1st Week at Karongwe and it ROCKS!

It was my first week of placement at Karongwe and I can’t help but be thankful that I did not go to Bonamanzi and although I was regretting coming out on my own I know I made the right choice. Karongwe researches the feeding behaviour and movements of the predators on the reserve. They have collars on 2 Cheetah, 2 Lion, & a Hyena. The collars help us to track them by Telemetry and see how they are doing. So everyday I get to see lion, cheetah and hyena. Volunteers come to help us out with the tracking and data collecting and stay for either 5 or ten weeks. When I arrived the volunteers were on their last week before heading home so I got to take part in all the leaving activities. We had a Braai on Monday where we spit roasted an Impala! Tuesday the local school kids came around and we took them on a Safari. They were so excited to see Giraffe and Zebra it was incredibly cute. Wednesday we did volunteer work and picked up garbage along the highway and ended up with our picture in the paper. Thursday we had another Braai where we cooked Poikie (basically stew cooked in a cauldron on the fire). The poikie meat was Hippo, tastes a lot like beef. Friday morning got a lovely breakfast at a local restaurant and spent the afternoon cleaning up the camp as all the volunteers left early Saturday morning.

My training started Sunday morning out on drive learning the roads and the area as best as possible. The cheetahs we have collared are very much habituated to humans so we can walk very close up to them. We arrived to find them just finishing off a baby Impala and sat watching them as they licked each other clean then wondered off into the bush. Next we tracked down the Lions to find them sleeping lazily in the middle of the road. On the way back to camp we passed 2 rhino and a herd of elephant. I have not see this many animals in one day yet.

The next few weeks I will continue training, as the next group of volunteers does not arrive until January 4th. I plan on heading down to Nkambeni for Christmas, that is where most of the other Bushwise students ended up going for placement, and we are going to have a big Christmas feast.