The Milgis Trust

This morning I could see Mount Kenya from the Milgis, Crystal clear,110 nautical miles away!!. What a pleasure..Its a good sign, it means the rains are still around even though there is a lull at the moment… Quite lucky for me as yesterday one of my camels sunk into the sand in the Parsaloi Lugga, up to his neck!!…Lucky it was a camel!,[not an elephant] and luckily theres a scouts meeting this weekend, so we had plenty of people to help…!!..It took a team of 19 men about 4 hours of hard digging to get him out… What happens is when the Luggas, come down in full flood, after a few days, the surface water is no more but you have water, flowing under the sand..Then you have areas where water is stagnant in pools, that when you had the flood, the water had been swirling, some how you get pockets of air trapped under the sand, and when some unsuspecting animal comes down to drink, it sinks straight in up to his neck, the air bubbles out and the sand ‘grabs’ round the animals legs and it can’t move…When you try to dig them out, the water makes it all most impossible to dig the 5/6 feet so that the camel can move… Its an unbelievable situation…A camel is so tall, and at the end of those long legs is a big foot, so adding to the problem… What amazes me, is that elephants, do not seem to get them selves into these situations… Can they feel that there is a problem ahead… Probably!!.. Many years ago on Manda Island an Elephant had managed to get him self on the wrong side of an underground water tank, something panicked it, and he wanted to run across the tank to get away, luckily he felt it was there, slammed on the brakes just before, [ it left good skid marks] and went back the way he had come from, which was quite complicated, as he had been browsing, not really concentrating in amongst the houses, and now he was in a hurry!!..