Imagine this: back to basics at its
finest - I spent the first two weeks of my month in Africa in a tented bush
camp with an outdoor bathroom composed of mud walls and no roof or door to
speak of, and no hot water without building daily fires. Temperatures dropped so dramatically at night
that I often went to bed wearing two hoodies, thermals, tracksuit bottoms,
socks, and even a woolly hat on one occasion!
There was no electricity, meaning that my evening meals were often
shared with enormous moths and dung beetles.
It felt a bit like I was living in a commune, where everyone chipped in
with the household duties and at mealtimes, and where creative improvisation
was the norm, due to lack of basic resources that we take for granted in the
UK.
The Hanchi Conservation Project involved
6am starts and me relearning everything concerning equine husbandry, tack and
yard maintenance. This primarily
consisted of two hours of horse riding a day, and a hell of a lot of shit shovelling! So my days were mostly filled with collecting
horse manure from the stables and paddocks and making repeat trips to the shit
heap, and then tipping the wheelbarrow, with much care needed to not tip it
down the sides. Not quite what I had in
mind, though I did develop some biceps good enough to rival She-Ra any day!
Apart from the ubiquitous manure picking,
I was fortunate enough to experience the advantage of having a roofless
bathroom, and to catch sight of a beautiful sky full of stars every night. I tracked cheetah and leopard, did some
bushwacking with the aid of a machete (and almost whacked my own boot in the
process, on one occasion!), and saw wild antelope. I also went on an amazing helicopter ride,
which was akin to a mini safari in the air.
I could not stop smiling to myself, it was such a thrill. That aside, I also spent a great deal of time
daydreaming in between, about buying a French bulldog and relocating to the
coast to be by the sea.
My second placement at the animal
rehabilitation project took a whopping eleven hours to reach by car, and
involved an overnight stay at a hostel in Johannesberg to break up the long
drive. This part of my trip felt like
more of an adventure as I had the opportunity to work with serval cats and a wild
caracal, even taking them out for walks on leads every day; less enjoyable was
getting dead chicks out of the freezer every day for their meals, especially
being a vegetarian.
Responsibilities at the rehabilitation
centre involved a few nights sleeping out with a warthog appropriately named Pumba,
who turned out to be quite an escape artist and needed constant monitoring to
curb his destructive tendencies. My
surreal nights with Pumba were spent with him wrapped in a sleeping bag next to
me. I also worked with a crow who needed
to be let out of his cage every day for exercise - he made a habit of pecking
at all my clothes and generally being annoying for exactly twenty minutes, and
then would turn into sweetness personified after said minutes, allowing me to
stroke his head and neck, and even falling asleep on my lap on a few occasions.
In Africa, natural resources are milked
to their fullest, so no fruit flies in jars for the chameleon’s meals, oh no, I
actually had to hunt for flies myself, and place the little reptile (the size
of my index finger) in front of a fly on the wall, and wait for him to stick
his tongue out and zap the flies one by one until his hunger was satiated. Working so closely with this creature, I
observed that George the chameleon had funny eyes that rotated round to the
back of his head without him rotating his body.
I tried to imagine what it would be like if humans could do that. Some food for thought.
Some funny moments (in hindsight) at the
Centre involved the vervet monkey escaping out of his cage and being chased by
Pumba, which I can only presume must have almost given the poor thing a heart
attack, even with his good tree climbing skills. Other escapees included one of the serval
cats, who decided to stay stuck up a tree until dark. I also had a giant tortoise pee all the way
down my leg and even leave a trail a few metres long on the ground behind him,
and me, for that matter. You see, I
meant it when I said this tortoise was big.
Riley the bushbaby, at only 1kg in weight and a mass of grey fur was
quite possibly the ugliest animal I have ever seen, but that also made him the
cutest. He looked like a cross between a
chinchilla and a gremlin, with monkey hands and feet and moved like a sloth,
which was not very much due to his back injury.
Another comical moment was having six son conures (birds) all flock at
me at once, with a few quite literally stuck on my head/hair. I had to jump up and down to tear them away.
A question I have frequently been asked
since I got back, is if I would do it all again. And the answer to that is that while it was
an unforgettable and really quite unique experience, I don’t think doing it
again would be the same. And so my
search begins once again for my next adventure.
Wherever next will life take me?!
I quite like the idea of working with orangutans in the Malaysian Borneo.
© Copyright Vanessa
Sicre
No comments:
Post a Comment