It’s been a wet and dreary week; feels very much like home! Well, it’s still been about 25 degrees, we’ve just had a nice blanket of grey cloud hovering over us for most of the week. I entirely blame this on the fact that we were meant to do astronomy this week; as soon as you plan any activities that rely upon a cloudless sky, you’ve jinxed us to the fact that we’ll have clouds and rain. Although can’t complain too much because it meant we didn’t have to keep getting up for 5am astronomy sessions! More tests on Monday and they weren’t excellent but we’ll see when we get the results :( then Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning were our Astronomy, and Weather and Climate lectures. Both things that I enjoy abstractly; like I love the stars and loooove cool clouds, but learning about them is definitely not as fun as just experiencing them.

On Wednesday afternoon I had my third and final full drive before our mock assessments start. I was actually not too nervous doing it for the other group, it was definitely different but they were nice and I guess that’s what it will be like when we take out various groups of guests- you never know what they’re going to be like. I was really happy with the information I was giving and the way I presented it, I stumbled over my words a bit at the start but got better as it went on. I need to focus on spotting enough things and stopping to talk, because my time was a bit short. Like you see a tree you could talk about but then you’re kind of past it and don’t want to stop and reverse just for a tree, or you think that you might see a better example of it later on in the drive, but you might not see a better one and then it feels like you haven’t stopped enough and you just kind of panic a bit… Well, not really panic but definitely think that it’s not going very well. It’s weird how much difference it makes seeing animals or not. Yes, you should plan as if you won’t see any animals then seeing any is a bonus, but even if we’d just seen some impala and a giraffe or two I think my timing would have been perfect because even just stopping for 10 minutes at a couple of sightings adds so much time. It’s a fine balance between wanting to see some cool stuff, but not wanting to see too many animals so that you have time to talk about insects and geology as well! But in general I was happy with it. I was mostly pleased with the stuff I spent ages researching last week about the insects and spiders and things because it showed that once I do that for a bunch of other stuff, I will be really solid on knowledge. This week I’ve been doing the same for birds, as I’m woefully lacking in knowledge about them. I still struggle enough to identify them so at least if I know a lot about the few that I do know it will look like I’m a bird pro!

We had the most amazing sightings on Thursday. Sasha drove our group in the morning and we went in the main gate of the reserve. We sat in the vehicle while Gerhard signed in at the security booth and Sasha was giving us our briefing about not putting arms and legs outside the vehicle and not littering etc and we were just about to head off. As Sasha turned on the engine to leave I happened to look to my left and suddenly yelled “stop stop stop, what the fuck!”. A cheetah was just standing without giving a single shit about us, about 10 feet away from us just slightly in the trees next to the main gate. It was probably there the whole time that we were sat listening to Sasha and we just had absolutely no clue, and if I hadn’t seen it we would have just driven off without even realising! We think that we’re pretty savvy about the bush but clearly we all need to work on our situational awareness a bit more! It was an absolutely insane sighting; there were two of them, a male and a female, wandering along completely unhurriedly scent marking on trees and sniffing around. We followed them down the road for a while as they continued to explore, one of them lay down and rolled around in the dusty road, then they headed off into the bush so we took the next road to the right to see if we could find them again. It’s crazy how quickly they seemed to disappear as soon as they were in the grass, their markings giving them such insanely good camouflage. We spotted them again a few times then we came out on the road along the southern fence line and followed them along there for a bit. They are just the most beautiful creatures; so lithe and elegant and just didn’t care about our presence at all. 

We were sat behind them as they sat looking down the road, then they both looked to the right- through the fence, across the road and into the next door reserve, so we all looked to see what they might be looking at. Suddenly we heard thundering footsteps and wild dogs ran past! I only saw one as it was running past but the markings and the way in which it ran were unmistakeable. Ty and James saw three really clearly, but we have no idea why they were running, it would have been amazing to have carried on along the fence line and seen them on a kill or something! I have only seen wild dogs once and they are my absolute favourites. They technically occur wherever they want because they traditionally have massive home ranges and don’t really give a shit about fences, but I think in the whole of last year they were seen only once on Makalali and this isn’t a known area for them. I can still hardly believe that we saw that. Just the most insane combination of sightings- cheetah are rare enough and an awesome animal to see, but the wild dogs too was just unreal. The rest of the drive we were pretty buzzing, the other group of course didn’t believe us that we saw wild dogs but I didn’t even care, I knew that we saw them and that was enough for me!

On Thursday evening we had another sleep out in Makalali, so ended our afternoon drive at an open space in the reserve where we made up a fire, laid out our roll mats and divvied up night watch duties. Luckily, after all the cloud and rain earlier in the week, we had a beautiful clear evening and managed to do a bit more astronomy. It’s so much cooler looking up at the stars once you know a bit about them and can start pointing out constellations. We had an awesome dinner of pork chops cooked by Marko on the fire, then Megs and Lucia had brought marshmallows for everyone, it was such a nice evening. Gabe and I were on watch from 1-2am so managed a couple of hours of sleep before being woken up for our shift. A few hyena were wandering round but didn’t come too close once you’d spotted them and put the spotlight on them. Even if they had, the way to apparently deal with hyena is just to throw something near them and they run away! The hour actually goes really quickly but after that I couldn’t get back to sleep for an hour for some reason, but it was so cool lying snuggled up in my sleeping bag, listening to the calls of the hyena which were so close!

In the morning we were up at 5am for another astronomy session which I literally cannot remember any of because I was still half asleep! We packed up and headed off on a sort of half-drive with Gabe guiding us, just because everyone is always too tired after a sleep out to really be awake and paying full attention to do a proper drive. It didn’t really matter that it wasn’t a full drive because we know that he is awesome at it and he’s not got anything to worry about or especially practice so it’s good that it was his drive then. After giving us a nice reprieve for sleep out, the rain came back on Friday evening and all Saturday morning. I do love the thunderstorms here with big booming thunderclaps and lightning that brightens the whole sky, but constant grey an drizzle is just too much of a horrible reminder of the weather at home! Can’t complain too much though because the area needs as much rain as we can get before the dry winter comes. Hopefully we get some nicer weather next week though so that we can actually do our astronomy practicals.