Getting stuck

A few months ago I received a complaint that my blogs were not as interesting as they used to be, since I have stopped getting stuck and whacking myself on the head. So I decided to listen to the constructive criticism and take this advice on board.

Janette (my new assistant) and I set out to the NG32 area between the Boro and the Santantadibe on Saturday morning, having obtained the latest fix from Bongolo just before leaving camp. We managed to find her fairly easily, in the same herd as B7, the only GPS collar that I have managed to pick up. We got a decent count of around 80 animals, althought I think that the herd was much bigger. We collected faecal samples and left them to their buffalo ways.

As we were driving back along the road to start sampling points, we came across a lovely herd of around 200 relaxing in grassland. This gave me the best count of the whole season, as they were very helpful, moving slowly in one direction, allowing me to get good visuals of most of them. We also collected faeces there, then moved on to vegetation sampling. That area seems to have gotten quite a lot of water in the time since I was last there, and a lot of the roads were flooded. Janette thought that flooded acacias were pretty, whereas I was slightly less impressed since I know what the ground turns into.

As we drove to our first point, a rather small elephant trumpeted at us and ran towards us from fairly far away. Janette was a bit concerned, but I just drove on and told her that she should only start worrying when I start swearing. We did a couple of sample points and were heading to another when we came across a section of the road that was particularly nasty-looking. There was a dry game trail going around it and lots of sage growing, so I foolishly thought I could go around. We went off the dry ground and straight into cotton soil, promptly sinking. Janette was a star and got stuck in straight away with the spade, while I jacked, keeping well away from the arm. We managed to get out within about 45 minutes, which was rather efficient of us, and was a good thing as it was starting to get dark by the time we were out. We hurried to a decent campsite, after turning around on the road and going back the way we came.

We heard lions roaring, followed by a gunshot, which was a bit disturbing, but I would have thought poachers would be going for meat as opposed to lions. There were also hyaenas and hippos calling, which pleased Janette. As I was cutting vegetables for our evening meal, I managed to slice the tip off my finger, which was foolish but not too painful. I eventually stopped the bleeding and got a bandage onto it. It rained pretty much all of that night.

The next morning we sampled a few more sites, then got ready to head into another area to collect samples from another herd. As we were driving towards that area, the sky was growing progressively darker and I heard someone on the radio talking about a storm at HQ. Given the already flooded state of those roads, I felt that an additional storm would probably lead to more time spent getting stuck than collecting data. I made the decision to abort and come back to camp. That was the right decision, since it rained all that afternoon, night and the next day. Today it has eased off a bit, but the skies are still overcast, so everyone is waiting for things to dry up before venturing off-road again.