So I finally found some time to write – and to all who expected weekly updates, I am sorry, but I hope these giraffes will cheer you up!
I am currently in my first off time and enjoying a nice cup of tea in a hotel in Hoedspruit. I just slept in a bed again and although like my tent a lot, I have to admit that the bed was very comfortable. But the time in the bush was great and I'd love to tell you a bit about more about my last two months.
My journey to Africa started before I even boarded the plane. Getting a student visa for South Africa is not that hard – at least in theory – but not having my passport 4 days before departure made me a bit nervous. However, it worked out in the end and I realized that things work a bit differently in Africa. I got quickly used to the term TIA (“This is Africa”), which is frequently used when things were a bit different than back home.
After arrival I spend one night at a hostel, where I already met a few fellow students, before we left for Nelspruit for the start of our one year field guide course. I met 15 students from around the world who all had the same passion for nature and were excited to learn about wildlife on their way to become field guides.
The next day we left for Karongwe where we spend a few days for our wilderness medicine course. This is basically a first aid course adapted to the life in the bush. We learned CPR, but also how all the things around us could easily kill us. This might sound a bit harsh at first, but it was a real eye-opener and made us realized that we really are in the wild and need to be a bit more cautious than in our lives before.
After finishing the wilderness medicine course, we headed to Botswana for the first part of our training in guiding. We stayed in Tuli, which is a very nice area dominated by mopane trees and nice koppies (small hills) where we enjoyed many beautiful sundowners. Our daily schedule looked somewhat like this:
04:30 Wake-up call 05:00 Coffee and tea 05:30 Game drive 10:00 Breakfast 11:00 Lecture 15:00 Lunch 16:00 Bush walk 19:00 Dinner
So we basically had some time off from 12:00 to 15:00, which was mainly used for learning or taking a nap. We learned and experienced so many new things every day that I normally went to bed at about 21:00.
After one month in Tuli, we went back to South Africa in a game reserve called Selati. We got a bit more variation in vegetation and the camp was placed right at the river. On our first walk we saw lions! This was a great start and seeing this beautiful cats on foot makes you suddenly feel very small. We saw the lions again on the next day (again on foot) but we didn’t see them afterwards for weeks. To be honest, I thought I would see more of the flagship animals of southern Africa in this first two months. However, this is a field guide course and not a safari and we are here to learn about the whole ecosystem. So yes, we saw elephants, giraffes, zebras and leopards but we also learned about grasses, flowers, trees, birds and all the other factors that make the African bush so unique.
Keeping that in mind, we were studying a lot – and it was a very different way of learning. We had the “normal learning out of the book", but identifying trees by their bark or their leaves and identifying birds by their calls was very new to me. And I wouldn’t have thought that I would manage to know 60 bird calls just after two months. But as I said, we studied a lot and the time in Selati went by very quickly. The last weeks were then dominated by several exams and ended with my practical assessment, where I hosted lunch and then took some guest (fellow students and an assessor) on a drive on the next morning. My drive went well, although we didn’t have too many big mammal sightings, but the course prepared us in a way, that we could basically stop everywhere and talk about all the big and small things around us.
Saying that, I enjoyed the course a lot so far and I am very excited to get back out there in the bush four our next adventures in basic birding and traditional skills of wildlife tracking. I hope I find some time again to keep you updated on that :)