We were a stones throw away from Kruger
Sorry I haven’t been on my blog in months! I have been busy traveling to Cape Town and surrounding areas and have just started a new job here in South Africa. Since the start of January I have been working at a Conservancy named Untamed Africa, at the Numbi gate of the Kruger National Park! We are literally feet away from the Kruger Park.
The area is really beautiful , but the only problem is the grass is about 2 meters high! so as you can imagine you cant see anything unless it walks right out in front of the road at the last second . This area of the Kruger Park receives the most rainfall per year. I am helping to start a research project on the white and black rhinos in this area. This is done by driving around all day and locating rhino middens(piles of dung that male rhinos accumulate and use as message stations in their range). We then GPS all of the middens on the conservancy and and study what animal associations are occurring in and around the middens. We have come to find that many other species use the rhino middens. Elephants in particular take a liking to them because the grass that grows around the middens is nice , fresh and contains more nutrients then drier patches of grass since the rhino dung acts as a fertilizer. Mongoose love them as well because of all of the insects like millipedes and beetles that accumulate in and around the rhino dung.
Untamed Conservancy
The best part of my job here is going out into the bush every day with no one looking out for me. Although it is frowned upon, I do tend to wander off from the vehicle a little further than allowed, but I feel very competent in my ability to detect danger and I am well equipped with the correct procedure if a dangerous situation should arise. Not to say I wouldn’t pee my pants if a lion walked out of the grass 
. The other day I went into Kruger for a couple hours and was astonished to see how fast the leopards and lions disappeared into the tall grass right off the road. Realizing how dangerous this lack of visibility was, I decided to be a little more cautious when bending over to measure the rhino middens and wandering off trails to follow some interesting tracks in the sand. Now believe it or not the last 2 months that we have been here we have not seen one rhino on the conservancy, which hasn’t been the case for the students and volunteers who are also studying here! This seems like a typical situation to me because when you look really hard for something it never shows, but when you least expect it …….. there it is, I am still determined to see a rhino on this conservancy before I leave. I have already had about 30 or 40 rhino sighting since I’ve been in South Africa , but am only interested in seeing the ones whose dung I am digging around in all day.
My accommodation is really nice, some call it a concentration camp, but I think its quite roomy . It is in fact an old railway camp with an active railway station that runs on the perimeter of the Kruger Park. The only problem is when the train comes by at night it passes about ten meters from my head. I have come to ignore the sound and focus on the night calls of the lions and hyenas instead. We eat pretty good every day , but since our diner only comes in the afternoon, we have to heat I up in the microwave every evening. This is okay unless there is a line. 
Every afternoon we call a driver from the Nkambeni Tented Camp (where the guests stay) to pick us up and take us to the lodge,where we eat like kings. The only issue is trying to fill your cup up with sweet litchi juice before the bees sting you or dive head first into your glass. We have a medium size swimming pool in the middle of camp that stays green for the most part. There are also about 6 hot tubs next to the pool, but only one of them works. When it rains ( which it does most of the time) everything floods and the hot tubs literally pop out of the ground. Not to far from where we work is the town of Hazyview. Here you can find a couple of really nice restaurants, bars, internet cafes,shopping and a gym. If you want to go to a really big mall , then you only have to travel an hour away to Nelspruit where you can find just about anything including a movie theater. It felt nice to get dressed up and act civilized every now and again, but I preferred the bush.
Ive had some pretty cool sightings since I have been here. One day, we pulled up to 5 wild dogs resting on a rocky outcrop that had just fed on an impala. Another great sighting was when a male leopard came 5 meters from our car, as well as a lioness sitting on one of the map signs made of rock in kruger, which I have never seen before! One of the top newspapers here asked for the rights to publish this picture I took in an article which was really neat.
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