G'day mates! Sorry for such an immediate second email. I generally won't send this many mass emails so quickly, as I know they can be a bit annoying in the ol' inbox for those who aren't so interested. However, I'm leaving for the bush early tomorrow morning, and I only have an hour on the internet today. So I thought I'd maximize the situation and send out another big one...
Anyhow. Day number two. Quite an improvement from my mixed emotions from yesterday! I think two hearty meals, 12 hours of sleep in a bungalow, and two cups of delicious coffee black really helped the situation... I spent the afternoon last night and this morning running errands with my field supervisor (Jassiel) and my top dog supervisor (Matt). Both are overflowing with humor and smiles. Robust senses of humor, you could say. It felt good to be around folks with easy laughter, and I'm happy to know I'll be working with such jolly chaps...
We spent today racing around town trying to check off a list of to-do's. We got about half of them done, and Matt was ecstatic. Matt wareed me that things move incredibly slowly in Zambia, especially when it comes to shipping, receiving, or financial transactions. After participating in a one-hour long propane bottle purchasing transaction today, and after paying for a phone yesterday afternoon, only to have the salesman tell me the phone wouldn't be ready until today (which it wasn't), I suppose I am not in a position to discomfirm Matt's warning. Things do move slowly here (except for the traffic). But it's all good. We got plenty of things done today, and the only ramification of things moving slowly was that I had to drop Matt off at the airport this afternoon (he's heading into a different part of the country for two days to meet with a funder from Europe), and then I got to drive back into downtown Lusaka in a local truck. I wasn't sure what to expect of myself, though. In Zambia, the driving rules are the same as England. Steering wheel on the right, cars moving forward on the left. Seems easy enough, until you factor in the amount of roundabouts in Lusaka (which are rather confusing when they're turning the opposite way)! Yet it was perfectly easy. Not a bad second day in Zambia...
Tomorrow I get on an 8 hour bus for Mongu where I'll meet Egil, a Zambian Carnivore Programme ecologist from the Netherlands. From his email he's sent me, he, too, sounds like a humorous soul.
We talked about what a typical work day will look like for the coming months. And here it is: wake up at 3 am to start tracking collared hyenas and wild dogs. Track animals until we get a strong signal from the individuals we'd like to track that morning, find them, see if they're currently eating or hunting, document what we see. Take a break in late morning to nap, read, eat, and most importantly: enter data. Then it's off again at about 5 pm to do the same thing, returning to camp by about 7 or 8. In the process, we'll be seeing mostly wildebeest, zebra, numerous species of antelope, hyena, wild dog, and perhaps a few cheetah. There are only three lions near where we'll be, one female and two males. They're seen almost on a daily basis, but they have not expressed any aggressive behavior toward humans, vehicles, or camp. Oh, and 450 species of birds... Exciting, eh?
National Geographic will be right behind me, arriving in Liuwa Plain only a couple days after I do. They'll be camped with us for two weeks, filming hyenas, lions, wildebeest, and the staff of the Zambian Carnivore Programme. After seeing the Alaska Bears and Beyond program on National Geographic and how they spun Pack Creek, I can safely admit that I'm expecting some amount of cheesiness as a result...
We'll also be sharing our camp with Robin Pope Safaris. I know nothing about this guy Robin, but apparently he's a world renowned safari guide. He'll be next door to us for a month...
To accommodate all of our neighbors, our camp apparently has two toilets and two showers. Talk about living plushly in the bush! I was expecting one to two showers a month and a latrine-digging event every few days. Perhaps this is too luxurious...
Anyway, I'm off to organize my stuff and better prepare myself for tomorrow morning. Hope everyone's enjoying old man winter!
Until next time,
Daven
Jassiel M'Soka, ecology staff for the Zambian Carnivore Programme. Jassiel told me late one evening that his goal in life is to have a modest but sturdy house on about ten acres of land with a garden. Sounds familiar to me... 
Matt Becker, CEO of the Zambian Carnivore Programme. Among the most refined senses of sarcasm I've come across in the 21st century..
Two of the three National Geographic film crew out on the finest road in Liuwa Plain National Park.
Mongu, Western Province with a storm brewing beyond. Mongu was a very quiet, mostly peaceful town at the end of the paved road in western Zambia. It sits on a high bluff overlooking a massive flood plain that is dry, Kalahari-style grassland in the dry season, and soupy flooded swamp in the wet season. I arrived at the tail end of the dry season, when the days were hot and transportation was a relative breeze...
Folks in Mongu meandering on a Sunday evening. While in Zambia, there was some civil unrest in Mongu. In the 1960's, the Barotse people of Western Zambia struck a deal with the Zambian government (shortly after independence from England) to eventually form an independent Barotseland (similar to a situation like Swaziland, an independent nation within the borders of South Africa). This indenpendence has never been granted, and in January, 2011, some Mongu and surrounding area residents took it upon themselves to again demand independence. It turned somewhat violent, and two residents of Mongu died in the altercation. I was not in Mongu at the time, but I arrived two weeks later, complete with police check points, curfews, and a fair amount of sad and meloncholy Zambians I had come to know over the course of my time there...
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