Tuesday 1st October 2013

Not much sleep last night, woken up at about ten pm with something bounding down the track sounding quite out of breath which then started having a good sniff around my tent. I didn’t get up to have a look, I wish I had as judging by the tracks this morning it was an aardvark.

Not long after the aardvark visited then the elephant was back. He’s certainly taken a likening to the camp and the trees around my tent in particular. He must have been with me for about an hour and a half.

Whilst I couldn’t sleep with him munching in my ear (not as annoying as someone eating an apple on a quiet train) I wasn’t worried despite all seven/eight tonnes of him standing about a metre from where I was lying. That was until he took a momentary interest in my tent, he had a good feel and that made my heart really start to race.

He or others kept waking me through the night and at one point it was as if a gun had gone off when he pushed over a tree. As people got up in the morning the eles moved on again and let us have our camp back.

Today was really disappointing, the field observation test didn’t go well but I learnt a lot from it. And really annoyingly I failed my driving theory test, I passed two of the three sections but failed the ‘sign’ one by one mark. This means that I’ll have to do it all again. The worse thing about that is adhering to African time! The car rental turned up 45 minutes late and then the test itself started almost an hour late.

The highlight of the day was treating myself to a camera trap which I’ve set up right outside my tent. Now it’s time to drown my sorrows with a few Windhoek around the camp fire.

The view of my camera trap, Sod’s law nothing will visit tonight!