It is now coming to the end of my first placement in Africa, and hence I’ve been away nearly four weeks! Can’t believe how quickly time has gone so far! Typically my final day here and I had to go to the doctors this morning as I’ve managed to get ‘acute tonsillitis’ – not much fun. Managed to get some anti-biotics and have been told to rest… mentioned my plane flight tomorrow but as long as I take it easy over I’ll recover no problems! Anyway, here is an update of the last two weeks:

Last Wednesday was sleep out – an amazing experience. We got to the area we were camping at 4pm, unpacked and started the fire. We were right by the river so Joe had bought a fishing rod and caught a 20kg fish!! As we were fishing we could hear elephant noises in the distance and knew we would be having visitors soon. Sure enough around dinner time we had a herd appear – pretty awesome and they passed through with little disturbance. Dinner was ‘wars and pap’ – a tradition over here, basically sausage and stodgy mash followed by toasting marshmallows. We then picked a number out of the hat for what shift we would be awake for and I got 12.45am – 2am. So at 9.30ish I got into my sleeping bag – this is hardcore camping with no tents, just your bag under the stars! It was pretty chilly so it was a case of running from the warm fire and quickly getting into your bag before getting cold. Clear night – looking up I could see shooting stars, the Milky Way and plenty of star constellations – pretty incredible. JUST as I was drifting off guess what – the elephants reappeared! Haha, about 8 of them surrounded our camp – we had to get to the vehicle as we were worried they were going to trample us! Eventually they moved on but at this point it was pretty difficult to get back to sleep because 1) I was wide awake now and 2) bloody cold!! Dozed on and off then was woken for my shift which actually went pretty quickly – it was nice and warm by the fire and I heated water for a cup of tea. Then back to sleeping bag as shift was over. It was cold but not as bad as I thought actually – every time you moved though you would feel a cold draught of wind, which was pretty nasty! 7 of us camped out and so we all woke up at 6.30, packed up and came back to the volunteer house for an amazing hot shower – second best shower I’ve ever had after the one on my Kili trip when I hadn’t washed for 6 days! Honestly though, amazing experience 

Last weekend was fun as we went out Friday night and on Saturday had Rachel’s ‘leaving party’ (another volunteer who went on Tuesday). They created a mini video of our time on the project which was great to watch, and made you realise just how much we’ve done over the last few weeks!

Monday we had an amazing elephant sighting – one was playing in the mud then came right up to us and started lifting up the tracker seat on the vehicle, playing with the aerial and even lifted our vehicle a bit from the ground! Pretty breath-taking, you could tell it was just curious and as long as you stayed pretty still you felt fairly relaxed. Got some great videos of this that I will try and upload at some point if the internet will let me.

Tuesday we went into town and on route visited Jessica the Hippo who starred in ‘Hippo in the House’ on channel 4. She was pretty much hand-reared by a couple so is the tamest hippo you will come across – we got to feed her and give her a kiss. After town we got back and over the radio someone said they had found a dead cheetah, and sadly it turned out to be one of the cheetah boys I have been monitoring since arriving here. It couldn’t be confirmed but the thought is there are two other cheetahs in the area who have attacked them before, and it looked like they were behind this too (they have killed another cheetah before). Really really sad as I had got to see a lot of these cheetahs and they were always a highlight to watch. We found his brother who at the time was unharmed but it was thought only a matter of time before the others would find him.

Sure enough, first thing Wednesday we headed out to find the brother and this time he was badly injured – obviously been attacked overnight. He could barely walk, had nasty wounds to his back legs and head. We could get within a metre of him, which showed how critical he was. We called for an emergency vet and sat tight with him for a few hours until he arrived. The vet ended up injecting him by hand and 6 of us loaded him onto a stretcher to get him out of the bush. The vet operated on him on the back of his truck – despite the horrible situation it was incredible to watch. He managed to stitch up most of the wounds, although some were pretty nasty and was going to be painful when he woke up. It took about an hour and a half, then the cheetah was placed in a boma where he will now remain for the next few weeks until hopefully he recovers.

So that was a few hectic days! The last 48 hours have involved some more great sightings – saw a leopard, more elephants, rhino, hyena, giraffe and perhaps most excitingly a pangolin (Google it – really rare to see, they are awesome!!) And this is pretty much the end of my time at Askari now! Can’t believe how quickly it has all gone really… will be very sad to say goodbye to this place. Excited about the next adventure though!

Anyway, thought I’d give a quick sum up of my best moments here. I was also having a conversation with one of the other girl’s here about things we missed most about home which might amuse you…

Best moments:
1) Seeing a pangolin – possibly my new most favourite creature and very rare to see.
2) The incredible elephant sighting we had this week.
3) The first time I tracked one of our cheetahs using our telemetry device – she jumped out of the grass about 10m away giving me a good fright!
4) The sleep out experience
5) Actually kissing a hippo – an animal you would usually stay well clear of!

Top 3 things I miss at the moment (not including people etc)
1) Central heating. Something you don’t really think about until you arrive in a country that drops to 3/4 degrees at night time and you are in a house designed to stay cool in hot summers… I go to bed with a fleece, quilt, blanket and hot water bottle to keep me warm!!
2) Choice in clothes. Very materialistic I know but as you can probably see from pictures I am wearing the same thing pretty much every day and I do miss having the variety to choose from! To a point where I gave in and bought a pair of jeans the other day – I missed the comfort factor too much!
3) Speedy internet. Not something I require most of the time but when you do want it, you want it to work at a fairly decent pace! Things have improved vastly in the last week as wifi was installed, but before then a page would take 10 minutes to load and internet cafes were a night mare to upload my photos from! The closest I have come to smashing a computer!

So the next placement I am heading over to is in Namibia – looking forward to it so will update everyone on how that is going soon. Love to you all!