Eleanor Tandy

BSES Namibia 2012

 

My name is Eleanor Tandy I am 17 and I am currently studying Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry at A level in Gower College Swansea.  In Late July, I will be heading off to Namibia on a scientific exploration for 5 weeks with the British Schools Exploring Society (BSES). This will entail a lot of walking, either up/down a mountain, along a river, across plains or across the Skeleton Coast desert. I am going on this expedition for the personal development and the experience. This expedition will test and challenge me to both my physical and mental limits, which I hope I can overcome. BSES Offical page or the Canyons to Coast 2012 Namibia Expedition

During the expedition, I will be setting up a base camp near the Ugab river. We will then be venturing from this base camp to complete our two projects. Our first project is the Brandberg Rock-Art project (The Brandberg massif is twice the height of Ben Nevis) early hunters painted in the caves all around the massif telling tales of their lives. Early archaeologists made sketches of the paintings, but they were not put on maps or collated in a definitive collection. We therefore hope to locate, map and catalogue these paintings so that they are much easier to find for future reference. Our second project is the Elephant Monitoring Project. This will be carried out in the savannah grasslands of the Ugab. I will be monitoring the populations of the elephants around the Ugab. About 5 herds move around the area that we will be looking at. I will be observing, tracking and surveying the elephants. We will be working in partnership with the Elephant Human Relations Aid (EHRA). The data that we collect about the elephants will directly contribute to the work done by the EHRA.

We will be learning how to survive a desert with the minimum of equipment, we will be eating food from the desert, learning how to devise and improvise to trap game, collecting food, testing for poison, food preparation, radio usage, communications techniques, signalling methods, emergency response to a lost member of the expedition, search and rescue, navigation and night navigation, bush camping, snakes/reptile and dangerous animal safety.