Making the most of electricity!

A Millipede

 Hi guys!
Sorry it's been such a while since my last post but we've had electricity for about 1 hour a day over the past week!
So on Tuesday we rode the elephants and tracked a fake poacher. The elephants have an amazing sense of smell so they have trained them to track a smell so when the time comes (hopefully never) they will be able to track a poacher. I then went riding and was very lucky to see a Martial Eagle. They are HUGE!! I think the wing span of the one we saw was 3 - 4 metres. We then went to the secondary school to do more gardening.

Me and Mak

 Wednesday saw us do some behaviour research on the black rhino and after breakfast we went to continue our work on repairing a bridge. On the way home Bright (project manager) surprised us by finding a Python. At one point it jumped out the bush and raised it's head very high scaring us all to death!! This python was about 7 feet long and luckily decided to go up a tree than approach us! After that excitement we removed some bushes with machetes  along the dam wall and then had our Shona evening with Mrs Maseka.

A Giraffe who got very close to our truck!

Thursday morning we walked with the elephants and in the afternoon we drove to Imire to see some cave paintings. It was quite a climb (Hugh: thanks for taking me indoor rock climbing in Bangor it turned out to be very useful!!). The paintings were amazing and there were tombs as well inside the caves (17 Kings and Queens from the tribe who lived there).

Friday didn't quite turn out as planned. We arrived at the elephant pen to see it totally wrecked! Toto had got free during the night and had knocked over 2 trees, destroyed the feed hut and taken down a third of the fencing so we ended up fixing all that for the day!

On another note, I'm really getting on with all the volunteers here, we have 2 more Brits arriving on Monday. The weather is miserable. It's cold, wet and windy and I wish I'd bought more clothes!! I'm definitely not going to look like I've been in Africa for a month! Sadly, it turns out I'm the 3% of people who has a reaction to the malaria tablets. My arms and hands which have seen the most sun turned very red with a bad rash and developed some small lumps which are quite irritating. Since stopping taking the malaria tablets it's died down considerably so unfortunately I can't go to Victoria Falls as it's a high risk malaria area but hey ho I'm having great fun here!

Spot the Stick Insect

Cave Paintings