November 26, 2007

I arrived in Porterville this rainy afternoon, after a week of rather futile work with Disa filicornis and Disa harveiana. The latter is the sister-species of Disa draconis and looks almost identical, so I can collect data from D. harveiana and merge them with those from D. draconis. The site on the Gydo Pass is beautiful, with dramatic mountain landscapes, huge boulders that provide the much-needed shade for lunch breaks, and baboons that pounce around between the rocks and screech and bark quite frighteningly. We put in a week of long days, alternating between scorching heat without a breeze and gloomy wet-cold days with gale-force winds, but to no avail. There are simply no pollinators around, so the most crucial experiment, which is concerned with pollinator behavior, did obviously not take place.

November 19, 2007

I’m once again in the middle of some hectic packing, because tomorrow I’ll be heading out to the Gydo Pass near Ceres, about 160km NE of Cape Town, to work with Disa filicornis, a very pretty, pink-flowered orchid. I just came back Thursday evening, sun burnt, tired, tick-bitten, and badly scratched up from a tough week of work with Disa draconis.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

A lot has happened since I posted last time. My car and me are insured now. Given the special conditions in South Africa, the insurance companies here offer a wide variety of services that are quite unheard of in other countries. All insurances offer to insure car windows - apparently there is quite a lot of "smash and grab" incidences, where your car windows get smashed and somebody grabs whatever is in reach on dashboard, passenger seat, or backseat. This may happen during a traffic jam, while you wait at a red light, or when your car is parked outside overnight. As a consequence, you have to put all your stuff into the trunk or into the foot space so that it is out of sight, and remove everything you are emotionally attached to from the car in the evening.

Thursday Oct. 11, 2007

Before I started out to South Africa, I asked around about transportation amongst all those people that have been to South Africa. Nearly everybody said "Oh, you just buy a car and off you go!". Well, it's really not that easy, at least if you are on a budget! First of all, cheap cars are - as everywhere in the world - usually moving pieces of trash, precariously held together by paint and stickers. Second, South African car models are often very basic, and are driven until they reach biblical ages. To give you an example: There was one specific case, an 17-year old Golf, that looked so deceivingly nice from outside that I took it to a mechanic for a check. However, it revealed astonishing amounts of oil splattered all over the engine once the mechanic opened the hood.

Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007

Two weeks have already passed in a whirlwind of activities, and I have shamefully neglected my blog. I will try to catch up a bit:

My 40-hour journey I had looked forward to turned out to be -- as usual -- a mixed bag of experiences. In the end I still arrived rather tired, because the stewardesses had started banging around in the airplane kitchen at 5 am, but then delayed feeding a wide-awake and increasingly hungry lot of passengers until 8 am! As I had almost expected, the pickup from the airport didn't work out -- I came out there after an amusing discussion about the duration of my research visa with an airport official, and nobody was there with a sign with my name on it. After pondering this fact for about 20min, I took an airport shuttle to town. This had two benefits -- I got to see my neighborhood, because the