• Never play football in front of a large crowd and a man with a microphone bearing even the slightest resemblance to a premiership footballer, unless you absolutely have the skills to match. Sitting on your arse whilst a 12 year old dashes away from you whilst the commentator makes yet another joke about ‘Torres’ can be humiliating.
• 
• Driving a knackered pick-up truck along rain-washed dirt tracks with 20 kids crammed into the back is marvellous fun and absolutely terrifying in equal measure.
• GoKart races are more fun if you crash in the first lap and have to fight your way back through the field, despite starting in pole, than if you stay out front the whole time.
• Scuba diving never loses it’s awesomeness
• The tropics suddenly become a lot less fun when it rains for a week and all your possessions become petri dishes
• Yoga should not be attempted when not wearing underpants.
• Every now and then there comes along a newborn baby that genuinely is gorgeous, and not a crumpled, scrunched up heap of skin and grabby fingers.
• When wearing a dress for the purposes of entertainment, one should check the garment’s degree of transparency under flash photography before allowing many people to make permanent records of it on their cameras.`

I wish I could copy the whole thing in here, but I guess that would be stealing. Today’s word of wisdom comes from a rather super blog which i’ve only just started reading, but wish I did a long time ago.

The picture is a teaser. Go here

Yesterday, we made the 3rd ever sighting in Kenya of a particularly nondescript brown bird. Some people got quite excited indeed.

Here’s the story as penned by me (I’m working very hard out here as you can see)

Recently, I’ve been feeling a bit tubby. It all started when I was teaching in the summer school, never walking more than a hundred yards from classroom to staffroom, or bedroom to dining room. The lack of exercise coupled with the consumption quantity of saturated fats one can only find in a Diego Maradona’s lunchbox, or a cafeteria feeding 300+ teenagers, I arrived in Africa feeling somewhat sluggish.

Yet, with Kenya being somewhat famous for their athletic prowess, I sensed an opportunity. Settling in, I wasn’t disappointed, and found the beach lying a mere 50 yards from my house regularly populated with joggers. Soaking up the inspiration, I began to form some kind of routine, taking the 4-5km route up and down the beach after work every couple of days, taking on the quicksand, mounds of seagrass and ghost crabs as they came, depending on the state of the tide and degree of darkness.

As my social reach in the small town extended, I found myself invited to join in a regular aerobics class. So complete with vest and headband, I submitted myself to the tutelage of ‘Tony Fit’ and have begun to learn all sorts of new and wonderful things. Something called ‘Step’, and something else, monumentally more vicious, called ‘Circuits’. I have also discovered something else important about myself: That whilst I can bounce on one leg and do all sorts of kicks and stretches with the other leg all day, my core is a weak as cheese. Indeed, my stomach muscles still hurt from the excess of the session 4 days ago. The ‘Childbirth Crunch’ was particularly vicious.

All this meandering to get somewhere near the actual story of this blog. To surmise, I’ve started doing some exercise and am approaching some semi-state of fitness again. In addition, this week I’m housesitting for my boss, at his house a couple of km down the beach. This thus presents an extra opportunity, as instead of taking a ride in the car, I can run home and have the extra weight of my back pack to increase the intensity of the short work out.

So last night, I packed up my bag, threw in my laptop and a pair of trousers (the mosquitoes are 10 times more vicious at the other house), turned on my iPod and set off. I was a little later than normal, and the light was getting pretty dim, meaning that the ghost crabs were out in force, and by out in force, I mean that every 5th step you had to check yourself to avoid stepping one. Ten minutes later, I had reached my destination and jumped straight in the shower. However, rather unnervingly, I discovered that my bag was open, presumably unzipping itself during the run. Tipping everything on the floor, it didn’t take long to discover that my laptop charger was missing.

Reminding myself that I have a rather absent minded nature and lose/forget/misplace things all the time, I resolved not to panic and figured that I’d just left it behind by mistake and asked those coming up in the car to bring it for me. Alas, although their arrival brought several letters and packages containing many delights from friends, the charger was not amongst them.

Realising that the plug must have dropped out somewhere along the way, and that the dulcet tones of All Saints singing ‘Pure Shores’ had drowned out the thud as it hit the ground, I picked up my torch and despondently headed back to the beach. Fortunately the tide was still on it’s way out and wouldn’t have washed it away, but it still meant i had 2km of 30m wide beach to cover, and it quickly became clear that finding my tracks was going to be tricky. One advantage I thought I had was that the charger was white (another plus point for macs) and would glint in the torch light, but it turned out that every single ghost crab also glinted in the torch light.

So it was with some half-hearted prayers and without much hope that I continued down the beach, trying to work out how on earth I could reliably get a replacement sent out to Kenya. The moon had not yet risen, and so despite the resultant splendour distant galaxies, i found myself cursing the darkness. It seemed ridiculous to hope that i would be able to stumble across the exact same place I had run and dropped something over an hour before.

I had probably got a quarter of the way down the beach, and had just worked out the most clever plan to manage to get a replacement charger by Sunday, when suddenly it appeared, right in front of me. Not uncovered by a torch sweep to the left or right, it sat there, exactly in the middle of my path. With my despondency transformed into jubilation, I literally skipped, singing, back up the beach to the house to inspect the charger’s condition.

Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of sand had found its way into the crevices, but that was easily sorted with a tissue or two. Slightly more surprising, was the apparent novelty the charger had been to the crabs. Right the way along the cord are tiny pincer marks, evidence of exploration by the inquisitive crustaceans, yet, fortunately, none had enough force to expose the wiring. So, as evidenced by the mere fact that I can upload this rather rambling account, everything works, and I’m back in business. It may be a while before I go running with a pack again, though.

It was somewhere out there….

It started with a bite. For some reason, every time I think of that line, Hot Chocolate’s ‘It Started With a Kiss’ comes into my head. Still, I never thought it would come to this.

Anyway, it started with a bite. And then another, and another. Which woke me up. Confused, I lay there a moment. Until I felt another bite, and something crawling along my arm. Reaching down, I located and crushed an ant, just in time to realise there was also one on my neck needing attention, and then one in my ear.

Grabbing my torch, a quick scan revealed a small cluster of ants on the bed, leading to a huge swarm on the window ledge. In my half-asleep state, the little blighters took on epic Indiana Jones-proportions and I panicked. I leaped out of bed, sprinted outside, and found a rock to perch on and inspect the ant-situation on the outside of our little sleeping hut in the half-morning light.

Rather alarmingly, I discovered 3 thick pathways of safari ants marching up and down the wall. If that wasn’t disturbing enough, their trails converged and formed a thick column surrounding the precarious rock i had chosen to use. I swiftly resolved not return to my bed and realised that I would be forced to sleep out the rest of the night on the veranda. Unfortunately, in my dazed panic, I managed to step off the rock, directly into the marching ant column. Anyone who knows something about safari ants, will know that is precisely the worst possible thing you can do. Upon being disturbed, the ants will immediately swarm and make a sprint up your leg heading for your genitals (I have no idea if that is actually their intended destination, but it sure feels like that).

So, no sooner had i put a foot down, i found ants excitedly crawling across my toes and beginning their rapid journey up leg. So I did what any other person would do in such a situation – I ran. Unfortunately this had no reducing effect on the biting that was being conducted. So I had to take the next logical step. And strip off my pyjama pants. That’s right. I ran (or rather hopped) down the path, struggling to pull off my pyjamas whilst simultaneously slapping at the little critters who were so joyously planting their fangs into my flesh.

Fortunately, by the time I had reached the sanctuary of the upstairs veranda, most of the insurgents were dead or stranded and lost, many metres from the herd. The left me to finish out the night lying on an assortment of cushions, procured from chairs in the vicinity, lying in mortal fear of a monkey jumping on my face.

As I write, in a country far far away from me, men from 12 nations across europe, are kicking and punching balls towards upright posts, whilst simultaniously hitting each other as hard as they can, in their quest to be the best country in Europe at Aussie Rules.

That’s right, today (or yesterday, depending on when the internet will allow me to upload this), is the EU Cup 2009, held near Zagreb, Croatia, and I am suprised at how disappointed I am not to be there. Yes, I know I’m in a phenomenally beautiful country, getting to do a multitude of exciting things, but there’s something unique and special about getting to play for your country, not matter how obscure the sport.

This time last year, the Scotland team ventured into the tournament for the first time and we hit Prague full of good intentions to train hard and prepare fully for the tournament. In reality, this meant spending the Friday wandering the sites of the city whilst kicking a footy around and trying not to get caught by the police. The England team on the other hand, many of whom arrived on the same flight as us, had a little more forethough, and arrived with 2 coaches, a manager, and a team physio. They had also managed to book the pitches to have an afternoon training session. Scotland, on the other hand, had resorted to recruiting my particularly English former flatmate John, who’d never touched an Aussie Rules ball in his life, in order to flesh out the squad, and were still 3 short. Oh well, at least we were the cultural winners.

Training hard outside the castle.

Saturday morning came around, and clearly the fixture organisers had a sense of humour – first game up was England vs Scotland. After the hooter, it took a full 6 and a half seconds of game time (I’ve studied the video hard) before I’d caught the ball and smashed my left cheek into someone’s knee. Slightly stunned, without much awareness of what happened, I carried on and over the course of the tournament, had to visit the first aid lady no less than 4 times to spray some freezy stuff on it to stop the swelling obliterating my vision.

Anyway, the game. In short, we lost. England had many better players and a lot more experience than us. But we gave them a good game, and were probably at least drawing at half time. Next up were the locals, the Czech Republic, followed by the Dutch. We comfortably beat the Czechs, and needed to beat the Netherlands to ensure we finished second in the group and reached the quarter finals. With only two minutes to go, there was merely one point in it, but somehow, we pushed ahead and won by two goals.

Getting hit. Hard.

The quarter finals found us drawn against the Croatians, a squad essentially comprised of several very large, shaven headed men, who spoke Croatian with Australian accents. My only real memory of the game is catching the ball from the first bounce, immediately being hit very hard, dropping the ball, and the guy who hit me picking up the ball and scoring a goal. We lost, rather heavily. And then were immediately required to drag ourselves onto the adjacent pitch to play France in a game to decide some final positions. By now, we could barely put out a fit team, and having to play a game so soon against an opposition who’d had a full hour’s rest meant we lost again, but only narrowly. My biggest memory of that game is being wrapped up by some giant who looked like the French lock Cheval, and finishing upside down with my head inches from the floor in some kind of pile-driver move.

We forfeited the final 7th/8th play off against Catalonia, due to lack of players.

But we had a lot of fun. And I managed to play well enough to be selected in ‘Team Europe’. Ultimately, England comfortably beat Croatia in the final, and so it seems that sometimes preparation does pay off.

Team Europe

In the intervening year, Scotland have improved massively. Several new local players have developed well, and in August we were able to have our first ever national trials. So we’re taking over a much much stronger team this year and, despite living it up on the East African coast, I would give almost anything to be there. But hey, there’s always next year, right?

UPDATE: It was actually Monday before I could get online to post this. But word has filtered through that we managed to win ‘The Plate’ and finish 5th. The placing of things somewhat resembles rugby 7s and I’m still not quite sure how we finish 5th and yet still win a trophy, something those who finished 4th (I think it was Spain(!)) failed to do. Maybe someone can enlighten me. Congratulations should also go to England, who won back-to-back titles.

Once, there was a fair haired, good looking young man, who decided that he would take a trip to the sea. With his fins, masks and snorkle, he arrived at the coast ready for adventure. He swiftly donned his gear, and with a quick scowl toward the local youths wrestling octopus from their hidey-holes, he struck out toward the breakers, heading for the fabled coral forests and the fishy masses.

Yet once he’d broken the breakers, our hero found nothing more than a graveyard. All that remained were algae-covered boulders and huge tabulate rocks, dimpled as a monument to the pink polyps who once sat there dangling their bits out in search of passing food morsels and called it home. Few fish had stayed to pick over the remains; only hungry parrot fish feeding on the algae and a solitary butterfly fish, with a puffed up ego, knowing he was the prettiest fish around. Forlorn and annoyed at having paid $15 for the experience, the young man turned and pushed back to shore.

Reaching his destination, our protagonist stood up in the shallows, shook out his lustrous long hair and glanced around. Quickly it became apparent that one of the party who’d swam with him had not returned, so he wrapped his mask around his wrist and moved over to his companions to scan the waves for the lost comrade, avoiding the speedoed kite surfers along the way. Unbeknownst to him, however, the mask quietly slipped off his wrist on the journey. Far be it for him to panic, as the misfortune dawned on our hero, he swiftly switched into a search and recovery program, determined to recover his quarry. Alas, after a full 8 minute search, the mask was given up for lost, abandoned to the currents. Stricken with frustration and disappointment, the young man flung himself to ground, beating the sand with his fists, as moustachioed Italians looked on open-mouthed.

A few days later, the same young man was back at that same beach relaxing in the same stretch of water, with several new friends. Whilst they were daring each other to do adventurous back flips, a young local man, wearing little but a pair of shorts and a large white beanie, waded out and approached one of them. A little while later, upon being questioned, the new friend revealed that the local had wanted to know if he’d lost any swimming glasses. This was the information our hero had been waiting for! Without a second glance, he sprinted out of the water after the young man. After interrogation the young man introduced himself “I’m Sammy, and yes, I have your mask, let us go round the corner where we can talk”. It transpired that Sammy was a good man. He quickly asserted that he was a Christian, and rather than selling the mask and making lots of money, he wanted to find the owner.

Not only was he a good man, he was also a good haggler. Starting at 1000ksh, for the return of our hero’s own mask, he refused to budge an inch. Eventually the fee was agreed and shaken upon, but Honest Sammy wasn’t done “and maybe you can find me a nice tshirt”. The young man scoffed and enquired when the exchange could take place. “Oh just as soon as I get rid of these f***ing Italians I’m guiding”. Right on cue, several overweight, balding men strolled past, sporting big grins, bigger moustaches, and smaller speedos. And off he sped.

A frantic phone call an hour later took place, with Honest Sammy  assuring the good looking, long haired young man that he would be there with in 15 minutes. Sure even, honest as the day is long, as the wind picked up and the tide came in, Honest Sammy came bounding down the beach, holding our hero’s mask aloft and pumping the air with his other arm. ‘My friend! Rafiki! You are a very lucky man! So lucky that an honest man found your swimming glasses!”. The young man nodded, and handed over the note, simply relieved to be reunited with his gear. And with that, Honest Sammy spun on his heel and sprinted back the way he came, jumping and cheering like he’d won the lottery. Surrounded by his group of guffawing  friends, the young man shrugged with the knowledge that he’d still paid less than the insurance excess.

Which leaves us  pretty at the end of the fable. The good-looking, blonde haired young man carried on with his life, writing angry letters to the local wildlife service about the lack of policing in the marine park and occasionally mistaking flamingos for sacred ibises. Whilst whenever Honest Sammy is spotted these days, spurred on by his business acumen, his trademark doublefist pump and leap in the air is never far behind.

The end.

N.B. Fables usually have morals. this one doesn’t, so is probably technically merely a story. Fables are also about made up people, so any resemblance to people, living or dead, is merely a coincidence.

As many of you are well aware, Thursday was an important day. It marked the 250th birthday of the blessed black brew, Guinness, and as such required dutifully marking. However, as Thursday night was movie night, I had to make do with Friday becoming Guinness night.

Now, in Kenya, not much beer comes through taps, with bars in dusty villages rightly preffering bottles. Which means that Guinness here is really rather different from that heavy velvey stuff with the creamy head we’re all used to in the UK. To be specific, the popular variety here is known as Foreign Extra Stout, which can be translated inthe local language as ‘black and will knock your head off’. It comes in large bottles at 6.5% (or 8% if you’re in Singapore), and packs a similar punch to belgian lagers, except is black. And is very tasty.

Apparently 40% of total Guinness Volume is brewed in Africa, with Nigeria and Kenya being particularly thirsty countries, and as sales went down 7% in the UK and Ireland in 2006, I guess it’s likely Africa will continue to gobble up the percentage shares. As for me, I will continue to gobble up the big bottles.

Ten days in a country that is not your own can feel a long time. In many ways so much has happened that I feel like I’ve been here for a month! Since I arrived, i’ve been catching birds, ringing birds, painting, digging up concrete, computerizing mileage reports, cataloguing educational materials, scanning documents, excavating turtle nests, beginning the repairs of a nature trail, and counting more birds. It’s pretty varied work!

However, once the dust settled from the first 5 intense days of bird ringing, we had a meeting and it was decided that my primary jobs here are to be split between the Environmental Education (EE) work of A Rocha, and the Research and Monitoring. As far as the EE work goes, I’m hopefully going to be developing and trialing a couple of marine-based lessons to complement the curriculum of 22 or so lessons already in circulation. A Rocha tends to work with some partner ‘Wildlife Clubs of Kenya (WCK)’ that are affiliated at partner schools quite a ways away, but funding is pretty low at the moment, so we’re also hoping to develop things at some of the schools closer to home. In addition, Mwamba (A Rocha Kenya’s centre and my home) is fortunate to have a pretty substantial forest as a back garden, complete with semi-derelict nature trail. Hopefully, Sam (the other volunteer) and I, will be able to resurrect it over the next 3 months as well as producing some educational material to go with it. In particular, we hope to produce some ‘creation care’ lessons that help demonstrate the biblical basis for why we’re involved in conservation.

With the Research and Monitoring work, mostly that will be field work, either ringing or counting birds, and analysis with the hope of starting to incorporate some GIS jiggery into it all. Once that kicks off a little more, I’ll try and explain it better. There is also a hope of trying to do some marine biology (!) and repeat some experiements done a few years ago, where mud samples were taken in a local river estuary and the life found within catalogued. It’s a pretty dynamic delta, which has changed substantially in the intervening years, so it would be very interesting (for a biologist at least) to see if the life within has also changed.

Amongst all of that, there are still many odd jobs around Mwamba to be getting on with – painting bathrooms, resetting paths, hunting for driftwood are all things that get done when I’m bored of looking at a computer screen.

All in all, I’m kept pretty busy. Mwamba also functions as a guest house, so there are always new people to meet and learn from. This week, we had a photographer from an organisation called SaveOurSeas visit (a wonderful organisation), a couple of Spanish divers, a bird ringer from South Africa and a couple of students from the UK. Never really a dull moment!

On Tuesday afternoon, I feel asleep in Leicester Square and got sunburnt. A little over 72 hours later, I found myself shin deep in esturine water, birds in bags around my wrist, with my feet disturbing phosphorescent algae, under a sky with stars so bright they had halos.

And this is essentially how my week has been – a total contrast. Tuesday evening, I got digestion eating a huge pizza with my good friend Ralph watching Three Kings (an underrated movie in my opinion), in his as yet, not-completely-converted basement warehouse, and by 5am Thursday morning, I was stumbling about in the dark drinking chai tea and trying to learn the basics of bird ringing.

Whilst the whole experience is alien to me (I don’t know my boobies from my tits), I’m learning lots and having an enormous amount of fun. So far, my life has entirely revolved around bird ringing, with two 5am starts in the forest, followed by a series of all nighters (5pm-5am) in Mida Creek, the estuary catching waders, the first of which was last night.

For those of you as unfamiliar as I was with the Twitcher’s pastime of bird ringing (which, much to my disappointment, didn’t involve a long session of talking to girls on the phone), it begins with the nets. Basically, you string a series of nets, which are relatively invisible against a dark background, or completely so in the dark, and leave them for a while. After 45 minutes or so, you go back and lo-and-behold, tons of birds are trapped (and some bats, if you’re especially lucky). You then gently remove them, place them in a bag and take them off to be ringed. The ringing part, as you might expect, means attaching an identification number to their leg, and then taking some weight and length measurements. Over the last couple of days, we’ve been pretty excited to recapture a couple of birds that were ringed over 10 years ago!

As for the rest of life here, I’m sharing a room with another vounteer, Sam, who as luck would have it is from Melbourne, and a big AFL fan. He’s even brought an Aussie Rules ball, so this afternoon we’re off to the beach to put some calluses on our feet. Accommodation is basic, with a rather dusty walk to the toilet and shower, with cold water only on tap, unless you’re lucky enough to have had the solar heaters working. Monkeys are also prevalent, and they seem to revel in waking you up by leaping onto your roof at around 6am, which  was especially unpleasant as this morning was the first time I was actually still in bed at that time!

Well, they say a picture tells a thousand words, so I’ll leave it at that and throw in some pictures of the first few days…

The view from our bedroom door..

The bedroom:

View from the veranda…

Sunset and setting up nets at Mida Creek

Ringing in the forest

Some pretty green and red bird. I forget it’s name.