Tuli tracking course
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008Back at Joburg, I met up with Martin and Mark (ACE) and got transferred back to the Botswana border at Platjan. Here I met up with Charlie again who drove me and Frazer (new student) into Tuli letting me sit on the Tracker down to the camp.
I only stayed at the camp for the first night (in the love shack) and then moved up to the house, so Stuart and I could concentrate on prepping for the Tracker course
We set up camp in Lost hills with a tent for each of the participants and then set off to Alldays to pick up Rob, Adam, Lee, Yutte(sp?) Geoff and Guido
they all turned out to be nice guys and we had a lot of fun sorting out haw to organise camp and then starting the tracking.
We did one humongous walk the one day: starting around Lost Hills after some ellies we had heard (but never caught up with) then along to the Rockies and then down to Mamatumi!!! a canny old walk THAT one!…with 42 degrees showing on my watch - in mostly shade! thankfully there was water at Mamatumi, otherwise I think Stuart may have had rebellion on his hands..and a couple of dehydrated corpses!….easy to laugh about it now tho.
Still no ellies, so we moved camp to Lekkerpoet anyhoo. This time we had some success, in finding leopard, hyena and eventually LION track, 
which we followed for most of the day without actually catching up with the lions…until we got back inthe hilux to leave and instantly the liones was spooted inthe spotlight beam!!!…a nice sighting as she wandered along even sitting and posing for us in the grass!
Back at the camp we were warned by Adam about the ‘flat stone‘ …….we had brought a ‘bucket’ shower which we hung from a tree in the rocks at the bottom of Lekkerpoet hill - 50m from the camp. however, Lee had gone to ’see a man about a dog’ and had walked off into the rocks to find a suitable place - he had just crouched down to …well, you know…when he looked up and realised the shower outlet was dangling right above his head!!!! he’d only managed to find a toilet spot right underneath our shower!!!! too late to move, he did the business and then placed a flat rock over the ‘evidence’ so the rest of us had to actually stand on that rock to have ourshowers that night. YUK!!
Half way thru the course Geoff had to leave us, due to his pacemaker (that we didnt know about!) playing up!!!…bit of a shocker to me and Stuart, but at least it happened back in Koro camp and not out in the bush
The rest ofthe course went along well with the smaller group getting on well and improving in tracking skills dramatically
Eventually we came to the assessments which took place over 3 days - amazingly both Rob and Lee got Tracker 2 level! (along with Charlie who had joined us for the assessments and also got a level 1 Trail certificate too) I managed a Level 1 Tracker, which I guess is OK, though really I had hoped for better