Finding my feet

WOW! OK so I'm now at the end of week two in this beautiful place that is to be my home for the coming months. I'm finally getting my head around the many names of the staff (as well as the local wildlife), the best times to catch the best light to film in, a bit of the local language (Nyanja), and my daily routine of filming, digitizing footage, logging footage, and then finding time to squeeze in a cold beer, before climbing under my mosquito net for the night.

One of the senior guides here called Pattson, who often drives me out to film. He is slowly but surely teaching me every plant, bird, mammal and tree in the South Luangwa Valley - quite a task.

This is a hyena with a baby Buffalo that it stole from a pride of lions (who in turn stole it from a herd of Buffalo I guess!?). There's been loads of lion action in our area of the park this last week, and I've had loads of chance to film the lions with their kills. On one of our night-drives our vehicle got stuck in sand and following that we then we got a flat tyre about 100 meters from a family of lions. Changing a tyre by lantern light, knowing you're being watched from the shadows is an eerie experience!


Mongoose Manor! A few special people know I have a real soft spot for meerkats, but sadly Zambia doesn't have meerkats. However a family of mongoose (mongeese?!) has just moved into the lodge: They are adorable, and constantly run about the place in a big bundle, as if they were undertaking some sort of mongoose special mission.

This photo is just two of the many many elephants that seem adamant on blocking which ever road we try and use to get to the river.

This is the setting of my regular morning tea, before the game drive at 6 in the morning. A mug of rooibos looking out over the lagoon - no better way to start the day.

Often the guests I accompany on game drives have arranged to eat breakfast out in the bush - an occasion that strangely enough we call 'bush breakfast'. It's usually held in the clearing of a mahogany wood next to the river.

This week the 'fishing party' has flown into to the lagoon; this is a huge, many thousand strong flock of yellow billed stalks, pelicans, saddle billed stalks, ibis and heron, who have all flown to the lagoon which runs past the lodge to catch the fish in the ever-decreasing pools of what remains from the drying river bed. Over two days I shot a couple of hours of footage of these fascinating birds swooping past, scooping fish out of the water, and generally squabbling and squawking with one another. One problem I've found is that spending my time filming the wildlife around here means I don't get much time to photograph it, so I apologise that I don't have pics to show lots of what I write about.

As well as myself, there are a number of other interns and volunteers from the UK working at the lodge. The youngest, Rosie, is due to fly back tomorrow after two months here as a host (basically schmoozing guests and serving afternoon tea), and on Saturday afternoon a group of 12 of us took a picnic down to the river to say goodbye. It turns out Rosie is a trained opera singer, and after a few G & Ts she she treated us to an amazing rendition of an Italian piece of music out on the open plain by the river bank - really beautiful.

On top of the game drives that I've been filming so far, on Sunday I set out on foot with one of the walking safaris. The Bushcamp Company's tag line for their walking safaris is, 'from a vehicle you see Africa, but on foot you hear, smell, feel Africa'. This really is true, and the 3 hour walk through the bush gives you a completely different perspective to the landscape; as well as spotting the animals that I've become used to seeing on my game drives, being on foot allowed me to track the animals from their spoor and prints, and to pick up on the tiny details of the surroundings, easily missed in a noisy vehicle.

The above photo was taken on one of the night drives. The beam is used to pick up the tell-tale reflective eyes of the nocturnal predators of the Park.

Slinking off into the darkness; this is what the night drives in South Luangwa are renowned for - catching a glimpse of a huge leopard as it creeps through the bush at night.

Well that's all for another week. I'm off to one of the remote camps tomorrow which is a few hours drive from the main lodge. Hopefully I'll return next week with more pictures and tales to tell...