Hello dear friends!
It is now the first week of August, I’ve been in Zim now for a good 3 ½ months but the end is drawing near! I’m leaving in 19 days for Mauritius, just his morning my work permit was finalized so it’s official!! I am off to island paradise once again to save endangered reptiles with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation for 6 months (although my permit is for 9 months, so finance-depending, I may stay on a little longer! After all, why not?!)
I am very excited! But I am also very nervous! I think this experience is going to be quite unlike anything I have ever had, it’s all very romantic to think that I am staying on a tiny island off the shore of Mauritian mainland, in a house nestled amongst the forest for 6 months playing with geckos (well, YOU guys may not find that romantic, but each to his own right? :P), but there is going to be no internet except at weekends when I go across to the mainland, and no electricity for half the day (or so I hear), and the boat that goes across to the mainland (yes you can only access it by boat!) only travels between 8 am and 6pm so I really hope there is another way across apart from swimming after hours!! So yes, there aremany things I am unsure about and I think they are making me a little nervous, but you know what, it will be nice to get out of the hustle and bustle for a change, live in the wild for a bit, find myself again. So I am staying positive about the whole thing, I am sure there will be ways around it all once I get there and talk to the locals and the people I’m working with (Who, I have heard are all very nice according to a friend who is over there right now helping out with MWF, so that’s lucky!). And plus, the island looks BEAUTIFUL! Real tropical paradise and nothing like I ever would have seen before :)
On a more current note I have been having a ball here in Zim!!! 2 weeks ago I got invited to Lake Kariba on a houseboat trip for 5 days with a friend and some of his friends, very spontaneous trip, but turned out to be a lovely holiday, a little too much drinking going on for my liking, but I just decided to take a detox week and enjoy the Kariba surrounds instead. Again, each to his own, kariba is for whatever you like it to be for, but for me I went to get out of the hustle and bustle of city life, bar-work and rowdy crowds, and just have a good old chill! As a result I got some good fishing in, and early nights allowed me to get up early, make a cup of coffee and sit looking out over the lake listening to the cry of Fish Eagles and the grunt of hippos and read my book! :) It was lovely!
Then back to work for a week, and off again last Friday morning, at 5.30 am to Mana Pools! One of my all time favourite places on Earth! This time I went with a different crowd, including the Honeybear crowd from work and a few of their mutual friends who I had never met, but SUCH a great crew, it was awesome! I can honestly say it was the best Mana Trip I have ever done! I have never gone with friends before, always with family groups, so it was a new experience and one I would definitely like to do again!
There were 12 of us altogether, and we booked 2 campsites at Nyamepi Camp; the main camp, and set up a VERY fancy camp, thanks to yuppies who brought electric fences and all sorts of yuppie things to kit it out with! But, to give them their due, they did (sort-of) work to stop the honeybadgers and hyenas from coming into camp and stealing everything. Ok wait, scrap that on day one a honeybadger got into someone’s tent, and someone else cleverly tied their guy-ropes to the fence so it set the alarm off in the middle of the night… sigh whatever happened to simple camping?!!! So anyway it was all rather amusing!
There were a lot of game drives and sundowners, sometimes spending a whole day in one place cooking brunch for 3 hours, attempting to catch Tigerfish and instead catching a tree root which took about 20 minutes to reel in, it felt like a rock it was so heavy! Plus all the late night campfire stories about double-overhand reverse cobra grips courtesy of Bigger ROOO! That and the red “Dick-head” dress that you had to wear if you did something stupid that day… it did get passed around quite a lot, but surprisingly I never got to wear it!
But the wildlife was amazing! We saw tonnes of eles with their little calves, SO cute, and a very large herd of both Eland and Buffalo, quite a rare sight nowadays! The highlight of the trip was a pride of 8 Lionesses with their 2 cubs on day 2, and then again on day 4 the morning we were to drive out, and thank goodness for good timing as the second time we saw them one just happened to cross the road in front of us which then led our eyes to the rest of them all lying in the sun gnawing on an Eland carcass freshly killed a few hours before! What an amazing sight! After a good 2 hours of great photos we unfortunately had to head back to camp to help the rest of the group (there were only 5 of us on the game drive that morning) pack up all our stuff in order to leave, sadly as none of us wanted to leave at all!
Now, back in Harare, the countdown begins…. 19 days till I leave and sadly, only 3 weekends left at Honeybear where I have made the most amazing friends! But will stay positive and make the most of my time left here, and try not to wish my last few weeks away, as exciting the prospects are, or I know I will regret it!
Sending love to you all out there, missing you guys in Brisbane, and all over the world! Will write again before I leave on my next leg of adventure; Mauritius! :)
Much love,
Melissa
xoxox
