Shit Gets Real

Maybe relaxing wasn’t the best word choice. While Tuesday wasn’t incredibly physically demanding from digging and walking and trap-setting, it was no walk in the park (though, technically, it was a walk in the reserve).

Our day began nice and early again at 6 as we headed out in that uber-comfy pickup truck (a “bakkie” as they call it) to check the traps. Mine got two frogs somehow, though I kind of expected more considering it’s right next to a pond. But whatever, the week’s still young. After we checked all six we stopped and had breakfast, which for me consisted of a peanut butter sandwich, water, and a crapton of Marie Biscuits, my new food-related obsession. The next part of our day was pretty vague, as Jan just said we were going to walk around for a few hours looking for anything we could find. So we parked the bakkie in some random field and started walking along the beach until we hit the Mbashe River, then continued up the river bed. This part of the hike was painfully boring, as we basically just walked behind little sand dunes turning random sticks over looking for snakes and lizards and basically anything that moved that isn’t an ant. I basically non-obviously said screw that and started taking pictures instead, kicking over a few logs every now and then. After what seemed like an eternity of boredom and sleepily walking through the sand, we started abandoning the guess-and-check/blind person technique and started a hike through the forest.

We essentially hiked for the next four-ish hours through forest, grassland, and marsh, led by this guy named Ronnie (who works for the reserve I think) wielding his machete to carve up some semblance of a path. I kind of just blindly followed the person in front of me, so I apparently didn’t realize that we pretty much got lost walking around this annoyingly-dense forest with a penchant for having thorny stuff and random patches of grasslands with grasses almost as high as me. To be honest, the whole time was just a blur of bending under and around thorny plants for about twenty continuous feet, being smacked in the face by and hitting my head on branches, and wishing my water was a little cooler. I got some sick battle scars from it though, particularly one scratch on my arm that’s probably like six or seven inches long.

The next day was a combination of the two parts of the day before, simultaneously hiking and searching. We hiked the entire day because Jan needed the car for whatever reason, so my legs were really tired at the end of it, especially after the long day the day before. In the very beginning of the day, we got to walk across the Mbashe River mouth; it sounds a lot cooler than it actually is, but it’s fun to say I walked across a crocodile- (they’re more abundant upriver) and shark-infested river (they swim upstream from the ocean). We continued along the beach for a while until we turned up into the green rolling hills I could see from the beach that one day. From there we went up and down, up and down, up and down each hill, looking in random little ponds for snakes, frogs, and tadpoles. Thankfully Ken, our usual photographer, left his cameras in our chalet, opening up the photographer role for me as opposed to having to poke a stick around a pond hoping a frog gets pissed off enough for it to jump out. Eventually, just as my calves started burning from the inclines with grassiness not exactly made for walking up, we made it to this hill that looks like it juts out a little further than the rest. The views from that hill were amazing: onto the beach with the waves crashing, across the countless other rolling green hills and forest, this giant rock face across the one we were on, and of course the sick view straight out at the multicolored ocean. From there we turned around, checking some traps along the way, and used the roads to walk back to the chalets and a much-deserved shower.

That night we had (another) braai and I was part of the group tasked with making the meat, among other things, one of which was peas. Now that got me really excited, peas are my favorite vegetable; what didn’t get me excited was using a knife to open the can because we didn’t have a can-opener anywhere near. So I’m standing there stabbing this can of peas, and I completely miss the can and stab my finger. The two other people thought it was much worse than it was considering the embarrassingly-long string of expletives I let out. But at least the peas were good. By the time we were all done dinner and cleaned up, it was around quarter after nine. We had planned on having Jan give a presentation on his work for the Parks Board after dinner, but it was already close to bedtime for us (yea we get tired around 9-ish here). Sleep be damned, we had the presentation and discussion and got back to our chalets around 11, to meet the next morning at 5:45.

So the next morning we’re all there at like 5:50, ready to go. After sneaking in some coffee and peanut butter sandwiches, we all hopped into Jan’s bakkie and prepared to get butt-pounded on our way to all six traps. Then, all of a sudden, Ronnie (the machete-wielding trailblazer from a couple days ago) rushes up to Jan and says there’s an emergency. We were half confused and half “whatever” because we were really only half awake due to lack of sleep the night before. We were later told that the “crisis” (the word Jan used to quickly get our asses out of the truck) was an unresponsive warden who went out to push out poachers who came for mussels during the low tide; apparently the last contact they had with him had gunfire in it or something like that (we still don’t know the whole story, probably never will). We later learned that the police killed the poacher (still don’t know about the warden). At first glance it’s like “Oh cool, one less poacher in the world, good stuff.” But then you realize that that guy was probably just trying to get by, and probably knows some of the community members we’ve been interacting with almost every day. It’s one of those things that we (or me, at least, coming from someone with pretty much no interactions with poachers) have a different view of back home, and this just shows a unique perspective of the situation. Even things like conservation are different once you get down into the practice of it. Here (and in a lot of other places) they kill some of the reptiles and amphibians they catch because they need certain DNA from somewhere…I forget the details. But we usually think of conservation of saving everything and killing nothing, but in reality it involves actions that seem contradictory at first. Feel bad for a poacher? Kill to save? Sounds weird, but such is life I guess.

After a relatively long sleeping period (9-5 essentially, sleeping’s my job) we headed back out into the morning mist to check the traps again. Throughout the course of the drive out there, though, the rain increased, which made it pretty miserably damp in the back of the bakkie. Even more miserable was the fact that my trap yet again came up empty. Apparently the rainy weather aided some of the others’ traps while hindering mine, so hopefully it’s sunny tomorrow. I also need the laundry to get done (we hire ladies from the village to do our laundry, we’re job-creators) because it needs the sun to dry. Even when it’s done, though, it still smells funny, so everyone’s in this constant state of stank, either from the weather, sweat, or “clean” clothes. Weather forecast for the next few days? Rain. Awesome.