It Comes in Pint Size!

Shopping in different countries can sometimes be very different to what you're used to. And then, sometimes you look at a shelf in a supermarket, and the hubbub around you seems to fade, the people around you move in slow motion, the lighting changes subtly to draw your attention to a familiar item as a slow smile of recognition spreads across your face. "Ah!" you sigh, "I know that product!"

New Zealand isn't particularly exotic, in terms of what's in the supermarket. You can buy wine and beer there - except in Invercargill - but other shelves have familiar products under mysterious names. Jif, for example, is a strong cleaning agent here, so you wouldn't eat it like peanut butter. Speaking of which, peanut butter is one of those things that you first have to chew your way through some different brands before you strike an acceptable price-versus-taste tradeoff. Weak minds (not us, of course, we swear!) might fall into the trap of buying vast quantities of things that you used to ship half-way across the world, forgetting, for the moment, that you can buy more whenever you want. (I'm lookin' at you, Tim Tams.) And at other times you completely forget to indulge in other products you used to ship, exactly because you can buy them whenever you want (Lemon-Scented Tea).

Which brings us back to what I started with. We were looking for alternatives to Earl Grey and English Breakfast tea bags and discovered these:

Celestial Seasonings teas! In cutie-pie 10 bag boxes! You know me and my Sleepytime. (Or maybe you don't, but I love me my Sleepytime.) It's particularly fun that Celestial Seasonings were just down the road from us, in Boulder, and we even went on a tour of the factory.

In further harks back to ol' Colorado, our little box of household items has grown: We are now, once more, proud owners of an electric fan heater. Whee!

The story behind this starts a little earlier, when a work colleague of Kristi's loaned us a dehumidifier for a weekend. This is a gadget very much not used in Colorado, where the relative air humidity might reach 30% on a wet day. In our apartment, it's usually 80%, exactly the same as on the beach just outside the front door, since our windows don't insulate. In any case, we fell in love with 50% humidity air, and discovered that moderate temperatures in dry air are tolerable, whereas any temperature in wet air is miserable. We were all keen to run out and buy our own, when Andrew and Kathryn threw up their hands and gave us theirs, which, since they live in a real house, they're not using, on long-term loan.

So now that the air is dry(-er), we just need to heat it up. There is a heatpump in the living room (it's a fridge in reverse) but unless you're sitting right under it, or within minutes of turning it off, it's as though you never ran it. Hence our excitement about the fan heater. "We love," we both say.

Still Waiting...

Waiting to see if we have "won" the house is kind of like we have bought a lotto ticket for the big one and just when the winning numbers start to appear on the TV screen, the power cuts out.  And no amount of banging on the set will make the numbers appear.  So, we wait.

There was another open home at the house today, so Philip, Esther and Kevin (my sister and brother-in-law) and Kevin's mum went to check out the house again.  Really, we were there to check out the competition.  We didn't hide in the bushes or anything, but it did felt a bit like a covert operation.  We were after information.  How many people are interested?  Was it over run with people looking to outbid us?  Any news on what is going to happen next? 

We did learn from innocently bending an ear towards the real estate agent talking to another couple that there is an offer on the house and the vendors were keen to work with the buyers.   Hmm, is that us?  Is there another offer out there, other than ours and the one that the vendor has already accepted?  Hard to tell at this stage.  Apparently, the agent is collecting offers by 4:00pm on Monday (tomorrow for us) so people needed to get there offers in ASAP.   Optimistically, I am hoping that means that we will know if we are the lucky winners of a mortgage by this time tomorrow.  What it could also mean is that the vendor doesn't like any of our offers and could go back to putting the house up for auction on the 27th.  Or, he could like our offer well enough to go back to the person he first agreed to and ask her to turn her offer into a cash offer in two days.  Or, someone could out bid us.  Or, or, or.  There are lots of endings to this story and we just have to be patient.  Erg.  Waiting isn't a strong suit.

The good news is that Philip and I did really like the house again when we went back.  That's a good sign when you sign up to pay for something over the next thirty years, right?  So, in the meantime we wait.  An secretly start planning what type of furniture will go perfectly in the living room...just in case...

Oooh, So Exciting!

The house hunting is gaining momentum.  Once Philip and I decided that seven miles away is doable, we put our energy in finding out what the houses in Port Chalmers are going for and what we should offer for the house we really like (I really, really love it).  It turns out that the owners of the house must have gone back to the government CV folks to show them all the work that they have done, so the CV has gone up from $200,000 to $280,000.  That is good for us because we don't want to pay too much for a house.

I called the real estate agent to learn more about buying a house at an auction.  It seems a big unknown, so the more information we can get about the process the better.  Do you get a paddle that you raise to bid?  What if you sneeze?  Is that a bid?  Do you have to bring a 20% deposit in cash?  I don't even have pockets that big.)  If the house is sold on auction, we would have to pay for the building report and the LIM report (Land Information Management report) beforehand and if you don't get the house, you lose that money.  These things are around $1,000, so we want to get it right!

The agent knew who I was right away because we have been listed on the "no commission" list as we found the house before it was listed with the agent.  She wasn't keen to tell me much, but I did find out that they may not do an auction at all due to the high interest in the house.  Now those are not the words I wanted to hear.  It is our house!  That information did help Philip and I figure our next step; go directly to the seller to see if we could get in before any one else does.  Oooh, the adrenaline.

I called the owner of the house,  a super nice American guy who has been living in Dunedin for years and years (called yonks here).  With my best poker voice, I asked him if we could chat about the house.  I asked him (very smoothly, I might add) what he is looking for in a price now that the house has been on the market.  He said that he was advised not to mention prices, but that he does have an offer of $285 with the condition of the woman's house selling by the 25th of April.  VERY good to know.  That sets the bar.  I slipped in there that we were interested in putting in an offer and work with him directly to save him the auction fees and the real estate commission.  We chatted for a little longer (with my heart in my throat) and I hung up and jumped in the shower so I could run down to the local bookstore to pick up an offer contract.  This is VERY exciting.  I am trying hard not to get too excited (kinda failing) and get too hopeful.  Keep your fingers crossed for us!!

And the verdict is....

still waiting.  Not that a whole lot of time has passed, but when there is a house on the line, it would be good to know!  How can you plan paint colors and carpets and where to finally hang our paintings if you don't know if the house is ours?

We put an offer in for a lower than the CV (that weird little "I-can't-tell-you-what-the-house-is-worth meter)...

THIS JUST IN...the agent just called and we...

didn't get it.  Well, now we know.  What we were going to say is that we put in a bid for less than the CV originally and then upped it with all our might when there was a second offer on the house.  The agent took our bid in a sealed enveloped and whisked away to a quick meeting with the other agents and the house sellers (called vendors here).  That was at 5:30 and we got the call two hours later to say that we were not successful.  There was an unexpected third offer at the last minute and I think it is the one that stole the show.  They put a three in front of their bid and ours couldn't do that.  Our bid was in the middle, however.  At least we weren't the poor country cousins with our bid, but we still didn't end up with the house.  Oh well!  We were pretty realistic about our offer and we really believe that if it were our house it would be meant to be.  If not, well, the search must go on.

So, here are the front runners at the start of the new search:

Port Chalmers:  http://www.realestate.co.nz/1525522.  Love, love LOVE this house.  It is my favorite of all time.  Warm, renovated to maintain the old charm and character, probably in our ball park as far as the price.  The drive to work is along the harbor with the hilly green peninsula in the background.  The drawback here is a seven mile commute each day.  Not a big deal in the US, but is in the sticks here.  With gas (petrol here ) at $8 something a gallon, that makes you think.  What are your thoughts?  What is a commute with kids?  A dog at home?  Would you do it?

Well, that's it, I guess.  That house sells at auction in three weeks, so any ideas you have, we are all ears.  

Back to the real estate websites.  We'll keep you posted.

House-O-Meter

For those of you who have somehow magically escaped our ranting about finding a house, here's what we've been doing for the last three months: Finding a house. We haven't found one yet. Well, we may have, but then we thought that for house #6 on day 2, #25 about two weeks later, then we lost count but found several in suburbs all over town. Since Dunedin is, by area, the largest city in the southern hemisphere, that's quite a spread. It would take us 45 minutes to drive from a house we like at one end of town, to one at the other.

In any case, Kristi has done all the long hours of online research, made private appointments, and scheduled our weekend days to catch the open home times for the ones that could suit us. We've then together gone along, looking at each house with our different eyes, different interests, but, thankfully, quite similar tastes.

In retrospect, it's perhaps surprising that it took so long (probably 70-some houses, now) for us to come up with a way of more rigorously quantifying statements like, "it's not too bad," "we could change this (and this, and this)," and "I really like that." (Statements like, "I hate it," are really easy to work with: That's final and the sucky house in question is not in the running.)

We call it our house-o-meter.

The way it works: We have 16 categories: Neighborhood, Privacy, Open-Plan, Spacious, Location, Character, View, Price, Garden, Storage, Sun, Laundry, Warmth, Light, Access, and Futurability. We made up the last one, but it has to do with our finding that you can't buy a house with character without it requiring a certain amount of work; also, it represents the freedom that a house might provide us with putting our own stamp on it. For each category, Kristi assigns the house a score from 1 to 5, I do the same, and voila, we have a score out of 10. As soon as we started house-o-metering we realized that our scales actually had to accommodate terrible scores, so they're now between zero and 10.

Some of the front-line contenders were in the 110-120 range. We found out some interesting details from the scoring, with a few houses that seemed ok scoring quite low, and finding out what's really important for us.

And so, we've now put in an offer on a house that Kristi found earlier this week. It scored 122. We're about 50-50 excited and resigned; we have no idea whether the offer will be accepted. It doesn't help that our Daylight Saving ended today and our bodies are already out of whack with the day. We will obviously keep you posted on what happens next!

Steep learning curves

It will be a month tomorrow since we landed on the shores of the South Island.  It is hard to believe it has gone so fast.  Some days, it seems that we've been here, much, much longer.  Our days have been filled to the brim with learning; about phones and internet, buying a house and working in New Zealand.


The biggest excitement and relief has been getting connected back to the world with phones and internet.  Weird, right, that it should be so exciting after globetrotting?  Unplugging for 82 days was relaxing and great for creating extra head space, but after awhile you kind of want to know what is going on in the world.  There's nothing like feeling REALLY far away because you can't call people or email or Facebook to check in on friends and family.  So back to Vodafone we went to get a land line (the old fashioned plugged in kind of phone) and internet. 

There is a plan for every type of call or internet package you can imagine here and a fairly good price tag to go with it.  We learned that you pay for every gigabyte you use when you are on the internet.  We had no clue if we have used five, 10 or 20 GB in the past, but we have dueling computers set up at our house so we opted for 10.  We'll see how it goes.  No more Blockbuster downloads for us.  We've heard it takes about six hours anyway, so we can drive to the theater and watch a double header for the time and money it would take to download a movie at home.  We've heard that the internet is slow in NZ, but haven't experienced that at all.  It is still the super highway as far as we can tell. Our land line was a bit more straight forward and we put an international calling package on it to keep connected.  So, with two mobile phones (Philip has pre-paid 20 minute a month plan and I have 120 minutes), a land line and  10 GB of internet, we are paying $200 a month.  KaCHING.  But, we are connected. 

We've had a lot of excitement in the way of house hunting.  It is the first time for both of us, which I imagine would come with lots of learning, but it seems really fast and furious trying to learn a new system of borrowing money, house hunting terms, and about New Zealand homes in general.  I am definitely back in Kindergarten on this one.  We have been through our 30th house today and seem to know a bit more about New Zealand houses, but haven't quite adjusted to how different they are.  It is hard trying not to look for a Colorado or Minnesota house in Dunedin.  We have learned that sun is everything when looking for a home.  Location, location, location still exists, but don't even think about a house in a valley, on the wrong side of the hill or behind a bluff.  That means that the first question during an open home is where does the sun come into the house.  Next question is if the windows are double glazed (more than a single pane of glass - most windows here aren't, whereas in the US they are) followed by what type of heating does the house have.  Forget about central heating or underfloor heating.  Your options are wood burner, heat pump, radiators (usually mobile plugged in ones), HTV (some sort of funky fan that takes heat off a roof and distributes it.  I think.), and wetbacks (water is heated from the heating unit.  I think.)  This area is still really fuzzy for me and I don't really want to know .  I would prefer to see how I could decorate, what kind of a garden is there (yard to me, but this can mean yard, flower garden, and/or veggie garden) and does the house have a soul.  Philip and I are a good team.  I look to see if it is pretty and he looks to see if it will keep him from turning to ice.  As you are probably gathering, Dunedin isn't a warm place.  

Something else we have learned is that the laundry room is either as big as a small bedroom in the house or is across the garden in a grotty shed out the back.  This could be good because there is a lot of rain and dryers are practically non existent, so it can be nice to have a building with a roof to dry laundry.  Our favorite laundry so far was what we've called the Hobbit Laundry.  You had to go outside following green indoor/outdoor carpet to basement of a house, bend over at the waist to duck through Froddo Baggin's door.  Once inside we found a small washing machine in a damp, dirt floor 5'X7' space.  THAT was not our house.

There's more to learn and more houses to see, but here is a glimpse at a couple of our favorites so far:
http://www.realestate.co.nz/1449257
Would have to remodel the kitchen and bath.  GREAT yard. 

http://www.realestate.co.nz/1428395
LOVE this house!  Neighborhood, not so much.

 We are very happy to report that we are both working.  Philip is working with a company called Siliconcoach and is working on their website.  It isn't quite what he wants to be doing in the long term, but suits him well now and he's learning quite a bit.  He started a week after we arrived, which is great to start filling up the coffers again.  Philip works in the same office as his good friend Andrew, which is an extra bonus.  If you met Andrew at the wedding, you know he can be pretty entertaining.  I am working with a company called AustraLearn to look after study abroad students who come over from the States to study in New Zealand for a semester or so.  My job is working from home four days a week and I'll help develop internships for students and help them settle in to South Island life.  I am still not entirely sure what I'll do, but it is a work in progress.  I traveled to Rotorua in the North Island to help with orientation for my first week and leave again tonight for two weeks.  Then I'm off Australia for a week after that.  Glamorous, yes?  Well, yes and no.  I'd quite like to be in Dunedin snooping in other peoples' homes to find one to buy, but I did get to go inner-tubing in a cave with eels (they say they grow them big here and judging by the ones that were nosing my butt in the inner-tube, I believe it) and that was a lot of fun.

Better get to packing.  We would LOVE to hear from you now that we are connected.  We miss those of you far away and want to hear your stories!

Our Room with a View!  (French Riviera?  Not really - it is much colder than it looks!)

The view from the parking lot

Our new Ford wheels

The study / dressing room

Bathroom

Our one-butt kitchen

Dining area / living room

Wheels and a Room with a View

The first ten days in Dunedin have been busy finding a place to live, a car, a job for Philip, mobile phones (as cell phones are called here), and Internet. The usual trappings of a modern life. We also own a SodaStream machine, but more about that later.

We found success on the car first. We had a pretty specific budget and wanted neither a tin can lawnmower nor a jalopy, so we had some shopping to do. Esther (who, it turns out, is a bit of a petrolhead ;-) and knows lots about cars) and Kevin helped us over two days of car and house hunting. There's lots to learn about cars: age, mileage, and New Zealand New. That last one is significant because many cars are imported second-hand from Japan and so they don't come with any service or maintenance records, or a guarantee that the mileage hasn't been tampered with. We wanted something post-2000 and with fewer than 100,000 km on it (don't panic! that's only 60,000 mi). With, preferably, space for a dog, kids, and camping equipment. Just in case (no news there).

We looked at many cars, asked lots of questions, and took our first test drive. It drove like a boat floating on a big lake of chewing gum. We gave it miss.

Onwards and upwards: one dealer wrangled us a sweet deal based on Philip's parents 30-year history of buying and servicing cars there. That one had awful seats, which we were figuring out how to deal with, when Philip rounded a corner and asked, "hey guys, is that my hub cap? I think that was my hub cap." We stopped as soon as we could and verified that it was, indeed, our hub cap, so we picked it up on the way back. Kevin had to wave it at us from the other side of the very busy road because there were two hub caps lying beside each other. Busy day for test drivers, I guess. Continuing back to the dealer involved backing away from the curb, and the car started beeping, like a cement truck backing out of a quarry. Then "WAH CHING GUA HEI SHAJI" an angry-sounding Japanese woman's voice yelled at us. WTF?! No wonder people here don't want Japanese imports. To round out the day we also tried a VW that drove like a tank. 

After later test-driving the world's largest old-school Nissan tuna-boat grampa wagon, and the world's smallest, tinny, Flintstone foot pedaling Kia hatchback, we ended up with a ... Ford! A Mondeo wagon, manual transmission, white. We were stoked and, honestly, a bit surprised to be buying an American car, since we usually seem to lean toward non-American brands. I know Uncle Don will be proud, and we love the car.

What a relief! Car: check, done, moving on. Well, almost. The dealer, a nice guy named Tony, didn't want us to pay the whole sum by credit card because he has to pay the 3% Visa transaction fee, so we only used that for the down-payment. In the meantime, we had the car checked out independently and it needed a couple of things done, such as making sure an apparent oil leak was innocuous. For the final payment, we logged onto Internet banking on the dealer's computer to do an account transfer. (Yup.) Only: the amount exceeded the daily limit! So the dealer said, no problem, just pay the rest tomorrow. And off we drove with our new wheels.

Next on the list was finding a home. We have lots of help with this one, Esther and Kevin, Andrew and Kathryn, and Philip's parents. Nonetheless, it turned out we couldn't find our dream home in the first weekend. As a guide, Esther looked at 88 houses and Kathryn at 70-some before signing on the dotted line. While the house-hunting continues, we thought, no worries, we'll just get a short-term rental. Despite fantastic company and food at Philip's parents's house, having lived out of a suitcase for the last two months meant we really wanted somewhere to unpack all of our stuff. As it turns out, finding a short-term, furnished apartment without dorm-style living is a big ask. There was, in fact, only one option. And it wasn't for lack of trying on our part. Luckily, we like the place, it has a view to the ocean a stone's throw away on one side, a view to a lagoon on the other, and hills and sky in between.

The rental agent, Jeanette, needed us to pay a pretty hefty damage deposit, called a bond here. And wouldn't you know it, that was the same day we were supposed to finish paying the car, and together- boom! - over the daily limit for account transfers again. So, with a little bit of creative accounting, and bringing the car dealer a medium-sized wad of cash to make up the shortfall, everyone was happy.

Exactly two months after we stepped out of our apartment in Fort Collins, we hung up our safari hats, kicked off our travel shoes, and slid the suitcases under a real bed. It has been an unbeatably awesome experience. This is not the end of the adventure, but the beginning of another.

Go Travel, See the World

We'll say this for our Emirates flight: we saw a lot of airports. And we got there. So it wasn't all bad. Having said that, I'd never recommend that kind of flight, with lots of stopovers and short (6-hour) flights. On each one, it takes a couple of hours before the meal service comes around, then another hour for the trays to be cleared, and then a half-hour before landing the cabin starts being cleared again, so there's barely any time to sleep. And going through security at each and every airport along the way is, how'd you say, tedious. Grosi got to sleep quite a bit anyway, while Philip and I only got about 5 hours sleep during the whole trip. But we did get to watch a lot a lot of movies. 

We were pretty much exhausted and relieved to find ourselves on the last flight from Christchurch to Dunedin. It's a commercial flight but it's such a short hop that it's more like the pilot taking a few of his buddies for a spin. No security. None. No-one to look into our bags, no x-rays, no grumpy-faced guards snarling at us to throw away all of our just-purchased water bottles. Just a sliding glass door that opens up to the tarmac, and smiling attendant scanning our boarding cards. 

You can then imagine our surprise to hear the announcement, in addition to the usual instructions about what to do in case of an emergency: "We congratulate Kristi and Peter [close enough by New Zealand standards], sitting in row 5, who recent got married and are moving to Dunedin." The whole plane clapped - including, briefly, Kristi, before the announcement wormed its way through her exhaustion and she realized it was about us. The welcome in Dunedin was even warmer: both of Philip's parents, as well as his sister and brother-in-law, were there, holding a huge sign that read "Welcome Home Kristi and Philip," carefully lettered in Swiss German. We got home, ate some dinner, and collapsed into bed.

The weather the next day was classic Dunedin. It was misty in the morning, then the sun came out. But before I could get the camera out to take a picture of the harbour it was pouring down with rain. Then the sun came out. Then it was lunchtime and a huge thunderstorm passed overhead. Then the sun came out again, and by the afternoon it got really windy until sundown. My favorite part that summed up Dunedin was that it's summer here, but there was a street-corner vendor selling possum hats, scarves, and sweaters. And people were buying!

Switzerland

Since Africa, we've already spent two weeks in Switzerland. Our main goal was to visit Philip's family and catch up. The language barrier is really hard, often leaving me guessing as to what people are talking about. About Bärndütsch ("barn-dootsh"): it's unlike any language I've heard before. Not quite German, and it sounds like lots of throat clearings all at the same time. I was hoping to have learned more when I arrived, but I was pretty overwhelmed. Hopefully I did learn some in my two weeks here.

Most of our time has been visiting family. There was the big Christmas Eve dinner with one half of the family, when we had snow falling and watched the candles on the tree. Several of Philip's cousins and aunts and uncles invited us over for dinners and lunches. Ever since it started snowing, we've had just one sunny day, all the others have been gray and near-freezing cold. The frozen ground led to Aunt Vreni breaking her ankle when she slipped on black ice - not good! Not good at all, she needed urgent surgery and can't walk on it for the next six weeks. Poor thing. Philip was also very sick when we arrived, and I've had a pesky cough for basically the entire time here. Fortunately, neither of us had malaria.

The food here, however, has been fantastic. Here's a list of our favorites:
Rösti: A kind of thick, crispy hash-brown potato dish.
Fondue: You know what it is, but no-one does it like the Swiss! We must have each eaten a half-pound of cheese each. Yum!
Raclette: A specific cheese, grilled in a specific cheese griller. Get it hot and bubbly, add some garlic and onion, and eat it over baked potatoes.
Züpfe: A rich milk-butter bread eaten with - you guessed it - cheese. Or butter, I guess, or jam, or anything. It's yummy.

Addison, a cool chick that I met working at CSU, happens to be working in Spain and was able to come over for a visit over New Year. She and I explored Bern for a day, doing a cathedral tour, a walking tour, and visiting the history museum. The next day, Philip, Addison and I hopped on a train for a loop-visit around central Switzerland. We had hoped to see the famous mountains, but were plagued by fog for most of the way. We stopped in Lucerne (a quaint town on a lake), and tried to visit a glass-blowing place but we missed the glass blowers because it was New Year's Eve. We barely got into the place at all because it closed down right after lunch. The highlight for me was the train that climbed up through the fog and opened up to sunny skies and snow-capped mountains right along the train. Wow. After just half an hour at the mountain top, we descended through the fog again, to stop at Interlaken. This is supposed to be a town where you can see the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau mountains, but we saw more fog. This was a city I was excited to see again because Sarah and I had visited 20 years ago and I had such great memories. I guess we'll have to try again in the summer. After eating lunch, we hopped back on the train and headed back to Bern.

It's hard to believe we're at the end of our trip, but tomorrow we'll be on a plane to New Zealand. The long way... We stop in Dubai, Bankok, Sydney, Christchurch, and finally, Dunedin. 36 hours later, hopefully, we'll be back in summer. We're looking forward to being in New Zealand and looking for a place to live. We've really enjoyed the road, but we're now ready to start settling down again.

 Mountains above the mist

 Swiss Mountains

Dinner with Grosi and Addison

Goodbye, Africa

We had one more surprise on our final drive before we left the park in the afternoon. We were lucky enough to have it just be Philip and me with Michelle. The weather was perfect, and we were soaking in the atmosphere of the park, enjoying every minute of it. On other drives they had seen the big male lion who is really special for his big black mane. I was dying to see him. Along the drive, I spotted the head of a female lion, and on pulling off the road, we discovered that she was lounging - with the male! There aren't that many lions with black manes, as they come from a specific part of Africa, and man, was he majestic! They didn't care about us at all, so we snapped pictures and just watched them for at least a half hour. As we've discovered, lions mostly just lie around during the day, and that's exactly what these two were doing. She was snoozing, he was gazing royally into the distance, looking like the king of the jungle.

After our fabulous two weeks on Thanda (which, incidentally, is pronounced "Tanda"), we decided to treat ourselves to a fancy hotel near the airport with an awesome hot shower, a huge white bed, and no gecko poops. We watched a movie, ordered in room service burgers with a fresh salad, and enjoyed being, you know, clean.

What a honeymoon! A week in the wetland park with crocs and hippos, two weeks with lions and rhino, and a night to unwind.

Lion and Lioness

 I am ... Royalty

Leopard!

Rhino Capture

By the second week on Thanda, we'd settled into a routine of anticipating unplanned things to crop up on any day, at any time. A large part of the last several days revolved around C1: A white rhino cow that we needed to find, dart, and load into a truck to be transported to another reserve. Wait, what?! We need to load a rhino into a truck? Isn't that ... difficult?

It turns out that finding a rhino, despite it being the largest animal on the park after the elephant, isn't easy. They like grazing in the bushveld, where they disappear into thin air behind bushes that are, oddly, almost exactly the same size as the rhino are. We drove around the park a lot. Six hours one morning, four hours that night. Every once in a while we'd find a rhino or two, but not the one we wanted, as identified by ear markings. We'd rattle along the dirt road, spot a hulking shadow in the distance, screetch to a halt and kill the engine. Then get out the binoculars and strain through the scrub in the fading light, waiting for the rhino to turn his or her head just so, so that we could see both ears at the same time. The only thing that made it easier was that our cow was most likely to be hanging out with another cow, but since they were neither mother-daughter nor sisters, that wasn't guaranteed either.

Right at dusk we found her (and her buddy). We drove home happy in the knowledge that we had at least a vague idea of where to start looking the next morning. The morning was grey and heavy, and it had rained at night, so we packed our rain gear. But it was no match for the day. We found our rhino and radioed her location and waited for the game capture crew to roll up with their transport truck. And we waited. And waited. The rain poured on, the rhino grazed its way through the thickets, and we sat on the truck in the rain, keeping a keen eye on the rhino so as not to lose her. It rained, we waited. For hours. We got occasional updates from the others, murmurs of delays and the truck getting stuck. To shelter us, Michelle parked the truck under an acacia tree just by the side of the road, so we waited in slightly less rain, in the cold, and watched little white worms dropping down into the truck and onto us. By this time, we were over this rhino thing and ready to go home, but we'd waited so long that we didn't want to miss the action when it happened. It was only when the crew radioed that their truck had got stuck that Michelle finally threw in the towel and called off the operation. She's a tough cookie, that girl.

So, the exercise of finding C1 started all over again the next day. We briefly looked for the dogs, established a rough location for them, and started driving around the park again. That day it was unbearably hot, the sun beating down from a clear blue sky. We drove all day, with four trucks all looking for her by the afternoon, racing the clock to try capture her that day. The sun lowered to the horizon, shadows lengthening. No sign of the rhino. It was pretty clear to us, though, that unless she were right on the road, we had almost no chance of spotting her. We also had no idea which part of the park she'd be in, since they can cover a lot of ground in a day. The sky turned red, the sun went down, we went home.

On our final pass-by of the water holes, we saw the lion, and a short while later, we squealed in surprise as we saw a leopard leap across the road! Full brakes, kill the engine. The leopard had already disappeared into the grass, but we patiently waited, in complete silence, for her to calm down after her shock of seeing us. Eventually, gingerly, she lifted her head just above the grass and eyed us cautiously. They're super shy animals, so we were unbelievably fortunate to have spotted her. Michelle pulled out her hyper telephoto lens and captured identification photos while we were all mesmerized.

The rhino capture was starting to cost the park and they decided that if we couldn't find her by the next morning, they'd call in a helicopter crew to find her. We were on the road at 3:30, even earlier than usual, to start searching at absolute first light. Prepared for another super-long day, we'd packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (again) to augment our peanut butter and jelly toast breakfast (again). In the way of these things: C1 was right on the road. We could have driven into her. What luck! We radioed the crews and waited (again). C1 isn't a cow that hangs around, so she and her buddy started her on-the-move grazing (again) and we tried to follow her, but we lost her and found her again many times through the thickets. By this time, another three vehicles showed up to help. With teamwork and Michelle's excellent knowledge of the roads and tracks, the capture team (a team including a vet and specialists in wild game transfers) finally darted her.

They radioed us where she'd stopped running in her half-daze, and we rolled up to help with the second part, loading into the truck. When she was down, she was much bigger than the B5 bull we'd worked with the previous week. This girl was huge. The dart crew brought her half-back to awareness and instructed us to help push her back to her feet and help her walk toward the truck. Surprisingly, this worked. With a rope tied to her horn guiding her direction, cattle prods (ouch) making her move forward, and four people to a side stopping her from falling over, we got her to the truck. A final push up the ramp, and she was in. What a morning! - it wasn't even 9 o'clock yet.

Rhino on the road!

Rhino in the bush

 Game capture crew

 The sleeping, darted rhino, ready for loading into the truck. The cloth, lightly wrapped around her eyes by the red straps, is to calm her.

 Push! Puuuush! Good girl!

Success!