Thoughts at the end of the first year

After a year living in the bush, I had a bit of a shock when I briefly returned to London in March. It simply did not feel like home any more. Perhaps I was in England for too short a time. I have been out here for a whole year now and perhaps it is time to take stock of the situation.

I have managed to write eight chapters out of a planned twenty, so that is pretty much on schedule but the writing is getting harder now as I learn more and realise just how much more there is to learn about this whole conservation culture. Somehow I have to distil it all down into something that you might enjoy reading on the train. You, my target reader, are a hard person to please.

As I look around my hundred metres of riverfront I am proud of what we have built here. It is a comfortable, environmentally friendly little camp. We have survived storms and drought, elephant raids, supply problems, battles with the authorities and even managed to grow three massive, delicious, melons.

Admittedly our mango tree only managed to produce one fruit and all the baobab fruit got blown off in the first storm but with our nurturing the trees are stronger and healthier than they were when we started out. Elephants still occasionally come into camp but more often they take advantage of the access road on their nocturnal wanderings along the river. Monkeys roost in the trees on the river bank and we do gave to be careful not to leave food out and tempt them. A metre long monitor lizard lives somewhere in the bushes just beside my bedroom and often sidles out after lunch while I rest during the hottest hour of the day. Every day a skink uses the power supply to my computer as his morning radiator and clambers on top to absorb the emitted heat as he prepares to clear up the myriad little insects that wander in and out of the office tent.

The bird life is plentiful too, I now have some blue waxbills building a nest on the bush by the hot water geyser. Sadly, I see the kingfishers less often because they now use perches I cannot view from my desk, a negative consequence of pulling the dead acacia down last year. For a while, a small crocodile hunted from a base in the fallen branches. It may be there still and I am not going to jump down to find out.

A pod of hippos comes and goes from the shifting sandbanks in front of camp sometimes they will stay for days and then just disappear. The mass of rain this last season has caused the sandbanks to shift considerably and I guess the hippos will not settle until the river bed does.

In camp itself, the plumbing works, the electricity works, the small lawns are lush and green but there is more to do before it is perfect. Things that we are working on now after having spent a year learning what is possible.

It has all cost a lot more than I anticipated. The debt relief that Zambia finally won last year has led the value of the Kwacha to almost double since I drew up the initial budget. Though everybody warned me how expensive logistics would be, I did not really take on board just how much it would cost to get supplies in to the valley.

If I were to admit to any failures I suppose that they would be that I did not manage to take all he trips I wanted nor take anything like the number of photos I had intended. I have also failed to get any handle on the local language at all.

So, on to the second year . . .

© Afrikeye 1999 - 2007 (certain items under permission of original copyright owner)

home  privacy about legal contact