February 9th 2009 – back to the bush

There are so many characters here it is impossible to go into too much detail of them all, but one of the more flamboyant characters is Laken who continually tells jokes, constantly laughs and does handshakes with all and sundry. He tells everyone how life should be lived and what makes the world tick, so when the days schedule was announced and I saw Laken was doing the client presentation I immediately changed the roster so I could be join him . This would give me the perfect opportunity to rib him on his intro and safety speech to the clients, on this occasion 2 girls one from the US and one from Aus who meet up every 2 years for a month's travel. What a cool idea.

Anyway to continue, his normal exuberant demeanour is always muted during these presentations and after we returned to camp we sat down as a group and discussed his performance. To cut a long story short I presented to the group on how I thought it should be done adding various dramatic pauses and exaggerating the dangers of lion walking and this was copied by Laken using his broken English this had all the group in fits of laughter which was just wonderful.

We also discovered another interesting fact as a result of there being no ear pieces for the radios, which meant I had to lend them mine, and as Laken tried to fit them to his ears it became apparent that they were (his ears that is) the size of a 5 year olds and again great hilarity broke out amongst the crew, including Laken himself. There are thousands of such situations that happen every day here and it is really great to be able to enjoys the simple pleasures of life.

The afternoon though soon brought us back down to earth as the next job for the day for me was the dreaded meat prep and feeding. This is without doubt the worst part of the job here as we have to cut up stored meat, today this was donkey, and feed it to the lions. It is just revolting having to handle this thawed meat, including the lion's favourite of donkey head. If I am lucky I won't have to do this again.

The afternoon just involved another walk but with the heat we are having at the moment it affects both the walkers and lions with the lions especially becoming very lethargic, although without fail there is always one or two pieces of magic that the lions entertain you with. I know when I leave here I will miss these moments a lot.

Finally, I again went to the internet cafe and couldn't believe it as I had success on the Skype front and managed to talk, albeit walking with the computer in hand around the car park of the internet cafe to keep the signal going, to Sally and the girls and have a brief chat. That was really great.