3 September - Tree Clearing (and Animals)

I am normally up by 6am and sit in the common room sharing a quiet coffee with Adam, an Australian guy here, while we await the 7am breakfast rush. However in the last two days I have been waking later when the sun is a little higher and this morning I stepped out under blue sky and the promise of a warm day. I joined the gathering crowd for breakfast and learned from Adam that I had missed seeing a lion heading up the hill behind the lodge just after he had got up; there is a route around our perimeter fence that is used as a thoroughfare by a range of big animals although we rarely see them.

Today our first task was to wash the vehicles while the newcomers had their arrival brief. This was not the easiest of tasks as we are trying hard to conserve water here and we were using the limited water gathered in buckets from showering. Last week we were told that the local town is having its water turned off for all but four hours each day owing to extremely low reservoir levels. Although we use the same supply there are large storage tanks here so I guess it helps give us a little flexibility and it hasn’t impacted personally on us yet (neither has the knowledge impacted on the showering behaviour of some of the people here sadly).

We headed off into the reserve, leaving the newcomers still in their brief, to the copse of Black Wattle we had started last week. Today the aim was to finish felling this particular patch. There were few left and those that were were mainly quite large. We set about tree barking them with machetes (removing a thick strip all around the tree so that it dies) or hacking with saw. I ended up in a particularly large tree and played tree monkey for two hours while I slowly climbed around it removing the limbs and poisoning the exposed stumps.

By lunch the task was done and we walked to a vantage point just behind the copse to enjoy the views while we ate. The afternoon was the usual drive around the reserve. We saw a few more animals than in previous days - various antelope, zebras, a glimpse of a hippopotamus, baboons - and identified those that we could of the rhinoceros and elephants that we came across before returning back to our lodge for dinner.

I had arranged a taxi into town so that some of us (although mainly the newcomers) could go and get some beer from the local store. However, as our five o’clock dinner came and went and the five thirty arrival time for the taxi approached there was still no sign of their vehicle. It arrived just as the taxi pulled up, the newcomers sharing stories of how their vehicle's front wheel had collapsed out on the reserve (hence the delay) and of close encounters with a cheetah; they had had an eventful day.

The day ended with a couple of glasses of (newly purchased) wine, a couple of games of pool and then some fireside chatting before I eventually slipped off to bed.