Ok, so I am officially home and back at work in beautiful Muncie. Since this is mostly for friends and family I will most likely get to see you all at some point and tell you of my experiences in persons. First though here are some of FAQ's.1. What surprised you most about Africa?
There are many answers to this, as most of the trip surprised me. At first I would have to say the landscape, because everything we see and hear about south-western Africa says that it is all flat open grassland savanna with very few trees. In South Africa, at least where I was, this is not true. Instead there is a lot of bush and scrub and the region is very mountainous.
I was also very surprised at the way people lived in South Africa. You hear stories and people will tell you there is a lot of poverty and so on but we are very fortunate in America to live the way we do. Since South Africa is a fairly stable and wealthy country they do not have as many problems as the other countries in the region, but they do still have extremes. The cities are very modern and resemble our own cities and suburbs, they just have barbwire and fences to keep intruders out. However, their countryside is radically different. Where we have farms and rural communities they have game farms and any towns outside of the main cities are poor communities, and when I say poor, I mean living in cinder block homes and using tarps as a roof.
2. What was the scariest thing that happened to you?
First I want to note that this trip was very safe. When out in the bush our guides had rifles with huge bullets in them and we always went with a trained guide who knew the tracks and signs of the bush. Most of our camps were fenced to keep dangerous animals out and when they weren't we were to have a buddy with us at all times and a trained guide stayed in camp with us.
That being said I did have a few adventures while overseas. The most hair raising would have to be the time a hyena got into our fenced camp at Kruger. It was our second night at the camp and a few of us students decided to take a walk around the camp at night. It is a well known fact in Kruger that if you walk around the camp, and especially the fences, at night you will get a chance to see some really cool nocturnal animals. The group that went the night before had seen some really cool stuff and so we decided to go out again. Our guide was tired and the camp was electrically fenced so he stayed at camp and went to sleep.
We had a lot of fun wandering around the camp. We saw a genet and bats and even a hyena sitting outside the fence. We walked down to the river and listened as the animals called to each other. There really is nothing like it. Back here in Indiana we really don't have the same level of dangerous animals as they do, and no matter how many times you go to the zoo, the animal on the other side of the fence is still in captivity. In Africa they are not, and you are constantly aware that any animal could easily kill you if it wanted to.We had finished our explorations and we were ready to start back to camp when we heard the hyenas calling out. For those who haven't heard a hyena's locator call it is kinda spooky, click here to listen. If you really want to get a feel for what we were hearing turn the volume on this up and sit in the complete dark. Then multiply that one sound by 10 and that is what we heard. Shortly after the pack across the river called out we could hear a call come from across the far side of camp where we saw the hyena by the fence. Then after that we heard another one call from another side of camp. We thought at first that this was really cool to get to hear them all calling to each other through the night.
We stayed a bit longer and listened, but there wasn't much else to hear and so we started back to camp. At this point we were on the far side from our camp site and had about a 10 minute walk through the dark to get back. We had only gone a few hundred yards when the hyenas started calling again, and this time the answering call was coming from inside the fence, and not just inside the fence, but not very far from us at all, as in maybe on the other side of the bushes that just happened to be rustling.
Luckily we happened to be field biologists who had been trained in how to handle dicey situations and so we all quickly grouped together so as to form a large group. We weren't super worried, more like nervous, but we knew that from the sounds that the hyena was alone and a lone hyena would not attack a large group of humans. (side-note: We weren't guessing at this. Hyena's are extremely smart and any animal within the fence came to pick up any scraps left, not attack humans, so we were safe as long as we weren't a threat to the animal.) A few minutes went by and there were no more calls but the camp was eerily silent. Since we could no longer determine the whereabouts of the hyena we decided to continue our walk back to camp.The rest of the walk was uneventful and we didn't hear any more calls or see any more animals. We were just about ready to chalk up the closeness of the call to our imagination as we all went to our tents and settled in for the night. Just as we were about to nod off though, the hyena gave one last call, and this time there was no mistaking it, the thing was right next to our camp. I sat back up and looked out the window but I couldn't see it. I therefore decided not to leave the tent and curled back up into my sleeping bag.
So those were two of the most commonly asked questions. I will post some more later. I also want to note that all of the pictures in this post are my own.
