7th April

At last a new sighting !!!!! Possibly a new and important sub-species... Oddly enough it was in Choppies Supermarket in Ghanzi, you know how it is you've never been there before, you're not really looking and there it was right beside the till - Cadbury's Dairy Milk Cashew & Coconut. I'm quite sure I've never seen it before and you know I pride myself on my research in this particular field. Anyway I trapped a specimen and rushed it back to camp to the temperature controlled environment essential to its survival in this climate. After extensive tasting, sorry testing, I concluded that it was a viable species and I should set up a programme of tracking and trapping during the remainder of my stay here.. You can tell it's been a quiet day. I got up at 5.30am again to go tracking with Jane but she had a bad back so we didn't go. The upside is that I took a lovely photo of the sunrise which you will hopefully see if I can upload it from the laptop which I'm working on now. The technology is giving me some grief. I've downloaded an app on my phone called Image Shrinker but I can't see how it works. I've uploaded some more photos onto the laptop and compressed them but I don't know where they've gone. I don't like to keep asking, I'm trying to work it out but bear with me. So it was spreadsheets again today but very interesting as I was intering all the data from Jane's days out with the San bushmen trackers. I should explain that this is not the savannah, there is no big game here like lions, elephants, rhinos or herds of wildebeest. This is the bush and the game is smaller, like kudu and duiker (small antelope), warthog, brown and spotted hyena, jackal, caracle (a small cat), leopard and cheetah. They even saw an ostrich or two, that's one bird I haven't got on my list, I think I would have noticed. Not all of these are visual sightings, the evidence is mainly spoor (footprints) and scat (poo)which they look for both from a vehicle and on foot. I'm hoping to go tomorrow and another day, it's a long day from dawn to dark and often trekking a long way on foot but my best chance to see some wildlife away from camp. Talking of vehicles, when we left the dinner party on Friday and got back to Jane's boyfriend's car, which we'd left about halfway, he had a flat tyre. By this time it was about 10.45 pm so Rick illuminated the scene so Karl could change the tyre but he couldn't get all the wheel nuts off so we had to leave it there and return in the morning. At the same time, Keven (the host) came along with a big compressor and put enough air into the tyre so Karl could make it into Ghanzi for a repair. I mention all this because I was wondering on the driveway to hell what would happen if you broke down. It is pitch black, literally miles from anywhere, surrounded by dangerous predators and snakes and cell phone communications are awful. It's a standing joke that you can never finish a conversation because the signal always goes down before the end. The answer is you have to be very self sufficient and dependent on your friends and neighbours. This is not a place for the faint hearted. When Karl was a boy he was left alone in a broken down truck for two DAYS while his father went for help. More later... let's see if I can find a photo or two, no promises.