This afternoon we decided to try to collect some training points inside the forest reserve about 50 odd km away from where we are staying.  The lot of us (four students and Bennety ) headed out in a truck around three in the afternoon. There is one main paved road that cuts across the strip of Caprivi and we took the dirt road up to the tarmac and traveled east for a short while before cutting off that road to another much narrower dirt track that separates one of the conservancies (communities) with a designated forest area.  We had the brilliant idea that we would take some training samples and perhaps do one transect inside the forest reserve. We traveled along this dirt path for 15-20 minutes until randomly stopping…the dirt road had some decently thick sand and the absolutely despised scrapping along the side of the car was incessant (like fingers on a chalkboard which drives me CRAZY…really should have thought about this before picking research location…). We got out and walked along another dirt path that led east into the reserve. Again stopping at a random location we decided to veer off the path and go get a point in the scrub (think thicket-like) vegetation. So, experienced savanna people that we are, Cerian, and I charged straight off the path into the unknown.  No more than ten feet into the scrub-like vegetation then our entire pants were covered in sticklers…damn, it was soooooooo painful. And the trade-off to having the sticklers not stuck in your pants is to have them stuck like splinters in your fingers (as you try in vain to pull them out of your pants, shoe laces, socks, etc). We futilely tried to extract ourselves from the horrid mess while at the same time take the training sample that was diminishing in importance by the second. Not only were we fighting for our lives with the sticky grass near the ground but constantly swatting at the miserable flies that swarmed in masses around our heads. Finally we pawned off the rest of the training sample to Daniel who had managed to avoid the worst of the sticky grass and hobbled our way back out to the dirt track (think strip of sand that is placed straight in the middle of a mess of different vegetation types that are mostly scrub but has a scattering of trees and minimal grass…think miserable when trying to carve out a path with sticky grass and acacia thorns every direction you turn). We made it back out to the track and starting the painful process of extracting ourselves from the sticky grass. The excruciating process entailed individually pulling out each of satan’s spears (cerian’s description) firmly lodged into the cloth material. Inevitably, each spear left even tinier slivers that were impossible to get out but were annoying enough not to be ignored. I was sitting down on the sandy road to be below the swarming flies (that Andrea Wolf was periodically running up and down the road swatting at with her hands to ward off) when Cerian informed me that is where the tics were most likely to be…something to do with, “haven’t you ever heard  one of Graeme Cumming’s lectures??” – for the record, I have not. So I then scrambled back to me feet now feeling creepy crawlies all over my body.  Meanwhile, Bennety is standing perfectly calm and absolutely amused on our behalf. He informs us we should watch out for a specific type of vegetation – kindly pointing it out to us…we were just like…um, information that would have been useful twenty minutes ago.  He said he wanted us to have a real African experience. How nice of him. So, Daniel made it back out in one piece so we sent the two of them off for another point…they came back fifteen minutes later and we were still attempting to pull the nasty buggers out of our pants. Bennety (still very amused) then tells us this is great area for leopard and we should look in the trees for them…by that time, I was ready to take my chances with the crocs and elephants along the riverside rather than sticky grass, flies, leopards, and tics in the “forest.” We finally got back to the car and decided edge samples would work just fine for the area as we were absolutely surrounded by the miserable thicket. ..we ended the day over a beer and the cleaning out of the radiator that was full of grass… at least we got some data for the effort…although I’ll not be inclined to head that way again until absolutely necessary.

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