Day 15.

May 27th. 

Starting my third week here! Yowza! Today, we went into town to get more volunteers! We got to sleep in, cause we didn’t leave till 9. YAY! :D When we got there, we all got out at the tourist info center a ways down from the central shopping area. I stuck with Wolfgang, and he and I did some shopping. We went to an area where venders had their stone carvings and fabric wall hangings and other goods along the roadside, and he helped me haggle down some purchases. It was quite amusing to see a German man and an African woman haggling over my little stone animal. :) I told him he was my dad for the day, so he had to/got to help me hhaha. After a while, we made the 10/15 minute walk to the main area, and met everyone for lunch at Sleepers. Lukas had made the first pickup of the day, two young Americans! Molly and Emily, and they are 20! WOOOO! :D So excited for others who don’t use electric kettles, don’t watch rugby or cricket, think marmite is gross, and do other awesome American things! We had a nice lunch there, and I got a boboitie burger, which is a very traditional way to season beef, and it had chutney on it! I was a little nervous, but it was delish! :D Then we all wandered around town some more, going to the pick-n-pay and whatnot. I got ingredients to make chocolate oatmeal cookies for everyone this week, yum! I was going to mail postcards, but I had misheard the time to meet. I  thought I had til 2, but apparently we only had until a quarter til. So I shall mail them next week, first thing, so I don’t run out of time. After the second pickup (another young American girl and her dad), we headed to the bureau de change so the new volunteers could get some Rand. We stopped at a fruit stand, where I was disappointed at the lack of mangoes! Then we also stopped to drop Andrew off at the car place. THEN, we had to stop to pick up Claudia, the ranger who will be filling in for Toko this week. Finally, we were on the road, and it was almost 330! We didn’t get home til 430ish, and the bush camp gang for the week (Kira, Kelsey, and Tom) left pretty soon after with Lukas. I got to work on some data and chatted with Andrew a bit about new data sheets for the monitoring drive and other such things. Then, we all had dinner together around the fire. It warmed up tonight, compared to last week for sure! We all got tired pretty early, and began cleaning up around 8. We were all off to our rooms by 830, ready for an exciting new week tomorrow. Set route for tomorrow morning is up in Pidwa North, which I’m really excited about! I haven’t seen the area before, and there is a pride of lions that usually stays up there that I am anxious to see! 

My first draft map of lion pride locations for 2012. There are a few data points I need to look into to see if the IDs were accurate. But it's forming now!