Archive for January 8th, 2001
Day 5
I began today helping in the butchery, which was an experience. The meat for the cheetahs, lions and african wild dogs was prepared here from whole antelope, which involved skinning whole animals, and then cutting them into large joints and powdering the meat with some kind of vitamin / mineral supplement. I’ve done this with fish many times before, but this was a whole different level! I was gagging for the first half hour, but by the end of the morning I wasn’t half as squeamish.
The two African ladies who worked there really put me to shame, carrying huge chunks of meat like they weighed nothing, while I was really struggling.
Later I went on a drive around the reserve with Tyse. He showed me the sad remains of ‘Ronnie’ the rhino, a young member of the reserve’s rhino population, gunned down with assault rifles for his horn. It’s a sad sight, and a reminder of why the reserve exists - to protect endangered species from us, humans.
Apparently poachers had entered the reserve years ago, and since then the Kapama reserve has employed an armed patrol to periodically circle the camp. The incident also led to the creation of a rhino trust fund.
After that we went to a small lake surrounded by an expanse of rocky landscape. I found a stone tool, probably from the stone age according to Tyse! That was really cool, you can see the tiny chip-marks where the stone has been carefully crafted into shape. I really wanted to find some more, so we stayed for a couple of hours, and eventually I had a small collection of stones which had obviously been made by hand into a purposeful tool. I never would have thought you could just find something like that just lying around, I thought you had to go on a dig or something! I guess it shows just how fantastically natural and un-touched the African bush can be.
Later we made rope from reeds we found next to a water hole. I found another stone tool there aswell. Tyse taught me some basic some tracking skills, and the importance of knowing about water holes and finding the routes that various animals take to get there. If you were surviving by yourself in the bush, these would be ideal places to set traps and snares to catch dinner. I was also introduced to some of the edible plants in the bush, including an incredibly tough root which tasted nutritious and loaded with water, another invaluable survival resource.
We rounded off the day with a close-up view of some Barbary lions in a large enclosure near Kapama, another incredibly rare species of lion, now considered to be extinct in the wild. It is only due to the efforts of places like this that they still exist at all. I looked right in the eyes of a 200kg male, and he stared back menacingly.
On the way back our pickup truck got stuck in some wet mud, and had to radio a guy with a proper 4×4 to tow us out of trouble. “It’s all part of the fun” was how Tyse put it.
That night at Nunga camp Tyse told me loads of astronomy, which was really interesting - like the position of the North Star and its use for navigation.