Technological wizardry...

After another full day of conferencing I got home in time to send children to bed, eat something and check out whether our new in house internet connection is quick enough to cope with Skype. And it looks like it might be - we've got a full 33kb/sec here, fully 10 x the speed we've had previously. Now all we need it to find out who among our friends and relatives are also on Skype and we'll be off! Provided you're not in the US, of course, and suffering from a complete time-zone missmatch... We even have a camera to provide pictures, but that might be pushing it too far...  If you want my user name just let me know.

Today's excitement from Mama B has been succeeding in fixing various leaks and holes - we now seem to have hot water everywhere, which I'm sure visitors will appreciate. Just a matter of turning the right tap it seems. Whilst I managed to hook up with quite a few more people I wanted to collar before the end of the conference on my mission to make sure we have invitations to every protected area in the country... It looks like my first jolly will have to be some time in January, when I'll team up with a nocturnal primate expert (well, really THE nocturnal primate expert...) and we'll train a few local people on birds to look for and bush babies to listen for and sample some random locations beyond the west side of Serengeti in a very nice sounding private nature reserve (with the most exclusive lodge I've ever heard of - 1600 US$ per night I'm told (though we'll be but in the consultant's accommodation...)). It's tough, but someone has to do it. Oh, and it sound slike our nocturnal garden chitterer is likely to only be a fruit bat, but there's a chance of tree hyrax so I hould get a spotlight... Bit of a mad social weekend ahead, but hopefully lots of fun for all (and maybe even a little furniture ordering on the side. We're looking forward to the time we have a sofa to relax on...).

So, hope we can speak to some of you soon. Let us know your Skype names!