January 2011 Blog – New Year update

 

Camp Fire at Paradise camp on the Balule Conservation Project

Afreco Tours | Transfrontier Africa

Paradise camp is awesome! We have a great routine here. Every night, (when the weather allows for it,) we make a huge fire chat about our day, and have dinner. Well to be quite honest, Bwana Craig has been down at Metsi, doing the reports and the weather hasn’t cleared long enough to make a fire. So instead we make food on the gas cooker, and sit miserably undercover watching the lighting. Humidity is major problem as of late. The rain has been coming down in buckets and when the sun does come out the water logged ground evaporates and saturates the atmosphere with humidity.
Today was very eventful. We fixed the brakes on Scorol Corol, so we went to Ezulwini lodge to collect some wood and I got to drive… Let me state that Craig stresses me out when I drive. So we are driving down Oliefants Road and the breaks fail just before Sable Road. I throw the car around the corner and Craig freaks saying what some harsh words. I respond with, ‘the brakes don’t work,’
‘Don’t be such a drama queen!’ was Craigs response.
So we carry on driving, and we find ourselves going down another hill, this time a lot faster, and I casually say to Craig that the brakes don’t work. I could see he wanted nothing more than to jump off the car. Regardless I managed to get the car to stop and Craig was very upset with the fact that the brakes were broken again.
So in the end we got the wood, some very nice droppers for the upgrades we will be doing. The first upgrade is a garage. This is to simply protect the cars from the harsh African weather. We will also be doing regular maintenance on the kitchen and finally we will be building a box for the generator to go in, this will reduce the noise pollution that it produces as well as protect it from weather effects.

After collecting wood, we got back to camp and had a much needed lunch. We were just deciding were to store the wood when we heard the trumpeting of an ellie and we hopped into the car as quickly as we could. Craig was saying that you can hear the trumpeting of an elephant from miles away when we suddenly saw them. They were only 400 – 500m away from camp. Funny how things work out. We couldn’t get much data since the bush is extremely thick so photo opportunities were limited. Out of the eleven ellies we only got photos of two.
Craig has left to go visit his family. He sounded very excited… For those of you that know Craig you will understand exactly how much he couldn’t wait to go. So he has left the reigns in Tims hands. Good luck Tim.
We have one volunteer in camp, Jean. Jean is 68 years old and is traveling the world volunteering in multiple environmental projects. We call Jean Capt. 8 fingers, (construction accident,) and he has been helping out with the work on the garage. He will soon move into doing work on the kitchen. We can’t stress how important volunteers are to us. They help out with so many different things which we wouldn’t be able to achieve without them. Thanks to Jean and all the other volunteers that have helped in the past.
So besides for writing the blog and keeping everyone informed about the work we are doing here what do I do? Well I’m working on the marketing of the camp. The camp gets most of its funding from volunteers, so my job is to inform all the ex-volunteers about our projects as well as come up for strategies for increasing the amount of volunteers we have in camp.
Goosie is still around; however she is miserable with the constant rain. She has been running up and down hissing and freaking out. She reminds me of the chicken that thinks the sky is falling. She constantly bites me, last time she bit me was because of my box of chocolates that I had and she wanted.
So this is it for now, keeping on reading the blogs, and let me know what you think. I value any and all feedback. Thanks to everyone.

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