Home again Home again

For all of you guys who haven't figured out that I'm home and safe: I'm home and safe. Not eaten, killed, raped, or mugged. Home. Safe. So here are a few pictures, and there's a link to a few more on the sidebar (From Africa With Love). For all of you who want to see the African Queen, I'm here working at the EQI until August. Or else until I decide to go back again.

I'm sure you guys are excited to have me back in one piece.

Oh, Zero, you're such a daddy!

I guess its true that a not very exciting week here is way more exciting than back home. I can't even tell you guys how nice it is for each day to be so dramatically different than the one before it. Last saturday we went out for a posh dinner at one of the lodges and returned around midnight to our humble little farmhouse only to find Zero lounging on the volleyball court and Lisa in the braai (barbeque) area sniffing at the windows of our lounge. I spent all last week in the mountains, doing invertebrate surveys (hooray!). Yesterday we enticed a golden baboon spider out of her hole and we played with her for awhile. She's a big taratula, very beautiful and freaky looking, but when I held her, she just felt like fuzzy air on my hand. Holding millepedes is way more disturbing. I finally saw Maggie's cubs yesterday, and I must say that they are adorable. I think if the whole pride had been there then I would have just jumped off the truck and joined them. I could deal with catcing zebra with my teeth. Although for those of you who want me to smuggle cubs out, Maggie and Lisa both will not let me for sure. They won't even let little Mpho within a fifteen meter radius of them. Yesterday morning we also spent thirty minutes watching giraffees fighting. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life. And I spent a day in Kruger and ate elephant biltong (jerky).

I'm about to leave my fantastic game reserve heaven and go off with my adventourous Anne for two weeks and then I'll be back in the States again on April 9th. So plan a party.

Well, dudes, not that many exciting things have been happening this week. To me, anyways. One of our trucks was almost run over by the elephants, but I wasn't on that one. I did get to see Zero chase Mpho off a giraffe kill, which was quite impressive I must say. And I swear I thought that I posted pictures last week for you all to enjoy, but apparently it didn't go through. I wasn't expecting to be on the internet today--we were going to start the first phase of our cheetah energetics project. We were about to inject meat with doubly labeled water and feed it to some captive cheetahs when all hell broke loose at the place we were at and they called it off. I think there was a real emergency with their cheetahs--people were running around like crazy. I suspect there was a big big problem there. I'll let you know more when I find out myself. Anyways, I'm still here and having fun, so don't worry about me just yet. And be good without me, please.

Hunted

Well guys, I regret to say that the title of this message has a sort of double meaning. Lions hunting people and people hunting lions, I'm afraid.

The lions hunting people bit is a near death experience that my truck had last night. Ok, probably not truly near death, but it was enough to scare the absolute shit out of us. It was probably the most scared I have ever been in my entire life--including when our car just about smashed into a tour bus on the way home from St. Lucia. The sun was just going down, and I did a check for Zero with the telemetry. He was still pretty far away, but kind of close, and mobile. (We can tell by the kind of beeps if they are mobile and stationary). We were having major problems plugging the spotlight into the truck--one of the prongs had completely fallen off the plug and we couldn't get anything to work properly. So, my staff memeber, Helen, and a fellow volunteer, Jenny, got out of the truck to try and fix it. That took about six or seven minutes. When it finally started working, Helen started jumping around like an idiot, throwing her hands in the air and screaming, "I'm a genius, I'm a genius!" Then, she's like, "Oh, Shit! Jenny, get in the car, Jenny, get in the car! JENNY GET IN THE CAR!!!" We looked up and not even 10 meters away from the front of the truck we see the dusky outline of not only Zero, but Lisa (adult lioness) and Mpho (subadult male (mpho means little brother)), walking towards our truck. And not just walking towards the truck, but looking right at the girls on the ground, walking towards them. They get in the truck as fast as possible (Helen was so fast I didn't even see her run all the way around the back). Zero and Lisa split up, go on either side of the truck, and then Lisa eyes up us volunteers sitting on the back and looks like she is stalking us and is about to jump on the back of the truck. Helen sees her out of her side view mirror, starts the car and floors it. This scares the shit out of Zero, who starts to run around the truck, thus, scaring the shit out of me. By the end of it all we were all sitting there saying very incoherent things, breathing very heavily, and also saying "Fuck" alot. I can't even tell you how scarry it was.

Now, the double meaning of hunted comes in with Lex and Luthor, my first lion loves. They need to be removed from the reserve, because we have too many lions, they are about to mate with Lisa (their mother) and Maggie (their aunt), and they are also starting to kill more giraffe than the reserve manager is comfortable with. The problem is that there is no real market for selling male lions, because every reserve pretty much has too many. Plus, there's about a 90% chance that when they are sold, they will be resold to a place that does canned hunting. So, the manager decided to sell hunting rights for Lex and Luther on our reserve. One of them is being hunted even as I'm writing this. The other will be dead by the end of the month.

We are all obviously upset by this, and a few of us (myself included) were even doing a small bit of crying. But we all understand and 100% agree with the decision. What a learning tool for reserve management.

In other news, it has rained every single day this week. And its cold. Cold, cold, cold. And also, yesterday one of the toilet cisterns fell off the wall and smashed the pipes underneath it. So, we're left with only one toilet for 26 people. And we got to eat a posh dinner at one of the lodges on Saturday night.

I'm still having fun, still don't want to come home yet, and I still miss all of you, my friends and family, more than I will be able to say.

And I will not be eaten, don't worry. I might have the shit scared out of me again, but I will not be eaten. Or hit by a bus. Don't panic.

Love you all!

The Biggest Fish in the Sea

We caught the biggest fish in the sea. Or, a damn big one anyways. A sailfish, actually, maybe six and a half feet long, very very beautiful. Its our last day in St. Lucia, so we thought we'd go out with a bang. I've been traveling with three other ladies, an Aussie, a Brit, and a Canadian. The trip was supposed to cost R450, but we managed to book it for R250, which we were very excited about. Then when we were the ones pushing the little motorboat in the water and when we had to immediately go back to shore to check out a problem with the motor and then the Canadian immediately got impaled with a nasty fish hook we started to wonder if we'd cut a deal to end up eaten by sharks or stranded for hours in the middle of the ocean somewhere. We, as a boat (us plus two honeymooning Brits), caught three tuna, one baracuda, and the monster sailfish (the fish of a lifetime). We all enjoyed ourselves very much, but my three friend were terribly seasick and spent most of their time lying on the floor of the boat, trying not to throw up. I got more sunburnt than I care to, even blue shit does not seem to be helping.

St Lucia has been very beautiful--the ocean is amazing. We enjoyed our time on the beach until the Brit and the Canadian got stung by blue bottle jellyfish. We also saw Black Rhino and Buffalo in the park, which is nice because we don't have either of those on our reserve.

I think my time is almost up, and I need to go help the girls fix the sailfish steaks we took home. So, keep on keepin on, guys. I miss you all, but not enough to come home yet.