Sitting here listening to the Greatest Showman soundtrack, aggressively lip syncing along (much to the delight/horror of Gabriel sitting next to me) whilst avoiding doing any work.. I may as well be back at uni. Well, aside from the frogs making a fucking racket outside and the fact that I don’t have to wear 6 layers to sit in the library that is. But at least my annoying tendency to procrastinate is somewhat lessened here by the fact that I absolutely love what I’m doing. Except the grasses, they can still fuck off.

Another freaking busy week studying botany, specifically trees and grasses, plus the ID of 88 mammals, arachnids, insects, trees, grasses and flowers (plus remember all the ones from last week too)! The practical drives this week were awesome though. Having said last week that we were yet to see any big cats I’ve now seen lions three times. Still no leopard though, despite me shouting at the start of every drive that I want to see leopard and pangolin - apparently that’s not how it works?! Seems like bullshit to me. But we’ve seen a shit ton of impala, wildebeest, zebra and giraffe. Even though we’ve seen them lots I still love seeing zebra and giraffe, especially as giraffe are so curious that they always look over and you can see the oxpeckers picking at ticks and wounds on them. If I didn’t think you’d all get bored I would post a new photo of a giraffe every day.

While I was driving last Wednesday we were heading home, everyone was happily talking about male thongs in the back of the game viewer, the wind blowing through our hair, not a care in the world (except I was busy caring a lot worrying about crashing the vehicle..) when a group of 5 or 6 elephants appeared in the road ahead of us! We were driving past quite thick bush on either side and you can’t help but marvel at the luck and chance that meant that we were there at that exact time they crossed the road. If we had been maybe a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later we would probably have just passed right by and not known they were there; I mean, if we hadn’t stopped the vehicle because Jelle needed a wee 10 minutes before we might not have seen them, so thank you Jelle’s bladder.

Possibly the coolest elephant sighting of the week was on Thursday afternoon. We were driving in an area we hadn’t been to before and came past a small dam. On the other side across the water, a lone male elephant was eating marula fruit from the ground. No other vehicles were around so we were able to sit watching him for 20 minutes, seeing him raise his massive trunk and shake the marula tree to jostle the fruit down to eat them. The power of him was absolutely mental. I mean we’ve learnt about this behaviour and seen the damage on other marula trees but the ease with which he rustled this gigantic tree was amazing! It was the perfect sighting; he was so calm and didn’t give two shits about our presence, just carried on doing exactly what he was doing before we arrived, the sunlight was behind us and we were in no hurry. Sorry for the crappy photo but it's the only one I have that shows how freaking nuts it is that he was just shoving the tree.

We went straight from there to our sleep out in the reserve. Our group arrived at the site first so had to collect enough firewood to keep a fire going all night. The other group arrived conveniently late… Just in time to not have to collect firewood or dig the toilet! The evening was beautiful, Marko and Christiaan made amazing food on the fire, the moon rose late so we had gorgeous stars across the whole sky and we all just had a nice time. A quick hour of sleep before I was woken up to take my turn on watch around the edge of the camp. Sadly nothing too cool, just a jackal and a lot of weird noises which just turned out to be the trainers snoring and muttering in their sleep! The hour on watch actually passed so quickly then woke up the next team for watch and snuggled back in my sleeping bag.

Probably the best possible wake up call at 4.30 in the morning- lionesses walking 50m away from where we were sleeping! Luckily Caro hadn’t fallen asleep on duty so the trainers had been woken up and were keeping an eye on them, but they weren’t really interested in us, just carried on past and I only saw a disappearing butt. Less of a fun wake up that it then started to rain and we had no shelter, so just packed up our stuff and stood around the fire in the drizzle, continually boiling the kettle for coffee.

Disclaimer: these are not the same lions who walked past our camp, these were some boys we saw earlier in the week!

So basically it was another awesome week, surprise surprise. I think you all might start getting bored of these boasting posts soon, but too bad :)