhere where I do my fieldwork! It was really nice to chat, particularly as she's as shell-shocked to be back in Joburg as I am and we were able to commiserate over the headaches, nosebleeds and insomnia that come with coming home. She also goes into Nelspruit quite often to use equipment at the hospital and to get meat (apparently she has a grocery store near her, but their meat selection is limited to feet, beaks and bones, heaven only knows what they do with the rest of their animals) so we know the same part of the world pretty well which lead to lots of

"And then you go and there's the two women in the car-"
"With the choc-chips! And then the people by the-"
"orange farm with the tractor! and the guy who takes his shirt off and-"
"He drives the tractor down the highway! Who is he?"
"He makes the broken-pot water-features things they sell them-"
"Oh I know that pace, I think they're quite pretty although the-"
"Guy with the shotgun is insane!"

And so on. It was very cool.

And now I'm so excited to go back on fieldwork because there's someone I can coordinate with so we can have shopping/town trips at the same time and coffee...

Civilisation - where you have to tie your shoelaces so that people don't give you funny looks

So, I figured I might as well mention, that as of tomorrow evening I will be finished here! For now anyway. And so, on Monday, after I release the last few lizards, make sure the house is as clean as it's going to get and pile all my stuff in the car, I will be heading back to Joburg!

And of course, as it's the thing that's been driving me for the last week or two, I'm beginning to reach the phase where I don't really want to go home. Its much like the way I don't really want to come here - I moan and gripe and fuss and delay, and then as soon as I get here it feels like I've come home and I slip right back into my old routine - life in the big city seems like a weird memory! When I get home, being here is kind of like a weird memory. Like a dream or something.

So I try to focus on what I've missed - people (the only conversation I've had in the last two weeks has been with a sympathetic pharmacist when I was sick), being able to buy something when I want it, and not wait for my bimonthly shopping trip, a hot bath (that's number one on my list of priorities for when get home!), not being sunburned and covered in dirt and scratches all the time. There's also the gym - I like having a treadmill to run on because it's nice and flat, the hills here are way too much for me! Decent coffee is also right up there, although I admit I'm not really missing it as much as usual. Not having my life ruled by the weather. Wearing clean clothes every day (I wear my field clothes for at least three days before I wash them, it's disgusting, but considering that I'm filthy within minutes of getting out there, it seems a waste to destroy clean clothes, plus I get to limit the number of outfits I rip or stain or just plain wear out).

At the same time I love the simplicity of fieldwork. To have a single goal (collect x data points) and everything you do revolves around it this time has been amazing because i haven't had any major catastrophes. All of the fieldwork i've been on has had disasters - mole-rats when we couldn't catch enough, Luke's baboon research where we could't find baboons, the other mole-rat trip where they kept dying and f course my fieldwork which began with a rainy season like never before where we wowuld lose weeks at a time to rain. And then of course my two field sessions last year where the drought was so bad that the lizards were either dead or in hiding and I had to drive for up to an hour every day to find sites(including one covered in broken glass and toilet paper on a citrus farm) where I would eke out a few individuals and then trek back home. This time (touch wood)I got my best-case scenario numbers, within my best-case scenario time-frame without lasting injury, besides a certain low-level nausea which I've figured out comes from watching DVDs and playng Spider-solitaire at the same time (gives me motion-sickness, as I discovered last night!).

So maybe my nostalgia is just being compounded by life being generally ok here? I don't know. All I know is that the appeal of having meals cooked for me, taking a hot bath, being able to pick out my shoes based on style, not toughness and grip, hanging out with my friends and sleeping in my own bed is not really weighing up particularly well against the bad parts: traffic, noise, pollution and being surrounded by people all the time.

That said, I should probably go and do laundry so that I don't have to pack dirty clothes next to clean clothes tomorrow!

The big 300!

So I just realised that I have over 300 posts on here! I think this is number 303! As I didn't catch any lizards today I figured I would write about my blog instead (rather than a diatribe on how awful it is when the lizards aren't cooperating and you have the "I'm too sexy for my shirt" song stuck in your head).

Oh and for the record, thanks to everyone who was nice to me when I felt awful yesterday, the headache is almost gone and I've been drinking lots of liquids - my water bottle, which I had thoughtfully filled with Game this morning to stave off the dizziness was totally attacked by ants and I drank most of it anyway! Proud?

So yes, it's been almost three years since I started this blog, I didn't really want to, but I as peer-pressured into it, and having had rather a lot of fun having comment-wars on other people's blogs I figured I might as well go for it. Oddly enough I think that out of all of us I'm the one who still blogs the most regularly, with the exception of Sarah, who started a new blog when she moved to Japan, which makes me giggle on an almost daily basis!

I have weird memories of blogging, from typing out an angry post on email on my phone while my friend and her new boyfriend mauled each other repeatedly in front of me, to one of the first posts, when I'd used out lab's psycho-tap to scrub tiles one Saturday and sprayed water down the front of my pants, on a day when the high-schoolers were touring, so I made a cup of tea and sat and drank it while holding a wad of paper-towel over my lap and writing about how awkward it was. There was the soul-searching (not really) moment when one of my mother's friends accused me of being a goth. there are many many posts on my fieldwork, with my favourite being about a day when everything went totally wrong, but I didn't let it get to me.

I don't ever really have "I should blog this!" moments, although sometimes I do, but generally forget about it until I'm in the middle of another post. I have a few dedicated and awesome readers, and a few who read my blog even though I've never met them! They've also gone in phases, three years ago we had a bunch of Americans living in Korea who we got to know pretty well, then there was the phase with the weird American who freaked out if we didn't comment every day...

There are people who I email regularly as a result of my blog, and people who have blogs that I love reading even though I have no idea who they are- for some reason they make a discussion on their choice of curtains fascinating!

So I guess I should say thanks! Thanks to the friends who forced me to start this. Thanks to the people who read and comment and make it feel like I'm doing more than talking to myself. thanks to the friends who make my life so weird that I have stuff to say! Thanks to the lizards who give me plenty of experiences that I feel the need to retell.

Happy 300 guys!

Of memories and weird dreams

So lately I've been watching the x-files a lot... and it always results in me having weird dreams. Once I got to the end of season 7 I found that season 8 wasn't really grabbing my attention (although the weird dreams got weirder, particularly whenever I fell asleep in front of the tv during an episode, which happened quite often. Considering that the only other option was watching our cricket team skillfully grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory (and that's all I will say about that except that Duminy rocks!) it wasn't too bad.

Then I really got into spending my work-time playing with visual basic and my free time at the gym or doing photography and my dreams returned to normal. Then last night i had the weirdest dreams!

It was like I was a little kid again, and two memories that I had all but forgotten resurfaced: The first was about easter when I was about 8 years old. I found a white t-shirt in my room and started drawing on it with koki-pens. I drew all the Easter-related stuff I could think of: eggs, rabbits, brightly-coloured squiggles and so on. And when my mom caught me she didn't yell at me, as I would expect any parent to do upon catching their offspring drawing on clothes, but rather she gave me a bunch of other pens to use and I completely covered the t-shirt in drawings. On Easter day we went out to the East rand to my grandparents and I wore the t-shirt all day, despite the funny comments from various relatives. The sad part was that when it was washed the bright colours all washed out leaving a tie-dye effect with some of the other drawings staying, so the shirt was pretty much ruined, which i was very sad about. I had hoped it could replace my favourite shirt (which had a plastic face on it that played a song when you pressed the eye, actually my brother and I each had one but we ended up sharing when one of them went through the washing machine and the face came off...).

The other dream also revolved around me destroying clothes... my favourite game as a child was throwing my barbie dolls out my window and waiting for it to rain. Then I would bring them inside, cut my clothes into strips and bandage them up. This really upset my mom, although quite often she would wonder where a specific item of clothing was and then one day she'd go into my room, see brightly-coloured strips of cloth lying around, mentally connect the dots and go "Oh, Helen..." anyway the thing I remembered in my dream was not about any of this, but I felt I must explain the scenario. when I was about 6 I desperately wanted a porcelain doll. My grandmother obliged and for Christmas I got one and named her Lily (yes, really!). She was extra-cool because she wasn't one of those stiff ones that have to go up on stand and you can't play with then, but she was made out of a bean-bag type body, with china arms legs and head. I spend almost every waking minute with the doll, and even got a matching haircut once (it helped that it was identical to my usual haircut, but I took her along to the hairdresser to show him what I wanted. He seemed quite tickled to be taking orders from a 6-year old and even offered to take the hair he'd cut off me to make her a new wig. I refused.). So what the dream was (and this really happened) was one day when I was about 7 or 8 and there was a drought, so none of my barbies were getting 'injured' enough, I decided that Lily needed open-heart surgery and so i took a permanent marker and drew stitches across her stomach.

The weird thing is that I'd completely forgotten about all of these things until I dreamed them! and when I woke up I went into my cupboards, and the doll still has 'stitches'! I will have to got through the photo-albums at some stage and confirm the existence of the amazing Easter t-shirt, but I'm pretty sure that happened too...

I'm sorry to drag on about this, but it's the first time I've ever had a 'real' dream, and definitely the first time a dream has brought back memories that I'd forgotten!

On another note entirely, this is the kitten who is currently sitting at the vet and looking for a home. She's the sweetest cat ever, so if anyone knows anyone who wants a cat and could give her a good home, please let me know!

Desert! Mole-rats!

So I was just thinking about how boring my life is at the moment. Yes, in the last week I have had to battle with the power-that-be to get sick animals to a vet, where they were treated inbetween massive snakes (including a beautiful anaconda that bit a friend of mine), but in general, the months that I'm in Joburg tend to be pretty routine and boring. I don't work an office job, so I guess my life is more interesting than most, but there is very little to write about. When I go on field trips everything gets more exciting, but even that has faded a bit.

Fieldwork now is incredibly routine and I like it that way. I have to occasional excitement of the roof falling in or watching random antelope from my window, but otherwise it's pretty much business as usual. Back in the day (I'm getting old) fieldwork was always to different exciting places where we met new and crazy people and had weird things happen to us.

So back to the point: a long time ago Luke and Id ecided that we would write a book called "The mole-rat diaries" all about our adventures catching mole-rats. On the last trip (it was almost 2 years ago) we actually started keeping accounts on his laptop all about what stuff happened. I stopped after about a week becasue I was too tired at the end of the day, but I have a few pages that I thought I would put up here in installments. I figure when I run out of actual stuff, I ahve the photos and the memories to try and carry on.

So watch this space for the new and exciting series of the Mole-rat Diaries (Helen's POV)

Lion, Tigers and... never mind!

So I just spent 4 days in the Kruger National Park. It's pretty much this really massive game reserve in the lowveld, that at some points is less than 100km from where I do fieldwork. I was sent along with a visiting researcher from Australia, who was really cool. It was nice to meet a scientist (with the exception of my scientist friends who are totally rox) who could have a normal conversation about music, dumb horror movies and also cool stuff like geckos and stuff they found in experiments and stuff.

It was weird going there. Firstly, we used to go when I was really small, and I didn't really like it too much. My concentration-span is notoriously short, and my clearest memory is being tired of being cooped up in a car all day (it's a big% area so you aren't allowed to walk around) trying to eat pop-rocks quietly so that my dad wouldn't find out that we were eating in the car. My mom used to snea up pop-rocks to try and keep us quietly. My other memory is of it being super-hot and we bought little hand-held fans for the back of the car, where we found out that if you got new abtteries and put your hand in the way of the blades it really really hurt. I have a few memories of animals, but not nearly as vivid as trying to sleep when it was really hot and stuffy at night, and swimming in the pool at one of the rest camps.

Needless to say, when I was around 10 or so we stopped going to Kruger, and went to the beach on holiday instead, which I was a lot happier with! So the first weird thing (after all that) was the random memories that popped up when I went to places. I remembered things like sitting at a particular picnic site and nearly being mobbed by starlings, and seeing a you leopard (or was it a cheetah?) asleep at the side of the road, or the hyenas we saw once. I really didn't expect to remember all tehse things when we were in terrain so much like my field sites where I've never really thought about those holidays at all!

Secondly, it was really hard for me to be cooped up in a car all day. Partly for reasons that I will not discuss here as I think they are best left alone, and partly because it looked so much like the farm, so we'd go past an outcrop and I'd have to force myself to quell the impulse to jump out of the car and go and look for lizards! I also battled a little bit because I'm actually relatively antisocial and like to take a walk whenever I'm away to get away from people and enjoy the silence for a bit. As ti's all scary and big 5 and stuff I had to be around the australian the whole time. I was proud by how wel I masked my crankiness at times, and other times I took an extra shower or went to bed really early so that I wouldn't have to be all friendly and stuff.

Thirdly: well the Kruger is a big 5 area. This means that the 5 animals traditionally known to be the most dangerous to hunt (and generally be around I think) are there and any walking around ahs to be done in the presence of game guards with rifles. For the record they are: Lion, Rhino, Elephant, Buffalo and Leopard. Anyway althought hunting them is totally out of the question now, there is some prestige attached to seeing all of the big 5 on a trip. Don't ask me why, elephants and buffalo (and Rhino) in some parts are almost as common as impala, and if there really was a prestige-type list it should probably include cheetah, wild dogs, hyenas and a few other things I've forgotten to mention. Anyway the moral of the story is that it is nearly impossible to see all of the big 5, mainly because it's really hard to find (or spot - no pun intended) leopards. We saw it 3 times in 3 days. Really. We saw black rhino - they were reintroduced relatively recently and there are only about 70 individuals in the park, had 3 independent leopard sightings and saw a cheetah with cubs (also something that hardly ever happens). If you;d asked me a week ago what the chances were of somebody seeing a leopard and a cheetah in a single trip to the kruger I would have laughed at you!

And finally, I realised that I actually know stuff! I'm famously bird and buck (antelope) impaired and can barely tell the difference between a pigeon and a mossie (sparrow), but for some reason I knew a lot fo the birds that we saw, and the antelope weren't nearly as difficult as I expected. There weren't as many different bokkies as I expected, and I geuss I've absorbed a tiny bit of bird knowledge from all those weeks in the field, but I was shocked!

I also found out that I'm actually pretty good at chatting to people in Afrikaans. We came across very few English-speakers and if you're driving past people who have just seen a leopard and they and tell you, it really does come in handy. Now I know that my Afrikaans is good, partly from travelling fairly often through South africa, and partly from some close friends who speak Afrikaans at home (and often to me when they forget that I'm English). I've been able to make myself understood and understand people well enough to organise things or ask questions, but I'm always extremely self-conscious and they realsie that I'm English and they either keep it simple or they start speaking English. On this trip I felt completely comfortable speaking Afrikaans, to a point of having random conversations, just chatting about stuff and even on one occasion (after I touched my camera to a hectic electric fence and shocked myself) swearing in afrikaans and then being rather sarcastic to the people who pointed out that it was actually electrified. It was very cool!

Photos are to follow, otherwise this post will go on forever!

The first are totally not in my top ten anymore...

Sorry I haven't blogged recently after the rather frantic pace of blogging over the last week or so... In the last week I have:

• dyed parts of my hair blue. This has been covered but I still find it super-exciting!
• been at the zoo at 5am setting up vivariums
• been at an official zoo-section opening with all the ambassadors and dignitaries while still...
• not cracking an invite to the official "we set up a display!" party
• force-fed venemous snakes (not a first, but totally awesome!)
• been yelled at for being late at the zoo
• Sent volunteers to their doom - babysitting Thandi isn't a walk in the park anymore! It's more like a sprint through the zoo chasing the psycho monkey - literally!

as well as numerous other things I won't mention! It's been mildly hectic!

Last night I went off to Billy's in fourways to watch first project perform. It brought back a lot of memories, about 8 years ago I was a total First Project groupie! They're a lot like those blue guys in Las Vegas, where it's a bunch of guys on drums, and they're really amazing and they don't need anything else. The drums (and random bits of metal, like STOP signs) are all that they needed and they were really incerdible. To add to the fantasticness the performers are all relatively good lokoing guys who perform without any shirts on.

That may explain why Billy's started filling up with rather a lot of girls last night... by 'girls' I eman everything from the 16-year-olds who had snuck in at about 6pm to avoid the bouncers to 40 and 50-somethings who tended to behave a lot like the 16-year-olds, but with elss dignity as they couldn't be kicked out for being underage. One such aldy was dancing on the bar by about 8pm, and not getting the attention that she felt she deserved - an image that I would far rather remove from my brain!

So anyway after a few drinks from a fantastic waiter with an unintelligible accent that had us falling around laughing (seriously, we were drinking Coke for the first part of the evening and it was still funny!) and a few fantastic conversations, some of which were centred aroud Lara's fantastic chest-hair (for the record, she doesn't have any, but if she did, we would totally make it super-stylish!) we went off o the dance-floor stage area to grab a good spot close to the stage. We got one that was slightly too close - during the performance I was about a foot away frmo one of the performers, and my ears are still sore! Then we waited, and waited, even dancing to the rather awful remixes of Britney Spears and the Black-Eyed Peas, and nearly starting a fist-fight with some dodgy old guy who seemed to think he was destined to be a pirate, and who got a little bit too close to Nicola and me. While I was content to shove my elbow into his ribs and give him a look that would have melted glass, Nicola found it a little bit more difficult to find her 'happy place' and the guy was only saved by our reshuffling the group to move her away from him once he decided that it was funny to push past us every 5 minutes.

We spotted the performers about 10 minutes before they weer due to go onstage. So they have no excuse of waiting for traffic or any such rubbish, but they kept us waiting for almost an hour and a half, and when tehy went on there were only 3 guys, rather than the usual 5 or so that I remembered. Plus, they had backing music with vocals and stuff, which took away all the magic of the whole thing. It was still cool and I had fun, but I found myself wishing that I was 16 again, listening to the original stuff they used to do.

It also got me thinking, as I was stumbling around the zoo this morning cleaning out frogs and geckos and chatting to one of the volunteers, that I'm getting old. Or rather, behaving old. I used to be out every weekend listening to new south african artists and going to music festivals and all that sort of thing. Now I go out just as regularly, but by about 11pm I'm tired and I want to go home. And I've hardly seen any new south african artists in the alst few years - except the couple that were at MyCokeFest alst eyar. And even those weren't new, I remember hearing the Parlotones singing "Staring at the Sun" when I was about 16, so they're hardly anything new!

It is very sad indeed. So now for some nostalgia: does anyone remember Sarongas (before they became Seether), Just Jinger (before they moved overseas), Nemesis, Tweak, Cucumber Zoo and all those awesome bands we used to go and listen to? what happened to them? And who's around now that's worth going to listen to?

I won't be posting for a few days as I'm off to Kruger with an Australian tomorrow, wish me luck!