By Kirsty Butchart

This week has been quite a productive one, lots of highs and lows had by all. We have dabbled in several areas, such as fencing, plumbing and game capture. As well as having a few less pleasant situations like air locked water pipes, a few scary incidents with “wrangling” bushbuck and two near arrests by immigration… lots of lessons learned.

So here’s a little more detail on a couple of the experiences this week-

This time we were capturing bushbuck, it was much the same as the impala capture using nets. We set up the boma areas and sat quietly in hiding behind trees and bushes whilst men beat the bushes to scare the bushbuck into the nets.

In these few moments you can’t help but feel like a primal predator lying in wait, heart pounding, adrenalin racing through the veins and the pure thrill and excitement of the chase ‘or in this case unsuspecting entrapment.’

The bushbuck dash out of the bushes, running for their lives, trying to escape. ‘some do manage to get out, under the nets.’ Their bodies hit the nets at speed and a resounding thud as they hit the ground repeatedly trying to get up… we rush to the scene to “wrangle” them out of the nets and cover their eyes as quickly as we can so as not to cause any more stress to their systems.

It was all very exciting and I think we all enjoyed it!

It still amazes me even in the most unpleasant situations, how we as a group of friends can lighten the mood and still have such awesome fun. In particular the day we all ended up having to clean out the water reservour after it had been not been filled. We had an air lock because of it. We had not had a shower in a couple days and were all feeling unimpressed with the whole situation and each other. The result, we had to climb into a thick smelly sludge and clean it out knowing that we would be unable to clean ourselves afterwards

..……..It all started with one flick of a wet broom… all work ceased and a fight was on. Muddy, smelly water was flying, we were all soaked and we were all smiling and having the time of our lives. “Awesome times, with awesome friends” is how it went down in the journals that night.

Final statement- ‘just another week at Quest’