Day 8!

Lovely day in town today. We left around 830 AM and got to Hoedspruit by 930. It’s quite safe and there are policemen/guards that are patrolling all the public areas, so I wandered around for a few hours and looked in some stores. Everyone kinda did their own thing, so it was nice to explore. I spent the majority of my time in stores looking through guides to African mammals and books on identifying scat and spore of African mammals. I also went to the Pick N Pay and gathered up some fruit, juice, instant coffee, etc, for my next week here. Later, I went to a cafe and had lunch and read my book (Screwtape Letters currently); it was glorious. We picked up a new volunteer, named Wolfgang, when his plane came in. He’s about 50s as well. On our way home, we stopped at a little plaza that had lots of souvenir-type shops. Paintings, carvings, and other such things. I was almost tempted to buy myself a huge oil on canvas painting of a lion on the savannah; it was only 1020 rand! :D  I am hoping to find myself a really nice carved lion head in the next few to bring home for my future “Africa room” in my house :) When we got home, Gail, Peter, and Kira packed up their stuff, and left with Toko for bush camp.  The three of them will spent the nights at the bush camp, learning survivalist skills, as well as tracking skills. Gail and Peter will return the following week to Twines (the research base). So now it’s just me, Andrew, Lukas, and Wolfgang here for the week. Not only am I the only American, and the youngest, but also NOW, I am the only girl. This week will be interesting. Hmmmm. Hopefully, it will be a little less hectic, as I am more into the routine of things, so I can really focus on my mapping. I have a lot of work cut out for myself now, here. So we will see how it all goes. I spent the evening reading a bit more, then working on some mapping and Skyping :) We had dinner around 7, spaghetti bolognaise. We all helped to clean up, and it went really fast. By 8, Wolfgang headed off to bed. I was still wide awake, so I went to go work on my mapping a bit, getting the data from the past years off the camp research computer so I can analyze it. Lukas came in to ask me a question, and we ended up talking for nearly two hours about research, school, careers, and Africa. We both are obsessed with lions, and we talked about how we fell in love with Africa and its wildlife at a young age: once you fall in love with the bush, you can’t shake that love. There’s just something about this place. Tomorrow morning, we do another set route drive, which is code for “a very long drive where we can’t alter our course to follow animal tracks or respond to any animal sightings from the radio.” Which, last Tuesday morning, turned out to be a great drive. It may also, as Lukas alluded to, be a drive where we continuously get stuck in drainage lines. Hmmm. We will see. That’s one thing about this place, I’m never bored. :D