Hey!!

Everything is good. Africa is pretty neat. The other volunteers are all really nice. There are two girls from England, and a guy and girl from the states, the girl being my roommate. She has been here the longest out of the volunteers and is my roomie which works well for me!

The heat here is incredible! The evenings are much more tolerable and the sunsets are amazing, very beautiful. Last night we went on our anti-poaching night drive, which is done about once a week. Basically you just drive around to eatablish a 'presense' so that anyone who might want to sneak onto the reserve (its all fenced and secure) will see us and hopefully think otherwise. When we do see them (didnt see any last night) we just come back to the compound and tell tony and mary (the owners). Usually it is Phalalo our volunteer coorindinator who sees them...we just go along for the ride haha. But the night drive was fun. There's an old land rover that we use all the time and we all just pile into the back of it. The moon was big last night and we watched for animals.

When i 1st got here yesterday i went down to introduce myself to the opther volunteers since it was their lunch break (12-1) but they werent there (in the pool house...our hang out). Phalalo said they must be lost and we went out to look for them. They managed to come back when we were out looking for them but in the mean time i got to see the reserve. Lots of grazing gazelle type animals, wilderbeasts, zebra's (which i saw for the 1st time on the night drive) and I even spotted our 2 giraffe's which u usually dont spot until you've been here for a week or so. They seemed curious and came up super close to us, about 20 feet away....it was sooo cool. Definately not the same as seeing them in a zoo! A very nice welcome to Africa.

I'll upload pics hopefully later today. Its 8am here and im going to eat breakfest shortly before we head out to do our morning work (different everyday). This morning it is tree identification. On wednesternoons we go into Petroia and go to the mall etc, which is cool i wont have to work a full day on my 1st working day! Tomorrow night we are going camping, which should be fun!