The continuing adventures of Lizard-Girl

I’ve had an awesome week and weekend and I have SO much to write about, but to do it justice I need more coffee and I have a hectic day planned so I thought I’d dig out one of the ‘secret posts’ as I’ve been neglecting my blog a bit lately (and I love you guys so please keep reading, K?)

Without further ado:

So I have one more story about the farmers on the Eastern side of the Conservancy  this happened a year ago, while I had another student staying with me while she did a couple of weeks of fieldwork.

I was trapping on the Bushpig guy’s farm when I got a panicked call from the other student to say that she’d had a car accident and asking me to fetch her, so I packed up and rushed off to pick her up. It turned out that she’d had a nasty puncture, lost control of her 4x4 and ended up making rather close friends with  fence, a few trees and a rather large rock. She’d called the AA to come and tow the car, but they’d put her on hold, and as she was on a prepaid package, she ran out of airtime, hiked for miles to the nearest occupied house (which was the one belonging to the shirtless tractor drivers, who offered her french toast) and called me.

We came back to the house so I could drop off the lizards and have some coffee and which I drove up the hill while drinking and ended up holding the cup out the window (made for some fascinating patterns down the door) and went to the edge of the highway to wait for the tow truck.

After an hour we phoned the tow truck people again to find that the driver had got lost and decided to go and tow someone else’s car. An hour later we’d convinced the dispatcher to tell him to turn around and come and meet us so we could show him where the car was.

I was fed up with sitting inside by then, so I opened the back of the bakkie and sat on the tailgate, and the other student came and joined me after a while and we pointed out all the rocky outcrops we could see and tried to figure out how to get the them. It was a lovely day and everything was fine until… a goat walked up and said ‘Maaaa-uh-uhhhhh!’

She ran back to the passenger seat and locked the door. i tried to avoid looking into the weird weird goat eyes (they have horizontal pupils, it’s just weird) and I tried to stay as far away from it as possible and not bother it. After a while it made the weirdest noise ever, I got the fright of my life, shrieked like a girl and ran to the drivers seat, leaving the tailgate down.

Big mistake. Next thing we knew the goat had jumped up into the bakkie and started headbutting the dividing window to get to us!

Considering we already had one damaged vehicle and didn’t really want another one, we figured we should try and remove the goat. Except that neither of us knew how. We went around to the back and tried calling it, we picked leaves from a nearby plant and tried to coax it out… and it looked at us and then peed all over the inside of the back of the bakkie. and I mean ALL over. I had no idea goat bladders were that big!

After about fifteen minutes we were rescued by two small children who came from the house. The chased it out and back into the garden of their neighbour, smacking the poor thing with sticks and generally having a great time and scaring us rather a lot. We thanked them and got back in the car, where they came around to the window and started chatting to us. The boy was ten or eleven I think and his little sister was eight. They lived in various houses on a big property belonging to their grandfather (I think they shuffled between their parents and grandparents houses, I‘m not sure how the tractor boys are connected to all of it).

The boy was the type that I could see growing up to be a very typical (albeit rather nasty farmer). He told us about the goat’s owners (the first non-white land owners in the area) in some rather derogatory terms, including blaming their behaviour on teaching the goat to pee in the back of the bakkie. Racism is, sadly, a part of life around here, but generally the adults hide it quite well, the way the kids spoke was just plain scary! He spoke about the land that his family owned, and when we asked if they often saw lizards he replied with “You can’t go there. It’s private property!”

We apologised, explained that we were just curious, and the other student tried to calm him down by telling a funny story about a leopard in the playground of a school she was visiting. Big mistake. You see, she is American, and has an accent to prove it. This little kid went off about how “You Americans think that that’s what life is like in South Africa, and that we all have pet lions and we ride elephants and-“ Unfortunately he messed with the wrong girl, as this one had spent the better part of a year living in various game reserves and probably knows more about South African ecology than most people. She told him this in no gentle terms and he decided to attack me for my American-ness instead.

Because apparently I talk like an American. Go figure.

The girl was about eight or so and very sweet. I got the urge to send her off to boarding school or somewhere we she could learn about the big wide world. She was kind of creepy though and occasionally would reach into the vehicle and stroke the other student. Eventually this got too much and the phone came out and she started calling the AA again, so the girl walked around to my side.

She didn’t mess around but opened with: “Do you believe in God?”

Great, we’ve been waiting on the side of the highway for two hours, there is goat pee in the back of my vehicle, we just got a front row viewing of some random person defecating in a ditch right in front of us and the creepy stroking-girl is trying to convert me.

I replied that I did (I do actually) and thanks for asking. She looked at me quizzically.

“You mean you’re a Christian?”

“Yes.”

“Well you’re not a very good one.”

“Excuse me?”

“You should be praying for the AA tow truck to arrive, not just waiting. ” her face lit up “You could close the windows RIGHT NOW and pray for the truck!”

At this stage the other student was trying to yell at the AA through giggles and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this all (but was grateful to have avoided the stroking thus far).

“I think I should wait for her to get off the phone, huh?”

Around that time the kids’ mother called them inside and the tow truck arrived (with a flat tyre, but that’s another story entirely) and we were left wit a rather strange impression of the kids in the area.

And finally: the leafblower lady

I have many more stories to tell, but this one has been on my mind lately and knowing my tendency to forget things after i promise to write about them, I thought I’d better put you all out of your misery and post this! Be warned, it’s a long one!

On the Western side (amongst all the beautiful, BEAUTIFUL rocks) is a tiny little guest house. I’m not sure why we turned in there, but as I drove up to the house my jaw literally dropped. There, nestled in some of the most amazing outcrops I’ve ever seen (I get quite nerdy about lizard habitat) was a lovely house, surrounded by trees and a swimming pool which  giant covered stoep in front. The whole place looked like some kind of oasis and I could almost imagine the clouds (there weren’t any that day, it was flipping hot, but you know what I mean) parting and angles popping out going ‘AAAAAAhhhhhh…” Monty Python style! The rains this year have been good, last year they were almost two months late – take the pictures I posted  while ago and convert them to sepia and add a dust haze and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what this place looked like then!

The amazingness continued: the owner was more than happy to help, spoke to me in English (by then I’d spoken so much Afrikaans in the last few weeks I actually battled slightly and kept answering him in Afrikaans) and asked me how many lizards I needed.

“forty more? Ag, you’ll get that in two days here!”

The next day I went back with my traps and all the other trapping paraphernalia to find the gate closed, so I left the bakkie outside and walked up the driveway (the gate was closed but they didn’t have a wall yet) where i was greeted by the owner who was quite upset that I hadn’t told him I was coming that day as he and his wife were going into town.

“I’ll be fine! Really, I just need to go on the rocks for a few hours and I promise I won’t damage anything you don’t have to watch me!”

“I wish I’d known. LIEFIE! Lizard-girl is here!” his wife emerged from the house.

“Oh! Lizard-girl! I wish I’d known you were coming, we’re going to town...”

“I’m sorry if it’s a problem I can come back tomorrow?”

“No no no, that’s alright, come let me introduce you to the people we have working for us, if you need anything, anything at all they’ll help you!”

I was whisked off and introduced to three guys who were building or something in the grounds as well as a lady working in the house. They were told in no uncertain terms that anything I wished for had to be done as long as the owners were away. Bear in mind I usually get told to stay out the way and climb the fence if I had to rather than bothering the farmers.

Before they left the owners tried very hard to offer me tea or coffee (by now I’m totally confused and twitching to get out to the rocks before it gets too hot) and then freaked at the idea of me walking to get the bakkie and insisted on driving me all 200m to the gate. They also kept worrying about not being there and finally forced me to take their dogs with me, just in case.

The dogs turned out to be a mixed blessing. By this stage I’d been away from home for three months and I was missing my pets like crazy so it was nice to have four-legged non-reptilian company. On the other hand they tended to run after my lizards. Pretty soon though we had an understanding and they stayed back when i told them to and came when I called (I thought they were exceptionally well trained, which was quite funny as the owner claimed that they were untrained and never came when he called!) and at one stage even chased a lizard onto a trap for me!

At some stage one of the workers came and asked what I was doing and I showed him, he seemed quite interested and obviously thought I was crazy and then went off to work again.

I caught a lot of lizards and a few hours after the return of the owners from their expedition into town I went to thank them and be on my way. The owner came rushing over to see how I’d done, scoffed at the mere thirteen lizards I’d caught (‘You can do better than THAT here!’) got me to show him a lizard which made him very excited and had me showing it to everyone around.

He also refused to let me leave without giving me something to drink and invited me in for some lovely cold Coke or something and told me to take a seat.

What kind of farmer keeps white couches? I dress relatively nicely when I’m on other farms as I don’t really want to expose the world to the horrors that are my standard torn, sewed-up, dirt-stained, oil-stained, blood stained, glue stained field clothes, but still I’d been out all day, for all I know I’d sat in a mud puddle or something. Anyway we sat and I perched as little of me on the seat as possible while juggling a lapful of cat and a glass of juice. the owner (I hesitate to call him farmer, but owner sounds so… formal, I’ll call him Bob.) Anyway Bob immediately started interrogating me on what I’d seen.

So I told him about the birds and the insects and when that didn’t get the desired response I mentioned a few bokkies I’d seen. he got very excited and started writing all of the names down. At one stage there was something he hadn’t seen before and he rushed off and found a field guide and showed me the pictures so I could confirm that yes, I’d seen a… I don’t remember, I think it was just a reedbuck or something. finally he sent me on my way with a reminder to “Look after my lizards!”

Over the next few weeks I went there at least twice a week and got the majority of the rest of my lizards. Bob was really nice and even showed me some other sites and how to get to them (for the record, rock-climbing up a sheer rock face turned out to be safer than his route, but moving on) and got to know them quite well. They were actually new to the area, and originally came from Joburg, but had bought a little farm to retire on once their kids had grown up. Bob had grown up on a farm near Bulawayo and loved that this area reminded him of home, while I’m pretty sure his wife put up with it for his sake – she reminded me of my mom a lot: loving nature as long as it didn’t ever get too close. Bob had actually built paths around their land so that he could get to the pretty places without too much effort (I took them once. Turns out a recently cleared bush-path that hasn’t been at least driven over to compact it is a surefire way to learn dune-boarding – minus the board).

One day I packed up to go home, thanked Bob’s wife, refused the offer of lunch (farmer’s wives like to feed me) and stayed to chat to her and have something to drink as usual. It was the first time I’d spoken to her alone as Bob was always bouncing around, showing me plants and tree agamas and they way he’d decorated the guest house and where he saw some or other animal. So I stood in her kitchen, trying not to touch anything and chatting about the weather and how I wasn’t trapping very many lizards as the drought had hit the local population hard.

I think it was a combination of heat, frustration, having someone to talk to and the fact that she reminded me of my mother, but out of nowhere I burst into tears and said something along the lines of “I just want to go home now.”

Next thing I knew she’d whisked the glass out of my hand, made me take out my traps again and lead me around the house, showing me all the places she often saw lizards. I ended up staying for another few hours and catching quite a few lizards while she rand around pointing out areas. At some stage I heard a terrible noise and rushed over to see what had happened: Bob’s wife was absolutely terrified of lizards, but she’d been watching me chasing them onto traps, and so she’d seen a lizards near one and tried to help me. As she didn’t want to get too close, she had grabbed the nearest tool (leafblower) turned it on and tried to use it to herd lizards. It didn’t really work, but I was very touched by the fact that she was trying so hard to help me!

And that is the saga of Bob and the Leafblower Lady, probably the closest I’ve had to family out here!

Oh and Kath, rather than the banjos, here are two songs I’ve herd quite often around here, so you might want to listen to them instead. I take no responsibility for any side effects!

 

Funny story to this one, I was at a party before I left and was feeling sick and so I went home. Next thing I get a million messages from people saying I’d missed it… Strange people back home…

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.

things not to say in a room full of farmers!

So today was the annual meeting of all the landowners in the area. I go along every year partly to represent the university and partly to meet farmers with rocks on their land. To tell the truth all I’ve ever really got out of it is a bizarre Afrikaans vocabulary (most of the meeting is in Afrikaans), some sleep while they bicker over levies and security requirements and many pages of doodles.

Tonight was different. I was invited along as one of three guest speakers and told that although the meeting began at 3:30 I didn’t have to sit through the usual stuff but could go along at 5 in time to speak. I planned on getting there earlier to do my usual job representing the oh-so-hallowed university, but then it turned out that a combination of bad roads and rain meant driving for 20km along what was effectively a potholed and rutted mud-slick. So it took me a while longer than I’d planned so I snuck in at 4:45 and tried to find a seat without being noticed.

The chairman spotted me and paused, mid-discussion to yell out a welcome to me. I waved and tried to ignore the WHOOSH of every head turning towards me. Fortunately someone moved up and cleared a seat for me and I sat down quickly. The woman introduced herself as the chairman’s wife.

‘I’ve heard so much about you! What’s happening now is they’re still discussing issues, so you’re welcome to listen, it’ll be another fifteen minutes or so. Otherwise you’re welcome to sit outside, have some coffee…”

Anyone who knows me will know that I got mildly excited at the prospect of coffee and she offered to show me where it was. And then the weird behaviour continued; rather than leave me to it, she made herself a cup of (ric)coffee (beggars, choosers, you know?) and asked if i wanted to sit inside or outside. and she stayed with me. it was so strange.

When the other speakers arrived I was introduced and we all chatted along with the owner of the lodge we were at and his family (all very very German, Hans, Heidi and Hermann and their awesome dog as well as a bunch of German staff who had the scariest lumo-blue eyeshadow I‘ve ever seen). I learned a lot about the area first from the chairman’s wife who pointed out the shape of the land and how you an tell it used to be a tobacco farm as well as swapping stories of the strange farmers and the different sides of the conservancy being so different. Apparently its being separated to have independent governing bodies on each side which is fair enough considering the bickering between the sides at the previous meetings.

Apparently from tobacco farming (the area was a huge tobacco area until the industry collapsed here in the 70’s or 80’s or something) the new owners rehabilitated the land (beautifully might i add, if you can ignore the prickly-pear they were cultivating in pots around the braai area and the bonsai Aap-se-tert that was Hans’s pride and joy) and turned it into a hunting lodge. At some stage while listening to the Parks board people discussing venemous snakes while the Germans discussed German dialects (in German) there was a pause.

“Was that a gunshot?” Hans shrugged

“Probably.”

“But who’s out today?” asked Heidi. “We don’t have guests this weekend and Jaco across at the other lodge doesn’t have anyone either.”

“Oh well. We’ll just have to go hunt some poachers later.” and the conversations resumed.

Once the meeting ended (it was an hour-long fifteen minutes) we set up a laptop and projector (with the assistance of a flower-pot) and the first speaker got started (once one of the farmers figured out that the bathroom was right behind the speaker and spent ten minutes trying to get the door open). He was a nice guy, very keen on what he was talking about and absolutely unable to either change his tone of voice or make eye contact with anyone. His discussion on changing legislation to protect and conserve the area made for a lively discussion as he had the wind a bit knocked out of his sails to learn that the entire area is under a land claim right now and so nothing he said can be put into practise until it’s settled. Of course the farmers had fun trying to figure out the loopholes and so on until one of them got very agitated and started screaming a bunch of things about a bunch of people and eventually ended up using a word that I don’t think is legal anymore.

For a room full of conservative farmers to go dead-quiet and a collective gasp… it was THAT bad. The chairman hustled the speaker off the stage to a smattering of applause and sent me up.

Here’s the fun part. I speak to scientists regularly. I speak to laymen regularly. I don’t really spend much time telling farmers about what I actually do and I had no idea how to pitch a talk at them. I mean laymen with practical experience but no theoretical background, a shaky grasp on English and a bunch of superstitions? Fun times! I had considered speaking in Afrikaans but wussed out ad made a slideshow with a bunch of photos and figured I’d wing it.

It worked quite well, they paid attention and didn’t fall asleep and I told a lot of stories of the things lizards do, which ones bite harder, which areas they live in, that sort of thing. I got them giggling at the idea of the lizard treadmill and at lizards outsmarting me (‘And you’re doing a PhD?’ thanks for the catcall Mrs Parks-board-guy’s-wife!) I even re-enacted my jumping out from behind a bush screaming, and asked the lucky spectators to identify themselves.

It was all going quite well… You must realise I don’t see people often (i.e. at all) around here. And after a while I start singing to myself, thinking out loud, talking to myself… you know…

So at some stage I mentioned something and they chuckled and I thought

‘Great, now they all think I’m cRaZy’ (add weird vocal effects to the cRaZy)

and the entire room BURST out laughing. I think the guy form the bathroom incident may have wet his kortbroek.

Did I say that out loud? Oh yes I did.

Either way I got some pretty enthusiastic applause at the end and they were all awake (just in time for a LONG talk on other legislation that wouldn’t actually affect the area at all) before the official end-of-year braai. By the it was 7pm so I made my excuses and went home to measure lizards and get away from the people who think I’m insane.

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 continuing adventures of Lizard-Girl: part 2

I began trapping and measuring lizards but the numbers weren’t great and i needed a few sites nearby for afternoon trapping – nothing major, just a few extras to boost numbers. So one afternoon i drove around looking for rocks.

i stopped at Arends-nes holidays first, which is a tiny little house (I’m not sure where they put the guests) made remarkable only by the giant disintegrating bulldozers next to the front door. I figured I could start there and so I stopped the car and got out, only to be knocked over by the biggest dog I’ve ever seen! He was very sweet, but had giant growths all over his head and so I wasn’t quite as friendly to him as I may have been otherwise.

The kortbroek-bedecked owners were very polite as I stammered through the explanation of my project in Afrikaans for the first time and they agreed to let me trap on their property. Which is all of about 200 square metres. Thinking they might own some property nearby or around the house I asked if they could show me any rocks around there, and they got very excited and took me behind the house. Before I could worry too much about what exactly was going (and thanking La and CG and Joey back home for teaching me to understand rapid-fire Afrikaans) the owner very proudly gave me a tour of his rock garden. It was basically a flowerbed. and it was very pretty, but entirely devoid of any of my lizards. I thanked him and left him shaking his head in bemusement at the weird English girl…

It got better from there as I found some decent-looking outcrops and drove up the nearest driveway. There I parked by the pigsty and was greeted by a tiny dog and a small boy who ran off screaming for his father. His father was Malcolm, a lovely guy who grows and sells his own chili-mix (it’s delicious but somewhat lethal) as well as making a living off people hiking and camping on his land (it’s steep, so they’re welcome to hike, but they have to pay him if they want a ride back). He was a great source of information, giving me phone numbers for a lot of his neighbours, explaining which rocks belonged to the local dominee (and therefore I could probably get away with being there ‘by accident’ as long as the wife didn’t catch me) and which rocks belonged to the butcher (and horse farmer. Suspect?).

He was the first to look me up and down, say

“ Do you have a 4x4?” I pointed to the bakkie which is actualy pretty fantastic off-road and he nodded.

“Do you know how to use it?”

Of course! How could he think such a thing? Just because I’m a girl…I told him it was no problem. I had done a small amount of off-road driving in the past, and I’d always paid attention and asked questions as a passenger when other people drove, plus I knew that the car had an instruction manual in the glove compartment. To his credit Malcolm didn’t even twitch, he just gave me directions and sort of snuck a mini-lesson in there, by mentioning which 4x4 gears I should use at each section.

Oh. My. word. I’ve taken the bakkie over some pretty appalling ‘roads’ since then, but nothing compares to the tracks on his property. At one stage I was convinced that I was going to roll the car (I had two wheels on one boulder and two wheels on a different bolder, with a height difference of about a metre and a half between them. When I got to the end and had do drive back up it I think my fingers might have dented the steering wheel! I stopped around the corner from the house and took a break to stop myself from shaking before I drove back the rest of the way.

Malcolm greeted me with

“SO how did you find the road?”

“It was FINE! No problem!”

I never went trapping there again. My adrenal glands couldn’t take it! I go back to see Malcolm occasionally though, to get chili (my sister-in-law loves it) and to catch up on the local news. His son also collects snake skin as his father won’t let him keep pet snakes, so I keep an eye out for it when I’m in the field.