Elephant Run

Safe and sound at our new African home:

Everyone is in this pic, minus Karen, who was taking this picture. Peter (bottom right) and Louise (lady with the shades) are the supervisors of the lab, and everyone else are the researchers that I live with. I'm sure stories of each of them will creep up into my blog throughout our stay. This was after we had just arrived on Wednesday and hadn't seen a bed for 2 days. Still happy, though!

I can only speak for myself when I say I had a wonderful night's sleep and woke up the next morning at 4:30am. I heard Derek (top middle) and Rich (bottom left) leave to do their field work for the day and, shortly after, decided to get up. I was completely awake and ready to explore - so I slipped on my running shoes and went for a run.

Running down the road, very cautiously, I saw some wildlife such as warthogs, a herd of antelope, and a bunch of birds. I was making lots of noise to make sure I wasn't going to run into any of the bigger animals.  After running a couple kilometres I turned back to go home (it was an easy running/exploring day). As I arrived back home, I nearly crapped myself when I saw this:

I had to cross his path to grab my camera and then I came back out and took the picture. This elephant's name is Rex and he's been hanging around the house for a while. Derek was going for a run the other day and Rex charged at him, which made me especially nervous to even take this picture, but I was near enough to our electrical fence that I could have darted behind it easily if Rex decided to try anything. 

Karen took some pics from inside the house. Note the perimeter fence we have to keep him out:

Anyways, there is another Rex encounter story, but I think I'll save that one for later. I apologize for my terrible writing, it's much more difficult for me to write these stories a few days after the fact. 

Until next time...