Thursday 17th April 2014

I woke a head of my alarm with an ele feeding outside the tent. Dozed off again before I got up at 04.40, forgot about the elephant momentarily and was stumbling around in a state of drowsiness, luckily he’d moved on.

I was meant to be walking today but as Hine didn’t know the route to the rubbish dump I had to do both that and the food run. Quite gutted, especially as he ended up with both an ele and a buffalo encounter.

I took the Landagreenie (Green Land Rover) which has no lights, this meant I had to use the spotlight to navigate the roads. This was fine until it stopped working quarter of the way to the gate, I’ll quickly add that it wasn’t the one I repaired yesterday.

Now I had no lights, not good as it was pitch black with a blanket of low cloud obscuring the moon. I did have my head torch though which is always kept in a state of dimness because the batteries I bought were cheap.

Back on my way again I saw three hyenas, one of which was a little too inquisitive, perhaps this would have ben a good time to be in the other Landy, the one that has doors.

Once I was back with the food and some scrambled eggs, they’d been packed in the trailer rather than riding up front with me, it was then off to the dump. It’s Good Friday tomorrow so everything was shutting down.The guys at the dump had taken a flyer and knocked off early. There was no way I could go back with all this rubbish so I managed to talk a security guard into coming down and opening the gates for me.

Eventually I headed home, a very long day so far which was made longer when I lost the trailer on the newly re-opened Sand Pad road. I didn’t realise I’d lost it until I was a further half a kilometre on. It had popped off when I was going up the hill due to the weight of all the firewood stacked right at the back. I’d definitely lost my sense of humour by now, getting it hooked up again on a steep incline was not fun.

Once back at camp it was a quick clean of the vehicle and trailer then the routine checks check before the Landagreenie was needed for the afternoon walk. I was looking forward to taking it nice and easy as I’d been on the go for eleven hours already and I’d missed both breakfast and lunch two days in a row. But first we had to set up for the Boma dinner as its the guests final night in camp.

Starting to feel run down, first time I’ve had mouth ulcers since leaving the London job. Back to the trails camp for six nights tomorrow, I doubt that’s going to be too restful, but really looking forward to it. Now its time to braai, hopefully the guests aren’t wanting to get up too early tomorrow, I wonder jow many South African’s will give me advise tonight?