One of my collars in the NG32 area (B78) does not appear to have moved more than approximately 20 m in the last two weeks. I took a little while to realise this as the collar is supposed to give a mortality signal in these circumstances but instead it has been giving me slightly different fixes every hour. The collar itself is on the edge of a large island, which I thought might be accessible from the south. I therefore tried to reach it from that direction at the beginning of last week. All the roads that I tried ended in swampy floodplains with quite a few mokoro stations. I asked for directions to NG17 (as the collar is just in that concession) and was told to go towards Stanley's and take a road east. So we tried that, and the road had been worked on, with small bridges and dirt piled up to make a road. However, this road stopped suddenly. We kept going off road but got stuck when we were still 10 km away from the collar. There was a lot of water, but we would have tried to continue if I hadn't had a slight mishap.
We got stuck in mud and while jacking to get out, I stupidly got too close to the high-lift jack and it pinged up and hit the side of my head. My ear was ripped, but I didn't pass out or vomit. We finished getting the car out and Laura sensibly told me that I had to go back to Maun. So we drove back. I felt a bit light headed and spaced out, but not too bad, but Laura correctly diagnosed me as having a concussion. We almost got back to the veterinary fence, but went through the last big stretch of water and stopped. I checked the wheels and realised that they were not buried, so my somewhat muddled mind came to the conclusion that the car was broken. My radio was not getting through for some reason, so I used my satellite phone and got in touch with Guy (the camp manager), who luckily had not yet left for camp. I explained that I thought my gears were broken as I was not moving when I accelerated. I somehow forgot to tell him about my concussion, but he very kindly said he would come out and rescue me.
I realised after about 40 minutes that it was very likely that my vehicle was merely stuck on the diffs, but by that time Guy was on his way and I thought my faculties wouldn't be up to much anyway. When Guy arrived, he found me swimming in the ruts in the road with a big smile on my face. He looked at my pupils and told me I was indeed concussed. He pulled me out and then changed my engine oil, which was full of water. The one positive thing about the concussion is that it made me very happy and stopped me from being stressed about being stuck. Laura drove my vehicle back to camp and Guy took me to town to get checked out. Brett, the paramedic, said that I couldn't go back to camp and had to be supervised, so Guy again helped me out and let me stay in his house, before we flew back to camp the next day.
As for my collar, Guy flew the next day to track and also had a good look at the GPS location of my collar. He said that there was a big channel between the road and the collar, but he was yet again willing to help me by swimming across, or walking with me. I got in touch with Stanley's Camp and explained the situation. They very kindly agreed to let me borrow a mokoro, a poler and a man with a rifle to walk to the collar and recover it, so I will not need to inconvenience Guy, even though he did not seem to mind. I should be able to go and get the collar tomorrow or the next day, and then continue on to do field work in the area - hopefully without hitting my head!!
My ear is mostly healed now and the lump on the side of my head is going down. I had a few days where I couldn't concentrate on much, but my mental faculties are coming back to me now too. I had to stay in camp for 4 days and not do anything too strenuous. A couple of the carnivore researchers took Laura and I out to a spotted hyaena den as they wanted to get photos of the cubs. We spent a few hours watching the cubs and adults playing and jumping around, which was lovely. There were 6 cubs of varying ages and several adults, and they managed to get photos of all of them.
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