Another survery, another site... another shower from a bucket!

Hello again,

Well i'm all finished in Rulenge now, we drove back to Mwanza and the Tanzanian office on tuesday - another very dusty long drive. I am now sitting in the Sunshine Motel in Kahama using a GPRS connection that is surprisingly good here. That is one thing I have found about Tanz., they may not have tar roads everywhere, or hot water where they have hot water taps but they have fantastic phone reception in the most remote places!

So I had a day in Mwanza, not a day off however as Robert and myself were preparing for the Magnetic survey work we are now doing. This project, involving four sites and scheduled for 3 weeks, has been put in our hands and if things go accordingly Robert will be leaving me halfway through to manage it myself! We're not alone however, we have Norbert the driver who can speak english and is very helpful and Abdullah who is a Geologist working for African Nickle who is learning how to do Geophysics field work. So having worked fairly hard and constantly to get the previous E.M. survery done, we're straight into this one which is going to be fairly constant hard work (there are 4 sites, each require walking about 30 km) as we want to get done in time to have some time off to go to the Oppi Koppi music festival in S.A. (although that plan has not been confirmed yet).

In other news I have tried another 4 types of beer so thats nice :) The waitresses here keep laughing at robert and I when ever we order anything and the fish we had tonight, fried whole, was something that will never make me complain about a few bones ever again! The scenery down here is a lot flatter than up in Rulenge, the vegetation is a lot more sparse but I did see some baubab trees (that could be spelt wrong, i'd ask Robert but he's using the rest of the hot water to have his bucket shower - we actually bought ourselves a kettle today to ensure we would at least be able to get hot water where ever we stayed... so long as we have electricity!).

On the way to site today we passed a village, all of the men of the village it seemed were doing some dance down the road, forcing us to drive off road around them, wearing masks and carrying bows and spears. Apparently it was a dance to deter thieves, so there you go.

I should, fingers crossed, have fairly regular internet access, but limited time to use it so I will update little and often if I can.

I hope everything is well with you all, I am missing England more and more! :) ....but I do kind of like the sunshine here :)

Love to all,

Joe.

---

---