sunday, july 25

This is Jessica again; Colin is working on analyzing some data he collected today.

Today the team worked all day down on the cape again -- technically, this is part of Table Mt. National Park, and the team has a permit, but since they are working in two groups, we keep getting stopped by officials, without our permit, leading to lengthy discussions. Apparently, Carl told Colin, who was working on his knees in the brush, to "stay down," so that his appearance would not cause questions -- I missed this interchange.

Mostly what I did today was stood and listened to the ipod, since there was a dearth of rocks at today's sites on which to sit, and the brush was thick, deep and full of busy ant hills. At the first site, a small but attractive frog was caught, but my photo of it is not as attractive as the frog was, so I'll wait for Colin's photo, which is better. Then we lunched at the shore (rocky) of the actual Cape of GH -- on Friday, we were at the cape point; if you look at a good map of Africa, you will see that they are slightly different places, though I think the point extends slightly more south than the cape does. I took a group shot (see photo) and we also saw a lovely hyrax, which is related to an elephant, though looks much more like a woodchuck or marmet. We also saw several eland (which we also saw on Friday), but I've not been able to get a good photo, as they are always far off.

I was trying to take a photo of an orchid when we suddenly left our second work site in a hurry because another large troop (swarm) of baboons was trekking up the path. They stopped traffic coming up from the cape entirely, with one of them lounging in the road on his back. Several of the adults were carrying small babies. (see photo) Then we went to a couple of other sites, which were pretty (along the Indian Ocean), but it would take too long to post photos of everything.

On the way home, we went the "long way" round along the Atlantic, vs. the Indian Ocean. It was very cliffy and swervy and I closed my eyes. We stopped for photos a couple of times, and the sunset was nice, though Colin's photos came out much nicer than mine -- we'll try to get his up on the blog later. (My nikon washes everything out; his handles color much better.)

We are leaving this locale on Tuesday morning (Monday night for Dear Readers) to head up into the cold, cold mountains, and we will have no electricity for the next week after, so if you want to say something to us, say it now!