Greg's Next Big Adventure

[ajp]

Looks good Greg. It's difficult to take a bad photo when you have subjects as breathtaking and fascinating as you had, but you do take a damn fine shot.

[calisota]

Just a post to advertise what I have in mind to do next.

The travel bug is still biting real bad. No great surprise there but what I'm doing to scratch the itch may be. I can't help feeling that I should take advantage of the fact my house is rented out and taking care of itself and to have a stab at something I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to write and I've always wanted to write a book. This could be the time to do it. Because I didn't really enter into my volunteer journey with any intention of it being more than a series of blog entries I didn't take the sort of notes that would be necessary to turn it into a book. With that in mind, and an overwhelming desire to see more of the world, I've decided to start from scratch with a new idea and try and do it right.

The idea is surprisingly simple. I have now been around the world twice and ticked an awful lot of countries off the list but I have seen very little of Australia. Add to that the extremely embarrassing fact that I am a quarter Australian (my grandmother was born in Tasmania of all places) and you would have to wonder why I have closed my eyes to the country where I have lived for almost 30 years. I have always had a dream to travel across the US, stopping at small towns along the way, but it occurred to me that there is a wealth of fascinating towns here with just as much interesting history. Over the course of my travel emails I've been told by many that I should write a book and a few have even said that they would buy it, it's time to find out if I really could and they really would.

So here I am researching Tasmania, my first planned port of call since it's where my many Great Grandfather set foot in 1830. I will be sending blog entries on a regular basis which will be appearing on www.planettrekker.info and will later be re-written, edited, tweaked, sworn at and finally wrestled into a form suitable for attempting to attract a literary agent. You can read the blog entries at your leisure or sign up for my email list to have them delivered to you and you will also be able to follow me on twitter, there's a link on www.planettrekker.info or you can go to www.twitter.com/ptrekker . I only have 2 followers at the moment and don't know either of them. You can even get them by sms. I've figured out how to use my phone as a 3G modem so I plan to tweet and post blog entries from all sorts of strange places.

Greg

[churros]

Cool! I went to Tassie in 1988 for my honeymoon!

[mushu mama]

When I travelled all around Tassie in 1981 we stumbled across a town called Doo Town.. all the houses have weird names that contain the word Doo. Its down near the Tesselated Pavement ( rock formations) and the Devils Kitchen. There are some hilarious names and definitely worth a look.

And if you want to interview a direct descendant of the first boatload of Germans to settle in the Barossa Valley when you hit SA, then I'm happy to help out.

And if you hit Horsham in Vic, you must have a Florrie ( or two) - ask around, I'm sure someone will be able to tell you which pub is serving them. Its a local delicacy.

Sounds like an interesting trip.

[KeithS]

So how is the research coming along Greg? Have you got a timeframe for when you think you are likely to head to Tasmania?

And how is that report coming along on your South African trip?

[calisota]

Uhhmmm...South Africa...right...working on it.

Plan is to head off in the direction of Melbourne and the ferry about the 7th of July.

Greg

[calisota]

Just as a salve to my own conscience and as a bit of an exclusive to those here, I'm going to write about South Africa. This is the first place it's going to appear but it may end up on my blog at some point.

Soooo...South Africa.

I flew from Hong Kong to SA on South African Airlines, the third time I've flown with them and, if I have anything to do with it, the last time I fly with them. It was a horrible flight and even managed to pip their last effort as worst flight ever. The food was horrible, the seat was even more uncomfortable than the usual cattle class seat, service was non existent and the entertainment system wouldn't work. Don't fly South African!

That being said, the airport in Johannesburg actually wasn't too bad. It had obviously had a bit of a spruce up leading up to the World Cup and was looking okay.

In one of those weird, small world, coincidences I ran into someone I knew at the luggage carousel. I had met Gitte in Laos earlier in the trip and knew that she would be in Africa doing the same project as me but was under the impression that her plane was at a completely different time to mine, if not a completely different day. This was at the time of the big snow storms in England though and her plans had been changed considerably, hence meeting in the airport. It turned out that a lot of people coming from Europe had their plans rocked by the weather and one girl coming from Canada, via London, had it turn into a 3 day nightmare saga topped off by the airline losing her luggage. You can imagine what sort of mood she was in heading off to a 5 week camp in the bush with only the clothes she was wearing.

Getting through customs was a breeze. Not even any forms to fill out, just a quick glance up at me and then a stamp in my passport giving me 3 months to do as I wished in the country. Maybe they had streamlined the process a bit in anticipation of hoards of football hooligans but it worked for me and Gitte and I were settled in a coffee shop in very quick time. After some semi okay food (it was an airport after all) we turned up at the meeting place in the airport and had our first look at the people we would be sharing tents with for the foreseeable future.

Everyone was to meet at the information desk of the airport at the appointed time and there was quite a group of people and bags piled up. There was the usual mayhem as a few people in GVI shirts tried to sort us out and establish which of two places we were going. Then, sorted into the Venetia group, I followed the appropriate staff member out into the car park. Our transport was a very neat and tidy mini bus with a trailer. No rattly old Land-rover for us. This was a proper, hired vehicle just for the trip and I really appreciated the ability to stretch my legs out in the front seat. From there the trip was just a long series of highways. Good highways though. Amazing highways actually. They were wide, smooth, well maintained and had little traffic. A nice drive even if the scenery could have been anywhere and didn't really scream Africa. I remembered my trip from the Harare airport into town when I visited Zimbabwe all those years ago as being a clichéd view of Africa. It was all rattletrap vehicles, people walking on the side of the road carrying things on their heads and livestock everywhere. The trip out of Johannesburg could have been any city anywhere.

We stopped at a service station for lunch and even the fast food lacked any African feel. Hamburgers are pretty universal. After lunch we drove on through mainly agricultural countryside until we stopped in the car park of a large shopping centre in a large town. It had taken us hours to get there and we could have been anywhere. I was still a little disappointed, but things started to look up when we were told that we were swapping to the GVI vehicles. They had come to meet us and would take us the rest of the way to our camp. The vehicles were an old, beat up Indian manufactured Ute called a Mahindra and an even more beat up and tiny van. The back of the Mahindra was full of groceries and our bags so we all crammed into the van. Compared to the one we had just been in this was like hell but at least I got to ride in the front seat again.

Many hours now pass as we drive along roads that are amazingly well kept, passing little towns that start to look a little more like you would imagine an African town to look. I also started to notice that there were high fences along both sides of the road and occasionally, much to my excitement, I would spot an animal on the other side of the fence. Usually just an antelope of some sort but it was a genuine wild animal and enough to wake me up and get me scanning again for a while. It turns out that there are no truly wild parts of South Africa any more. All of the parts of the country that contain animals are neatly fenced in and money is charged if you want to come in and see any. It's not like Australia where you can just drive out into the bush and see things. Every so often there would be a gate and a big sign proclaiming it as the entrance to some game reserve or other.

We were to be staying and working on a game reserve ourselves but ours was slightly different. De Beers, the diamond company, owns a lot of land and we would be on one of their reserves. One end was a diamond mine (seriously) and the rest was for the animals. Not being short of money De Beers had no need to charge tourists to come and see the animals so the entire place was closed off to the public. I imagine that it was part of their public relations to be able to say that they were saving the animals and letting them live undisturbed but it also gave us free run of a huge part of the country and the ability to go weeks without seeing any other people. When I come to my second 5 weeks and my second reserve you'll see why this was so good.

Eventually we found our gate and as soon as we were through it we hit dirt road. And not a particularly well maintained dirt road at that. Our camp was half an hour to an hour (depending on who was driving) into the bush from the gate and we got there just as the sun was going down.

The camp was a collection of tents/buildings. I put it that way because they were permanent tents, erected on concrete slabs and there were even concrete paths connecting the tents. We were greeted by the GVI staff and pointed towards the two tents set aside for us. There was an 8 person tent and a 4 person tent and by some fluke we had 8 girls and 4 guys to populate them. As we 4 guys hauled our bags towards our tent I wondered how 8 girls were going to manage sharing one tent.

The rest of the camp was 5 tents for the staff (only 1 or 2 to a tent depending on status), a dining tent and a kitchen tent. Each of the sleeping tents had a little bathroom attached to it that consisted of a sit down toilet, shower cubicle and a hand basin. This bathroom wasn't surrounded by canvas like the rest of the tent but the walls were made of sticks that afforded an expansive view out as you took care of your ablutions. As the other guys were choosing their bunks I stuck my head through the back tent flap to check out the bathroom and was confronted by a couple of big rats. This was really not going to be 5 star accommodation.

For our first week there the staff were going to be doing the cooking so that we could concentrate on our studying. After that we would be rostered to cook and do other camp duties. This first night dinner was something I can't remember and I barely remember putting up my mosquito net, crawling into my sleeping bag and my head hitting the pillow. We were being treated easy though, we didn't have to wake up until about 7am.

The first week was study week and we had an exam to pass at the end of it. The idea was that we were there to work and if we couldn't do the job then what use were we. I don't know if anyone failing would have been sent home but they were completely serious that anyone who didn't pass wouldn't be allowed to leave the camp for their entire stay and that would have been just as bad. We did get to go out on a few drives that first week and I'll get back to those but we really did study and I actually learnt. When it came time for the work to begin we were to be put into two groups of 6. Each day there would be one person from each group rostered as the cook and cleaner, another person from each group would be data input and cleaning and the remaining 4 in each group would go out on drives. Those on drives would have their own duties. In each of the two vehicle there was one person who recorded data, one who did telemetry, one who did maps and triangulation and one on vehicle duty.

We had to pass a number of exams to show that we could do each job.

Data entry was simply putting the data collected the previous day into a spreadsheet.

Collecting data was just writing down the details of each animal, GPS coordinates and behaviour etc. Sounds easy but it meant a series of lectures on identifying animals and learning about each one. We had to be able to species, sex and age anything we glimpsed in the bushes and there are a surprising number of animals in Africa. Throw in bird and tree identification and there was a lot to learn.

Telemetry was as much an art as a science. It was right out of all those documentaries where we had to stand up with a little aerial and a box that beeped and try and figure out where the collared animals were. By turning the aerial around and tweaking the dials on the telemetry set the beeps would change. It really was an art, especially trying to do it in the back of a moving vehicle with the animal possibly on the move as well. The exam was trying to find a spare collar that had been hung in a tree and I managed to nail it and could even point directly at the collar. I was given an award as the best telemetrist so I must have been okay at it. It was fun to be able to yell directions at the driver as we crashed around off road but it was also important to remember that the whole purpose was to find the animal in question and if you couldn't then it may end up being a long day in the sun until you did.

Maps and triangulation was also something I seemed to find easy but then I have that geeky mind. If the animal we were searching for was in an inaccessible place then we had to triangulate it by determining our location on the map from a GPS coordinate, marking the compass bearing to the animal and then repeating two more times from different locations. In theory where the three lines met was where the animal was. In truth the lines were never ever perfect.

Vehicle duty was simply doing a pre drive check of all the vital parts as well as making sure all the equipment and safety gear was aboard and working.

Part of the week was also taken up with a full first aid course. We were, after all, a long way from help if something happened.

I managed to pass everything even if my animal identification skills were not so good. There are so many different antelope out there and to be able to id, sex and age them at a glance was a little difficult.

Then we got on to the working part of the whole project and the reason I was there.

But I'll let you get up and stretch and leave it all for part 2.

Here's a link to some photos I took to tide you over.

http://www.gvivenetia.com/index.php/Greg


Greg

[calisota]

Just a shameless plug for the latest of my travel tales. For those not on the mailing list I am also posting to www.planettrekker.info which has the added bonus of photos.

Posting this from Seymour, Vic. It's a strange land down here but still oddly familiar.

Also...Mighty Maroons!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Greg

[KeithS]

Mighty Maroons!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for the travel updates Greg - I'm enjoying reading them

[calisota]

I am off again.

You may remember me going to Laos to teach English to Buddhist monks a while ago...well, I enjoyed it so much I'm going back to work on the project as a staff member. In one of those serendipitous chain-of-events situations I ended up being offered the job and I have committed to being there for at least a year. My main duties will not be teaching as such, although there will be a lot of assisting, but in the administrative side of things. I will be doing the paperwork, looking after the volunteers (a full time job in itself) and doing the tech stuff like blogs, video blogs, presentations etc. There is also the possibility of extending the projects in Laos to include things like construction work in remote villages so I would be able to get in on the ground floor in the creation and running of those as well.

If nothing else it will be an interesting entry on my resume.

Greg

[KeithS]

Hey Greg - this is fantastic news! I remember how fond you were of your time in Laos - so this sounds right up your alley.

When are you heading off? Will you be based in the same place as last time? Make sure you keep in touch with us all!

p.s. - and typical, just when we've got you talking on here again, you decide to bugger off!

[calisota]

Heading off in April.

Going to the same place as last time and hopefully staying in the same guest house. One of the things that got me the job was the fact that I had been there before and knew the place well enough to be able to hit the ground running with the new volunteers. I arrive the same day as a new lot so I'll be getting off the plane and stepping into tour guide mode straight away. It might confuse a few to find the guy who was standing in line with them at customs is suddenly holding up a sign with their names on it.

Don't forget, with internet time as part of the job I'll still be able to lurk here and post the occasional pithy comment.

Greg

[ajp]

Sounds fantastic Greg. What an opportunity and to do something you like in a place that interests you is a tough thing to find. MAke the most of it and look forward to hearing about it. Don't worry about the RWC, All Blacks will get bundled out in the quarters anyway, more than likely by Samoa or someone like that

[calisota]

Don't worry about the RWC, All Blacks will get bundled out in the quarters anyway, more than likely by Samoa or someone like that

It's not Samoa I'm worried about, it's the *^$$%# French.

Greg

[churros]

Exciting news Greg! Sure you can't do a stop over in HK the first week of April?