I'm wearing my hat

I'm so wearing my hat. K keeps saying, 'hey, look everlyone, Dr. Jones! Hey, Harlison Ford!'

Another lazy afternoon by the river. There's nothing so fine as messing about in boats. It's fair to say I'm going to sleep well tonight. We had a two-hour walk last night, then a long walk this morning. The walks this morning for scheduled for around four hours, but my Swiss seat-mate (Wannabe Earth Mother, or 'WEM'), Zav (Canadian number-one-son) and I decided we wanted to do more, so elected to do six hours instead. Well, actually, they wanted to do it, and I said I'd go with them. WEM's been bugging me...well, most of the time, to be honest.I don't know if it's the Swiss thing, but I find her a tad opinionated, and a bit of a pain. I mean, I'm all for 'nature knows best', why have a twenty minute debate about whether we really have to wear shoes on the walking safari when you could just stick a pair of trainers on. I mean, does it really matter that much? (although I did chuckle on day one when we went down to the river for a swim and it took her ten minutes to walk across the sand because of all the thorns – sorry, 'torns'). She also has that way of expressing her opinion in a way that suggests your opinion is wrong or stupid. Malaria, for instance. Now, I'm taking Malarone tablets – shit! haven't taken one today – as every medical and non-medical source has told me it's a good idea. I'm also using deet repellant. She doesn't use either, because 'dey do bed tings to your body'. What, worse things than malaria? 'Well, you know, African people don't take pills'. Yes, but 'African people' have lived in Africa a very, very long time. Hence the name. If Mr. Darwin is to be believed, any African who was prone to malaria probably wouldn't have survived long. I'm fairly sure, on the other hand, Switzerland doesn't have a problem with mosies. So, she doesn't take tablets, but I'm forced to sit next to her on the truck every day as she cuts up and eats chunks of raw garlic and ginger. Yum.

So, bit of a stroll this morning, and we saw quite a lot of stuff. Animals in the Delta are, for the most part, small, grainy and slightly out-of-focus, or so my photography would have me believe. I'm gradually getting the hang of this camera, but it' going to take time and practice to really start getting results. We saw warthog, zebra, hyena, impala, wildebeast, jackal, baboon, giraffe and lots of elephants. We had one particularly memorable encounter with a huge bull elephant. We'd seen it from a distance, then move away through some trees. We'd seen giraffe and zebra ahead, so stopped to watch. We were surprised when our guide whirled round started. Now, I'm trying to be conservative here, but the elephant must have been twenty metres from us. We ran, as quietly as we could. I snapped off one photo, and managed to get a shot of the elephant's right ear. Probably not even a near-miss by African standards, but it felt pretty exciting. I wish I'd paused longer to take the photo, although I'm not sure whether I was scared of the elephant, or worried what the guide would have said if I hadn't run after him straight away.

Managed to lose my lenscap, too. Gah. Oh, my watch has stopped working, too. Well, it's working, but I can't change the time. This was fine when I was only an hour out, but Bjorn suggested I push the reset button. It has reset, but now the time's totally wrong and I can't change it. Ah well, I guess I can wait until 12:00 and hit reset... So, lunch, more messing about in boats, then we're off for a sunset mokoro trip at, well, sunset.