Sossuvlei

On my last week in Namibia I wanted to take a road trip so 3 other volunteers who were around for the week and I decided to visit Sossusvlei.
We rented a 4x4, stocked up on food that we could cook on the fire and hit the road. We actually passed by the tropic of Capricorn so of course there was a photo shoot in front of the sign.

We found a camp right beside the gates (Sossusvlei is part of a national park) and settled in for an early evening after dinner. We tried to ignore the jackal that was circling our camp while we're just on the ground in our sleeping bags. We don't do tents :)


We got up at 4.15am to have some breakfast and make our way to Dune 45 which supposedly is the best place for sunrise. And we made it in time! We were on the dune as the sun was coming up. The colors were so vibrant and there weren't many people there so it was lovely and serene. Then we headed to the the big Daddy dune and we were the first there! We had some great views again after climbing up the dune.

Finally we stopped at the dead vlei on the way out of the park. This place was mind blowing, I couldn't stop taking photos of the trees. Again, the photos will probably never do it justice. We had one more night out in the desert before heading back to Swakopmund so we stayed at a place called Solataire in the middle of absolutely flipping nowhere. It was just a camp rest stop with a lodge beside it and bakery. Since we checked into the camp site we were allowed to use the pool. It was heaven lazing around for the afternoon in the sun, knowing in a few days I'd be back to full winter in Ireland.

By Wednesday afternoon we had made it back to Swakopmund and I started to pack up my stuff. I can't believe the 3 months has gone by already. It was over a year ago that I dreamed up this idea of helping EHRA with their website and spending a few months out here and now its over. It was really tough saying bye to Dave and Rachel, and all the dogs.
Tsaurab, the big ridgeback likes to rest his head on laps for a snooze, and as I was waiting for my taxi to the airport, he was practically pinning me down with his head, lying right across my stomach. I didn't want to leave him either. I had high expectations for this experience and they were all exceeded. My heart felt so heavy saying goodbye and I definitely shed a few tears stepping off the tarmac onto the plane. I've no idea what 2010 holds for me yet which is scary and liberating at the same time. I can only hope whatever it is, that it'll be even half the adventure this has been. I'll definitely be back to Africa.

Thanks for reading!

You can check out all the photos here.


Happy Christmas/Holidays/New Year!
Jen
xx

Building and Elephant Patrol with Darci

Darci arrived to base camp on November 23rd for 2 weeks of volunteering with me. For those who don't know Darci, I worked with her in NY, we sat about 3 feet away from one another and I missed her lots, she's such a good friend. It was really weird to see her out of context and in the camp. Our building week project was to finish building a wall around a water tank on a farm. The farmers have 2 tanks, one for the animals and one for themselves. They wanted to protect their drinking water tank. It was really hot the first day of building week and some people had trouble with the heat but we knew we'd finish the wall in a couple of days so we were able to take our time. It rained twice during the week so a couple of nights we had to sleep like sardines under a tarpaulin. I usually try to sleep a little further out from the masses but the close quarters were fine for a couple of nights. I've found since I brought my own pillow out, I can sleep anywhere outdoors, the whole night through!

The night before we finished the wall, the local farmers and family (6 people in all) came over to our camp on the build site for a sing song under the tarp. It was fantastic! They sang some local songs and we sang some songs back. I joined into a fine rendition of Wild Rover. The next day we cleaned up the site, and the whole family came out again including the kids for a photo session. I've never seen this happen with all the walls I've built here so it was really special to see how appreciative they were of the work we did.

We headed back to camp a day early since we had finished the wall, it was nice to have an extra day to laze around base camp and go for hikes. Also we had the EHRA end of year party and I was to help Rachel with a slideshow we were going to show on a projector. We all got dolled up, as much as you can in the desert and quite a few friends of EHRA came out to camp for the evening. We even roasted a sheep on the fire. Poor Dave had to do the preparation of the sheep. I've never seen this man turn away food but at lunch that day, after he prepped the sheep, he looked too nauseous for his sandwich. It was a delicious feast though and we all sat around under the stars with drinks looking at the best EHRA photos of the year on the projector. Pretty cool to be a part of that and you really see all the work they've done over the last 6 years.

On Monday we set out for elephant patrol. We'd heard there was a sighting of a bull in the area so we set out to find some tracks. The last 2 patrols I've been on we hadn't seen elephants the first day, we just spent the time looking for fresh poo and tracks. But this time we spotted the guy by 10.30am! It was great. And it was in the wetlands, an area I'd never been to before. We found another younger bull there as well so we spent most of the day checking them out. Then we decided to go look for some herds in the Huab River, also a place I'd never been on patrol. It was a long but scenic drive and we spotted 3 giraffe along the way which is kind of unusual on patrol. We also saw a lot springbok, oryx and steenbok which are all antelopes and all delicious!

The next day we found the Huab herds pretty easily too. We saw Misty the bull first. Years ago part of his trunk was cut off (or truncated!) in a trap so he's developed a new way of picking up branches to eat, really impressive to see how he's adapted. We watched the herds for the rest of the day and camped in an area where we thought they might pass by. We were hoping they'd walk past our camp at night but sadly they went in a different direction. We picked them up the next day and again, parked and watched as they all strolled by. Misty was in musth though which can make him unpredictable. At one point I was sitting on top of the truck facing him and he almost charged me. You're never supposed to move suddenly around elephants but he came at me and got so close I had to scoot back, otherwise he would have brushed me with his trunk or tusks. No thanks! Since these are wild elephants, it wouldn't be a good thing if they started touching us. Dave was sitting in the truck right below me when this happened and even he was a little freaked out. Cool experience though, I felt very small and insignificant which is always a good thing every now and then. It puts us in our place.

We decided after 3 days of solid elephant watching, we'd take the long way back to base camp and drive through the real desert. Dave describes this area as a 'geological wonderland' and it includes the petrified forest. We even thought we might look out for a black rhino which is kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack but we were passing through that territory anyway. We stayed at one of my favorite areas to camp when I did the fund raising trek, and again there was a stunning sunset and boulder craters to sleep in. On Thursday we got up early as usual and started to make our way back to base camp. Hendrick who is an unbelievable tracker spotted a black rhino on the horizon. Even for us with binoculars it was tough to see. We tracked him by foot a little bit but he could either smell or hear us, even though we were so far away. Very exciting to see in the wild. Dave had never seen one in the 3 years he's been with EHRA and Hendrick hadn't seen one in 2 years.

I have to admit it was my favorite patrol to date, so much wildlife, interaction with the local community and elephants, new scenery and having Darci there was the icing on the cake. So fun to have someone I know around and I got filled in on all the NYC gossip!

Here are all the photos from the trip

Jen
xx

The Brandberg climb

The website launch went well http://www.desertelephant.org, we sent out a newsletter to all previous volunteers, set up a facebook fan page which got lots of hits and publicized that the new site was up wherever we could.

With that out of the way, the next challenge was climbing the Brandberg mountain which is 2,573 m (8,440 ft). It's the highest point in Namibia and I've wanted to climb it since I saw it for the first time over a year and a half ago. Luckily there was another volunteer Rob who was out here for 8 weeks and he wanted to climb it also. Its a 3 day climb but its really hot this time of year and there was only one water stop along the way. We'd have to carry all our own food for 3 days so we decided we'd eat a lot of noodles since they were easy to pack. No offense to Rob's fabulous cooking of the noodles but I never want to see one again :)

The adventure began on Thursday 19th Nov. While the rest of the volunteers were finishing up their elephant patrol and heading back to town, I drove out to the base camp to pick up Rob and our guide Johnny, a local guy we found through one of the ellie trackers at EHRA. Dave from EHRA was very kind to lend us his car for the weekend and I learned out to remove a thingy from the car which prevents it from starting in case anyone tried to steal it from the base of the mountain. Considering we saw no other humans for 4 days, it was pretty safe.

We got to the base of the mountain Thursday evening in time for sunset and our first noodle-feast. We were up at 5am the next morning so it was an early night. I woke up feeling pretty crap and tired on Friday morning. I was recovering from a cold and my lungs were complaining. But I tried to put the brave face on and off we went. I like to think I've hiked quite a bit before, but hiking with a cold, a full backpack and fairly uphill was a whole new thing for me, I was gasping. Thankfully Rob kept stuffing me with sugary treats to keep me going. We made it to the first rest stop and our one-and-only water stop by 10.30am. Then we found a nice cave where we could enjoy a siesta from the sun till 3.30pm or so. The rocks in the cave were really cold so we both found ourselves placing various body parts on the walls of the cave to cool down.

I was feeling a teeny bit better in the afternoon and we made it to our camp for the night on the plateau of the mountain. We had to hug a lot of boulders along the way and sometimes it felt like one-false-move away from bye bye Jen. Johnny was tiny, about 5"2 but could take bigger leaps than either of us. Rob is 6'5" by the way! The plateau was really cool though and it was full of crater like holes in which we could sleep. The sunset was stunning and it was another fantastic night under the stars.

Again we woke up at 5am and left our main backpacks in the craters while we hiked to the summit with our daypacks. It was a 2 1/2 hr hike to the summit. We passed by some rock paintings along the way which are supposedly 2500-5000 years old. We reached the summit at 8.45am on Saturday morning and had celebratory hugs and apples. The 360 degree views were stunning and my photos will never do it justice. We could almost see to the ocean over 100km away since the land is so flat around the mountain. There's a book at the summit you can sign so we both wrote a little piece and sat for an hour almost in silence just taking it in.

The trip down was easier on the lungs but tough on the knees. It took us the rest of Saturday and a few hours on Sunday to descend. We got to a mining town called Uis where Johnny lives around 10am on Sunday, dropped him off and went to a lodge where we knew the owner. We were both pretty stinking after sweating tons and having no water except to drink for 3 days so we dived into the pool in all our clothes and ordered the best toasted sandwich and cokes we'd ever tasted! We'd started talking about them on Saturday on the way down the mountain so you can only imagine how exciting it was to finally get them into us.

We headed back to base camp Sunday afternoon and celebrated Rob's last day as a 33 year old with a fine dinner of bangers and mash over the fire and some good red wine. The rest of the volunteers were arriving on the Monday (including Darci!!) so it was really nice to chill out in an empty base camp for the evening. It was tougher climb than I thought it would be since there was no trail and lots boulders to climb with a heavy pack in crazy heat, but all totally worth it!

Here are all the photos from the trip

Jen
xx

Website Launch!

The website has been officially launched! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and it was a great learning experience. Check it out at http://www.desertelephant.org

I'll try to write more in the next day or so before I head off to the desert for another few weeks!

Jen

Water Hole Building and Elephant Patrol

I'm a little late with this update but I've had a busy week on the website. Our go-live date is Fri Nov 6th! Hopefully it'll all go smoothly.

Well the 2 weeks after the trek were a lot of fun. I did a 2 week volunteer cycle. There were 5 of us from the trek as well as 6 other volunteers for the 2 weeks. We had a little vehicle trouble on Monday leaving town so we didn't make it to base camp till late Monday evening. While Dave briefed the newcomers, Anneka and I made dinner for the group over the fire, spaghetti bolognese. It was another fun group of people to be around and quite different from the trekkers.

We all stayed at base camp for the night and then Tuesday we headed out to our building site where we would build a drinking hole for elephants, zebra, rhino etc. It might prevent them from damaging a farmer's water tank if they have access to water themselves. We headed back to base camp for the weekend, and spent the following week looking for ellies.

Again I'll just go through the highlights, and I still haven't taken a photo yet :)

- While looking for firewood, we drove into an aardvark hole which is like a giant pothole. If we didn't have the trailer on the back of the truck we might have tipped over. After much digging and pushing, we got back on track. Just another thing to watch out for when we're driving in the bush.

- At the build site there is a lot of dry grass and anything can set off a fire. A spark from a pick axe was the culprit this time. Within seconds there was a quite a big area of grass which was on fire. It took everyone with shovels, stomping and tossing sand on it to put it out. It was scary how quickly it spread but impressive how everyone came together so quickly and killed it.

- It began raining at night, just a few drops the first few nights but torrential on the last night. I woke up in a puddle. Its a little early for the rainy season but thankfully we had a big tarpaulin we could hang from the truck and a tree so people could sleep underneath. I didn't feel like sleeping like a sardine under the tarp with everyone so I slept under the truck. I kept hitting my head off the exhaust pipe when I sat up or moved but I was dry!

- We found some really big scorpions at one of our camp sites. It freaked a few people out but we all came through unscathed and no one got stung.

- We found a new herd of ellies, about 15 of them. They were really shy compared to the rest of the herds, they're just not used to the sound of the trucks. They led us on a chase for 200km over 2 days before we found them. Well worth it though. The next 2 days we left them alone and followed another herd, the Ugab small herd.


There were 5 females and a bull called Cheeky. I got to name of the of females who didn't have a name already. I named her Tamla after a special person I knew.

They were really relaxed in front of us and one even lay down for a nap only about 2-3 metres from us. Tony from our group took this photo.

It was another great trip, even if it was a little more eventful than usual. During the weekend back in town, Rob, Anneka and I went kayaking on Sunday morning in Walvis Bay, another small town along the coast. We were surrounded by a few dolphins and lots of seals.

Monday, while the new batch of volunteers were heading out, I was back on the website. However there was another vehicle problem so they had to borrow Johannes's car. They asked if I'd go out to the camp with them and drive it back the next day. I was packed and ready to go before they even finished the question. A bonus night in the desert, yes please!

In the end Dave drove back with me, he needed to pick up another car from town but he let me drive back for half the journey. Here's a photo of the road we drove on.

Its been a quiet enough week, just been busy on the website. I did some yoga on Wed, I'm slowly trying to get back into it.

I went sandboarding on Sunday in the dunes at the edge of town. The Namibian desert is the oldest desert in the world by the way! We could do either stand up boarding (like snow boarding) on lie down boarding. I did the lie down version. Basically you lie on a piece of greased up ply wood and go head first down a steep sand dune. The first run was scary but after that it was fantastic. I got up to 73 km/hr. I think the fastest of the day was 75km/hr. I ended up with sand in places I didn't know you could get sand. Great day, I'd do that again, as you can see from the pure joy on my face in the photos :)



Hope everyone is well!
Jen
xx

Fund Raising Trek

Hi all,
I'm back from my week of trekking in the desert, 123km in total. It was a lot of fun, we had quite a cast of characters with us. The trekkers consisted of two South Africans, one American, one Zimbabwean and 6 English. I represented the Irish contingent this year. We had a South African guy named Jaco leading us. Dave who was last year's guide brought up the rear. Johannes, Rachel, Doreen and Gerson all took care of our campsites, cooking and backpack-carrying etc. Thankfully the weather wasn't as hot as last year although it was still around 30C each day. I decided not to take photographs within the first hour of walking. It was the same route as last year and unless you're there, photos cannot do it justice. This year I wanted to just take it all in and enjoy the smells, heat, breeze and sights. It was quite liberating not to worry about taking photos and there were plenty of other snappers around me. Also, since I'll probably post their photos on the website, I'll make sure to share the ones I'm in :)

Rather than writing about what we did each day I've decided to just point out the highlights.

- The night before the trek, a few of us stayed at base camp before meeting the whole group the next day. It was really nice being in base camp (the tree house) without any volunteers and I had an entire tree platform to myself. I woke up to see a whole troop of baboons (about 30) pass right by me across a rock face at 6.30am, just as the sun was coming up. They were fighting, mating and playing. It was really cool to watch them so closely. They're LOUD though. Usually we only hear them at night so it was a great way to wake up after my first night under the stars since April.

- Lynne and Jane are trekkers from last year and it was really wonderful to see them again. We all felt like only a few weeks had past since we last saw one another, as opposed to a whole year.

- One night, Johannes decided to spice up the campsite by having a giraffe poo spitting contest. Yes you read correctly, poo! It actually looks like a walnut and its pretty hard unless you really squish it. So we all popped one in our mouths to see who could spit it furthest. I was crap (pardon the pun) but not the worst. I'll have to brush up on my poo spitting skills before I enter another contest!

Some of the animals and creatures we saw were:
- hartebeest
- oryx (really close by, he couldn't smell us since we were downwind and he was curious)
- horned adder snake
- a giraffe family, 2 mothers and babies
- springbok
- zebra
- ostrich
- scorpions
- a few fresh black rhino tracks but no sign of him sadly, we all really wanted to see one

- In the middle of the trek we climbed Doras Crater which is a 140 million year old crater. This was really tough last year, it was so hot, some people ran out of water - just not enjoyable all round. It was completely different this year. Not as hot, extra water stops and we made it to the highest point this year by climbing a different route. At the top we could see our lunch camp so we radioed Johannes and co who were setting it up and told them to get out the binoculars, we wanted to wave to them. Then we all pulled down our shorts and mooned. It was a first moon for a few of us, not a bad one to start off with!

- For the second year running, I had no blisters - wahoo! Some people rally suffered from them sadly. I hope it didn't ruin it for them.

All in all a great trek and not as overwhelming this year. It was really nice being familiar with the route. I felt I was able to take more of it in.

So thanks all again to those who donated. I'll find out what the total amount raised was and let you know. Your contributions will help EHRA to continue helping local communities live in harmony with the elephants, hopefully increasing tourism and jobs for them, as well as saving a few elephants.

I'm off to the desert again tomorrow (Monday) for 2 weeks, spending a week helping to build a drinking hole and then following week patrolling for elephants.

Hope everyone is well!

Jen
xxx

Greetings from Namibia

Well here I am in Namibia! I'm staying at Rachel and Joe's house a block from the beach in a town called Swakopmund. Rachel and Joe run EHRA. They're kindly letting me stay at a flat attached to their house, so I've got my own living space. They have 3 dogs who love attention and rubs so that's been really nice. Its actually a little chilly here at the beach compared to the desert where I've previously spent most of my time. Although by the afternoon the sun burns off most of the clouds, and summer is on the way. The EHRA office is based in the house too so it's an easy commute. Everyone really couldn't be any nicer or more welcoming. I spent the week categorizing elephant photos in their database which was interesting. Each elephant is really different looking depending on their ears, tusks and tails. I'm hoping this exercise will help me identify them when I see them.

The big news here this week was that an elephant bull named Raphael was shot by the government on Friday. Apparently on Thursday night a man was walking home through a dried up river bed in the desert, although he was told not to since there were elephants in the area. He and the elephant crossed paths and the elephant killed him. The next day officials came out and shot the elephant dead. It emphasizes the need to collar the elephants bulls and to continually educate people about what to do if they meet an elephant and the measures to take to keep this from happening.

Anyway, its been an interesting first week. I'm hoping to get going on the website again. I haven't taken any pics yet but I will dust off the camera and post some soon.

Jen

Beginning of a new adventure

Hi everyone,
Here is where I'll keep you up to date on my travels while I'm away. You probably won't see anything new until I head off to Namibia around the beginning of Sept. I'll be just chilling at home in Dublin for the month of Aug.

Click here to see some photos from my last trip there in April, might give you a taste of the life I'll be living.

I may not be building many walls this time but will certainly be stalking the elephants again! Can't wait :)

Talk soon!
Jen