THE WEEK
Hey y’all! Coming at you writing after the long weekend. Forgive me if I make the work week a bit abbreviated, it was honestly a while ago at this point oops.
On Monday we ran an ELISA plate each (so 2 total). If you recall back to last week, there was an issue with the plate washer. So this time we brought a test plate down to make sure that the washer didn’t overfill the wells again. Chanana and one of the visiting students went down to the first floor to run the test plate while I finished upstairs. They said the wells were fine, then when we ran Chanana’s plate…… THE WELLS OVERFILLED AGAIN. Ughhhhhh. We stopped the wash and did damage control. I figured out that the machine wasn’t overfilling the wells, it was the aspirator that was broken. The machine sucks up the liquid in the wells then refills them, so if the aspirator doesn’t go into the well properly, then when the wash liquid goes in, the well overfills. Bruh. We do damage control, fix the machine, then wash the other plate, hoping that the first one wasn’t contaminated. We finish the run and see that…. the controls passed! Yay! But there was an unusually high percentage of positive samples, so we decide to retest the positives to be sure. In the afternoon we run the gel that that we had pushed. It was fun putting the samples into the agarose. Unfortunately only one of the PCRs had bands, meaning there was a problem with the extraction (we had used 2 different kits).
On Tuesday we ran 2 more ELISA plates. With the washer we ran a test plate with water filled to the correct amount, and the machine worked just fine. We ran the real plates with no issues!
On Wednesday we ran 2 more ELISAs. Everything was totally fine until one of my negative controls read positive??? It was very weird because everything else looked totally fine and there weren’t other signs of contamination. We would have to retest all the samples :( Later in the day we ran an extraction of known positive samples. We plan to extract with 3 different kits/procedures, to see what works and what doesn’t.
On Thursday we did the same extractions but with a different kit, then we ran PCR to amplify the extractions. Weirdly after the first run one of the samples vanished??? Was it a ghost? Or maybe the caps that seal the samples weren’t closed tightly enough and all the DNA evaporated… I guess we’ll never know.
On Friday it was a half day because of the holiday weekend, so the day was dedicated to clean the lab. I put on my gloves and helped out. The main task was clearing out one of the freezers that had frozen over, so it had been turned off and was thawing so that it could be accessed. This involved a lot of paper towels and a whole bunch of samples that probably could be discarded, and a few very important ones that should DEFINITELY be kept. Low stakes. That was pretty much it for the day! And the week!
THE WEEKEND
Alrighty folks buckle up we are going on a RIDE. We had 4 days off for the celebration of Sir Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana. Sara and I went on a trip with Marcie, who works with Sara (technically she is Sara’s boss, but they are also good friends). She’s from Tanzania but works here in Botswana. I hadn’t really met her before the trip, but she was so cool! I’m really glad she came. On Friday night we boarded the night bus to take us all the way up to the northernmost part of Botswana to Kasane, which is probably the tourism capital of the country. We had a quite nice time on the bus! The seats were pretty comfortable, and we had a nice quiet spot at the back of the bus. We arrived in Kasane at like 7:30 in the morning. We walked down the road to a cute breakfast place called the Coffee Buzz. We had a nice long breakfast with lots of coffee in their pretty outdoor area. It turns out this is a place that a lot of tour groups begin their day at, so large groups of people could come in and eat and leave, all while we leisurely enjoyed our drinks.
There we also ran into some other people that worked at the hospital! They are med students that came when the other med students (that we went to the Delta with) left. I had met one of them, Elizabeth. It was soon clear that we would be running into them a lot on this trip, and we did not like their vibe. They very standoffish toward us, even though we had been nothing but nice, and they were all Americans that went in and out of talking in exaggerated British accents. C’mon be so for real. Anywayyyys, after wrapping up we walked down the road to pick up some groceries then took a taxi up to our hostel. The hostel was super cute! Sara and I were sharing a tented bungalow, and there was a pool, shared common space, kitchen, and bathrooms. Cute lighting and good vibe. We unpacked and hung out, I took a cold dip in the pool, read, and showered. Then we were off on our first activity: the boat cruise!
We drove into town then we got on a motorboat with a couple other people. We then waited a while for some more people then went down the river to the Chobe National Park check in. There was some problem with the park fee for the people that were added so we had to wait a while more. I was frustrated at that point, and not hiding it very well, oops! Whatever, we finally made it through. Then we had the most amazing ride!!! It was unbelieveably cool. We got so close to so many incredible animals. We saw a TON of elephants, even some swimming and crossing the river, buffalo, crocodiles, hippos, different birds, and more. We got so close to some hippos at some point that I was kind of scared. We also saw a breeding herd of male elephants all together. It was very clear that it was a group of males, given that multiple had their very large, uhhh, phalluses out and on display. We sure got a show! At the end the sun began to set, turning the sky into a beautiful orange. I get why they call it an African sun, wow. It was a fantastic ride! We got back the the hostel and cooked up some pasta and chicken which hit the spot. We played some gin then hit the hay, big day coming up.
The next day we were up at 5:00 to start our game drive at 5:30. It was the three of us and a couple from Germany together on the drive. We got bundled up in the robes they gave us, then set our on a cold, windy, and bumpy ride in the open safari vehicle to Chobe.
We got into the park just as it was getting light, and soon saw an absolutely breathtaking sunrise over the Chobe river. For our first big stop of the day, we joined a big group of trucks together to see… GASP! Mama and baby lions!!!! WOW! At first they were all snoozing, then the kids got up to play and the moms watched! I swear they acted exactly like our cats at home. Wrestling and jumping around with the branches and elephant dung. AHHHHH so freaking cute. Close by we saw some more female lions out in the bush. They were moving and it looked like were stalking some buffalo, but we never saw any attack.
The whole drive was absolutely stunning. There were stretches with no animals, but for most of it we kept seeing more and more! We saw so many elephants and giraffes at really close ranges, buffalo, impalas, kudu, vervet monkeys, hippos, fishing eagle, other birds, etc.
After a quiet stretch, our driver went and joined another truck looking into the bush, he asked what they were looking for, and they said they thought a leopard was back there. Omg. Those are quite hard to find. We looked in the bush for a while, then moved down a bit. All of a sudden there was movement!! A glimpse of a leopard!!! I had my binoculars trained on a clearing we thought the leopard would pass through, then there for a couple seconds: a BIG BEAUTIFUL LEOPARD! WOW! It was way bigger than the other one we saw so there must have been two. I didn’t get a picture since I was staring with the binos, but Marcie caught a blurry video as evidence. With that I now have seen 4 out of the Big 5 (lions, leopards, elephants, buffalo, rhinos), with just a rhino left. We saw one more great lion spotting at the end of the drive (she was posing for us), then we headed back to the hostel. It was insane.
Back at the hostel we had lunch included in our tour. It was stewed beef, collard-like greens, and bogobe, which is a stiff maize porridge. The beef and veggies were yummy, but I wasn’t a huge fan of the bogobe. It was fine with the other food but I couldn’t get behind the texture when it was alone. After lunch we had a short break, then headed back to the river!! We signed up for a combo tour that included another boat cruise. On the way into town there was suddenly a loud clanking sound that did not seem good. Turns out a huge and important looking piece of metal had fallen out of place. We waited by the side of the road, and then had a pickup to the boat site.
We basically repeated the same process of the tour from the day before, although all the sites were different! We did hear a lot of the same information and anecdotes from our tour guide, which was funny. Some different sites this time included: getting SUPER close to a massive resting crocodile, a water monitor (Nile monitor, as corrected by Uncle J when I texted him about it), some adorable baby elephants, a huge party with elephants, hippos, and buffalo all together, and some giraffes drinking in the splits. We also enjoyed the cruise with some ciders we brought.
We got back to the hostel and unfortunately had to do some very tired cheffing. We had planned an easy meal of roasted veggies, chickpeas, chicken, and garlic bread. Basically throw everything on a sheet pan, put in the oven, done in 25 min. Devastatingly, there was no oven. We had to cook everything individually on some wonky burners. It eventually all came together into a relatively reasonable dinner, but it took a lot more time and effort than we thought in the grocery store planning this.
The next morning we headed to Victoria Falls! The plan was to get a shuttle from our hotel to the Falls, see the sights there for and hour and a half, then get picked up for an afternoon whitewater rafting trip. This quickly began to fall apart. We were supposed to be picked up at 7:30, get to the Falls by 9:00, then get picked up there at 10:30. At 7:30, the driver called to say he would be there in 10, because of border traffic, not a good sign. After 10 minutes of me lowkey panicking, seeing everything fall apart, I decided we needed to change something. It was already cutting it close by limiting the amount of time we would get to see the Falls, and with one delay and more probably coming, we needed to push the rafting. We had already been up in the air about the plan for the day after, so we decided to try and move the rafting to the next day, and spend the full day today seeing the Falls. Luckily we were paying for the rafting in-person, so I called the tour company and moved our rafting to the next day. It was definitely unideal, but we were able to move our rafting from this afternoon to the morning of the next day. The only downside was that Marcie was planning on leaving a day before us to get back in time for rest before work. She decided to still keep that plan and not go rafting. After this was finalized, I breathed a big sigh of relief. Thank god we worked things out. I was very anxious about this and felt that this was a much better plan. I should’ve know that everything moves on “African time,” so nothing happens right at the scheduled time, and rigid plans are not advisable.
So we had a smooth shuttle, with a couple stops along the way that I was super chill about. No need to rush now! We made it across the border, and then started the day at a spot outside of the park. It was a restaurant/cafe/viewpoint/ziplining place. Marcie decided to zipline, since she was missing the rafting. So Sara and I enjoyed a lovely cappuccino while overlooking the gorge and the ziplining.
After we made our ways to the Falls entrance paid a whopping $50 (on top of the $45 visa) and entered! The way it was set up was a path through the luscious jungle, with viewpoints along the trail that had a different view of the Falls at each one. We started with a statue of Dr. Livingstone, who “discovered” the Falls, but basically just brought colonialism to Africa. That was a good place to start, because it all got better from there! Each viewpoint we GASPED because it just kept getting cooler and cooler! The sheer amount of water going over the falls were astounding. Plus the mist and spray, the rocks, the sky, all of it. We had the most magical time taking in the sights and pictures. We took our merry time and took a couple hours getting to all of the viewpoints. We all agreed we definitely couldn’t have done it in 1.5 hours, even if everything had gone according to plan. Guess who we saw again at the peak lookout point at the falls, those rude girls again…. They barely even looked at it!
After the views, we had a nice lunch at the cafe in the park, then we headed for a walk to the bridge splitting the two countries — Zimbabwe and Zambia. We had been on the Zim side (the better one for Falls viewing), but you could go to the bridge that spans the gorge separating the two without a visa. Sidebar: we actually did have a visa that could allow this because we thought we would enough the time/desire to see the Zambia side too, which we did not. We did spend $45 on the visa that only needed to be $30, but it’s all good, no harm no foul. Anyway we got to the bridge, saw the gorge, and saw someone do a bridge swing and another do a bungee jump off the bridge. No thanks! We made our way back to the pickup spot, then headed back to our hostel! It was a fantastic day that was amazing, even if not what I thought it would be like when I woke up. We said goodbye to Marcie taking the overnight bus back to Gabz, ordered pizza, then hit the hay.
The last day we woke up and prepared for rafting — for real this time. We made brekkie then got picked up at 6:45. We drove this time into Zambia instead of Zimbabwe, and got to pass over a bridge that separated 4 different countries: Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe — very cool. After making it thought the border, we waited on another driver (they liked to pass us around to different drivers in different countries), then made it to our group. We were the second ones picked up, then we drove to a really fancy hotel and got 4 more people. In all we were a group of 7: us, 2 teachers from San Fransisco, a guy from Michigan living in Dubai, and a couple from the Netherlands. We drove out for a while to the rafting beginning site. There we stored our things, loaded up on sunscreen, then got the safety talk (not to scare us, just inform). We then began a hike that we were absolutely not warned for.
It probably took 25 minutes, first going steeply down into the gorge, then through the forest. It was nice, just unexpected. Then we got to rafting! The whole trip was so much fun! We started at rapid #7 and went to #25. All the rapids had funny names like “Jaws of Death,” “Washing Machine,” or “Commercial Suicide” (this one we had to get out and walk around, it was that dangerous). My favorite name was a series of 4 rapids: First Ugly Sister, Second Ugly Sister, Third Ugly Sister, and the last one, Mother. Hahahaha. The rapids were a whole lot of fun, but not too scary. I was sitting toward the back of the boat for a lot, but I got to move up to the front and move around too which was nice. We didn’t flip the boat! There was only one guy who fell out of the boat, but it did happen twice, sorry Alex. We did get to jump out a couple times, which was so much fun!!! We got to float down the Zambezi, and we even got to ride through one of the rapids outside the boat, which was so much fun!!! Overall, 20/10 experience, it was just an absolute blast. Also our guides were so funny and really good at their jobs.
After we got to the end, we had to head back up the gorge. We were told: easy 15 minutes. My god it was just straight up the gorge. Again, this part wasn’t really advertised. I was fine but some others in my group not so much…. It was also so impressive to see the guys carrying the kayaks and other gear up the gorge. We were so lucky and grateful to have such an awesome group of people helping us to have a really fun trip. At the top there was a much needed lunch waiting for us. Then after food we headed back into the truck for a long ride back.
We made it back to the pickup point, then got shuttled to another taxi, then another. Then we made it to the border and got another driver. Whew! Once we made it back to the hostel, we chilled there, showered, got our stuff in order, and ate some food. We had to check out in the morning, so this was all just loitering in the common area. We had arranged with one of the staff members of the hostel to buy our bus tickets for us while we were rafting (had to buy day-of), which we were very grateful for. However, he did tell us it was at 8pm instead of 9pm, so we got there an hour early. We also requested the side with 2 seats, not the one with 3, although those were probably all sold out. So we ended up with a window and middle seat on the most uncomfortable bus ride of my life. This was our 4th overnight bus, but by FAR the worse. The middle seat had a lady on the left side that kept putting her head on my shoulder and blanket onto my overheating legs. The seats we somehow much harder, and the window didn’t close all the way. I’m not sure if I got any sleep. And the cherry on top? We didn’t get back to Gabz until 8am! For reference, I normally get into work at 8am. Whoopsies! You will have to wait to see how the day of work went in the next installation.
Overall, we had an AMAZING weekend trip!!!!! Kasane was fantastic. Chobe and Vic Falls are must visit destinations when in Southern Africa!!!! And another good lesson for me that I need to sometimes chill out, because everything always works out.
That is all for me, hope you all are doing well! I also just realized how long this post is, especially with all the photos. You’re a real one if you’ve read this far!!! I love my fans mwah 💕
Loving Life Living Good,
Emily in Botswana
Yea lions and leopards and giraffes, oh my! Aunt Melissa particularly likes the male vervet monkeys, if you know what I mean. Now you need to go for the Little Five: elephant shrew, buffalo weaver, rhinoceros beetle, leopard tortoise and ant lion. Good luck!