Week 1

This has been a pretty hard week – mentally and physically.  Physically, I’m pretty jet lagged and it took a bit of time to get used to the schedule and try to work in back exercises – I guess I really am getting old.  Mentally, I’m terribly homesick and am having communication issues, which isn’t helping put my mind at ease, but I was able to make a phone call to Eric today in town.  Here is a little bit of what has been going on during this first week.

I arrived in Richards Bay on July 2^nd at 7:45am.  There were 2 other people waiting with me until 2:00pm when we got picked up to be driven to the camp.  There were a few stops along the way and we picked up a few more people – everyone was divided up into small groups and taken to different camps.  I was taken to Hluhluwe Camp (pronounced ‘shlushlue’) with 3 other girls for the first 2 weeks – Angela (from New Zealand, age 27), Sara (from London, age 19) and Marion (from France, age 22).  Sara seems to have taken a shine to me and I seem to have taken on the role as “mother” – she even asked me to pluck a tick off of her since she was too grossed out by it J.  They are really sweet girls and make me laugh.  The “camp” is a research station, so its setup more like a dorm area with rooms for 2 and a communal kitchen and bathrooms (similar to Archbold in south Florida) – with plenty of hot water!

A typical day involves waking up at 4:30am so we can be out of camp by 5am to telemetry track the wild dog packs (the main focus of this camp).  We usually get back to camp around 10-11am to have lunch and do some administrative stuff (ID photos, enter data, inventory, etc.).  Then we leave camp at 3pm to track the dogs again, arriving back at camp between 6 and 7pm to have dinner and go to bed by 9ish.  If I don’t go to bed by 9:30pm at the latest, then I have a wicked hard time getting up in the morning – y’all know I’m not a morning person :-).

In the beginning of the week we were able to spot 2 dogs from one pack and then on Saturday we finally found all 7 dogs from the second pack we’ve been tracking.  We’ve also seen loads of other critters (as Sara would say) while trying to get a signal and find the dogs.  Lots of encounters with elephants, some of them pretty close and a little scary, but overall very cool!  We also saw a cheetah cub on Friday evening J!  It ran out in the road in front of us – just as surprised by us as we were by it – and then ducked into the grass and started chirping for its mom.  She never did show up, but it stopped chirping and we assumed it probably found her.  We’ve also seen white rhinos, zebra, giraffe, buffalo, nyala, kudu, impala and lots of different birds. 

I’m waiting for the researcher to get back from Spain to explain what he wants me to do with GIS, but in the meantime it’s been fun to see all the animals and work with the telemetry.  Although it’s beautiful and amazing here, I really miss home.  I hope everyone is doing well.  I can receive/send emails on my cell phone daily from camp pretty easily, but the connection is really bad here so I can’t really use the internet that well except when I go to town once a week.  If you want to send me a quick email for a personal response that would be most appreciated (nagidsm@gmail.com).

Love to you all and talk to you again next Monday!  Oh…and did I mention I saw a cheetah cub :-)!