For the past two days we've been enjoying game drives and delicious meals prepared by our camp cook with light field work in between. This is our second night at the Shingwedzi Research Camp and Boy! do I find the accommodations lovely. I just took a nice hot shower, and the water pressure was excellent. It was well deserved too, I had the dust of two days in the back of a safari truck settling in my ear canals. I dug that stuff out with a wash cloth. I think I saw a potato come out too. That's one thing I was not prepared for--the amount of dust. As soon as we turned off the paved road onto the dirt road that took us to our field site it started to sift in and immediately got into our teeth, eyes, and noses. Sherwin rode with his sweatshirt up over his nose to keep the dust out. I think I may have inhaled some parasites. The dust is really fine and infiltrates everything.
I've seen quite a few animals. Elephant, Giraffe, Zebra, Wildebeast, Kudu, Buffalo, Ostrich, Brown Snake Eagle, Saddleback Stork, Lily Breasted Roller, Jackal, Tstssebe *or something like that, Steenbok, Impala, Crocodile, Hippos...and some more. They're Everywhere. This place is really awesome. The best part, though, is that we're allowed to get out of our safari vehicle and walk around in the bush--the Afrikaans word is VELD, pronounced 'felt'--which tourists aren't allowed to do. But it's okay because we have a guy with a gun. One of the U. Pretoria students said that KT and I looked just like lion food when we were sitting down in the brush labeling tubes. But, we didn't get eaten by a lion.
When we finished our field work we took a cooler of beer up to the top of an earthen dam and watched the sunset. There were a bunch of hippos that swam up to the edge of the dam and showed off for us. They thrashed their heads around for a bit and made some piggy noises. There were 5 of them and they even lined up in Hungry Hungry Hippo formation, which we all appreciated. The game ranger (the guy who carried the gun all day to protect us from Buffalo and such--we had a semi-close call with a buffalo in the afternoon) said that the hippos swam from all the way across the river just to investigate us--since we were intruders.
We had a campfire after dinner (the wood here is really HARD, as in dense, so we only managed a small campfire, but there was fire...). While we were sitting there watching the veld-TV (as one of the students called it) we heard lots of lions. They said that the lions were close--and they were pretty loud. I guess right outside the fence. Good thing there are fences here... Lions don't sound at all like I expected them to sound. They're not all like "Roar Roar" but more like "croak, low grunt, croak" Maybe those were their eating sounds. Or just really big frogs. Lion Frogs?
Ok, well, it's late here and I need to sleep since we have a LONG game-drive tomorrow from Shingwedzi to Skukuza--something like 7 hours in the back of the safari truck--7 hours in the dust and wind. Next time I come here I'm bringing my ski goggles. Enjoy the pictures.
Game Ranger.
Lion bait.
Ostriches and baby ostriches.
Elephant crossing.
Sunset. That spec in the middle of the water is a hippo walking towards us to say hello. Hippos don't swim, they just walk on the bottom.
That's a hippo there. Two of them actually.
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