For some reason I felt that I wanted to demonstrate my independence, so without contacting Barry and Adele I jumped on a minibus in Blantyre first thing Monday morning (well, by the time it actually left it was mid morning, but that's pretty standard) and then, on arriving in Bangula, hired a couple of bicycle taxis to pedal me and my luggage the 14Km to Chipembere Camp. This turned out to be a complete waste of time and effort on two counts. First of all, as the sweating cyclists rounded the final bend into Chip camp we met Adele driving out on her way to Bangula - if I'd waited half an hour she could have picked me up. Secondly, it turned out she was driving into Blantyre the following day anyway, so I could have just stayed put and been driven down in comfort. As it was I ended up going all the way back to Blantyre on the Tuesday to help her with the weekly shop. I am used to Ripple, where the two hour drive to Mzuzu was undertaken strictly once a month, whereas Barry and Adele, with a family to provide for not to mention all the materials they have to buy for the work on the reserve, think nothing of driving to Blantyre (about the same distance) once a week if not more often.
I can't believe how the weather has changed over the last few weeks. Throughout the whole of January, February, March and April never a day went past when I wasn't drenched in sweat for most if not all of it. Then towards the end of May we suddenly started getting cool days, and now in the middle of June, even down in the bottom of the rift valley where it is always several degrees hotter than anywhere else in Malawi, most days are actually pleasantly cool, and in Blantyre it can be positively chilly. Of course, this is also partly due to my having acclimatised - I was joined after a couple of weeks by Rebecca, another volunteer doing research into eco-friendly tourism for a master's degree, and I'm not sure 'pleasantly cool' would be her phrase of choice. Nevertheless even she agreed that it is quite bearable. Things will be very different come October and November when the temperatures will soar.
During my absence the temporary lion enclosure had been completed, and Amayi and Moran, who had grown significantly even in that short time, now had space to wander about. However it was still not big enough for a long term home, and work was already well underway on the construction of a much larger enclosure. They are also getting through around 5Kg of goat meat a day between them, which is becoming a problem. Not only is it costing a lot, but as fridge space is limited, a trip to the butcher is required at least once every couple of days.  On one occasion Adele was too late into Bangula and there was no goat left, so we had o go an buy one from a local village and get a couple of the builders to do the butchering. I've never actually seen an animal of that size killed, skinned and cleaned. I took lots of photographs, but in deference to the more sensitive of my readers I've not posted them here!
Chipembere Camp has dormitory facilities for volunteers and also a small two-bedroom house, and as I was planning to stay for a relatively long stay I was put in the house, which is very comfortable, with its own toilet, shower, and a little kitchen. There was no cooker or fridge, but a second hand gas fridge was discovered going fairly cheap, and two-ring gas stove was quickly acquired in Blantyre. (It's quite amazing going shopping in Blantyre - you could almost be back in England with the big supermarkets and shops with rows of flat screen televisions and laptop computers).
One of my first visits was to Kalambo Secondary School, which I know well from my previous visit in 2006. Mr Makena is still the headmaster, and the new classrooms, which were being built when I was last here, were finished and in use. I have to say it is a much nicer school than Kapanda, better maintained, and above all much lighter due to having proper glazed windows in both the classrooms and offices.
Of course, they are also doing the MCSE syllabus, and so of course I had to offer my services helping with Romeo and Juliet. However, this is form 4, not, as at Kapanda, Form 3, and they would be sitting the exams in just a few weeks so there was no time to go through the whole play with them. However I agreed to take a double lesson each Thursday plus some extra lessons to be arranged on Saturdays, during which I would get them outside acting out some of the scenes, and on the following couple of Thursdays I made some swords and we had some good fun with the fight scenes - sadly I was too involved in the action to take any photographs.
Kalambo School is only just outside Bangula, and a good 10Km from Chip. The first trip I cycled it on PAW's battered old bicycle which took about 45 mins each way, and decided that was not going to work as a regular solution, especially as the Thursday lesson started at 7:40. Barry was quite reasonably not happy about me driving any of the PAW vehicles, so it was decided that I would have the use of  the even more battered PAW motor bike. Despite weighing a ton this has a capacity of only about 100cc, has a tendency to select gears at random and of its own volition, apart from neutral which is not selectable at all, and has to be push started when cold. It also had a tendency to slew around alarmingly in the soft dirt roads. Nevertheless it got me to Kalambo and back, as well as into Bangula for the odd shopping trip (again, sadly, no photo).
There were several ideas being batted around as to what I would do for PAW during my stay. As well as Kalambo I would offer my services to the local primary school in Tisa. We arranged for weekly English lessons to be made available at the site for anyone from the local villages, however no one ever turned up for these, we never found out why. I also gave English lessons to the workers on the PAW site, and the plan was to provide some training in English and "etiquette" to the gate keepers at the Chipembere gate, and also to the Department of National Parks and Wildlife employees who man the gate into the reserve itself. There is also a orphans group from ten till twelve every weekday where Adele provides some books and toys, and also a free meal. During term time this is fairly quiet as kids of primary school age are at school, but come the holidays it will get pretty busy. At the moment it just happens under a tree, but a building is under construction which will become a proper orphan nursery. (Those who, like me, have been scratching their heads over the whole Madonna saga will be interested to note that in Malawi an orphan is defined as a child who has lost one parent - a child with no parents is called a "double orphan", this was explained to me when I queried why one of the orphans was regularly accompanied by her mother! Yet another illustration that provision of aid is never a simple matter, it always throws up unexpected social complexities.)
The next exciting event was the arrival of Ed and Lucy, who were filming for television. They asked me not to publish any photos or details of the programme at the time as apparently it upsets the publicity department, but it was in fact for the first of the series "Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention", broadcast on BBC1 on 3rd November 2010, demonstrating how the same principles used by termites to keep their mounds cool can be used to design air-conditioning systems for large offuce blocks. However we are a very short sequence in a fairly short programme and for some inexplicable reason they declined to take advantage of my acting talents, so I'm not in it at all.
I was really enjoying life at Mwabvi. I got along really well with Barry and Adele and with Kristen and Courtney. I was working on a project that I'd been involved with from the beginning, and which, under Barry's management, was really starting to develop into something real and positive, and more so than than any of the other projects I'd been involved with, I really felt that I could do something useful...

As well as Rebecca we had also been joined by two Italian girls who were volunteering for a week before moving on to do a photography safari in South Luangwa. It was Sunday 27th June, and Barry and Adele were making a barbeque for everyone, but at about 5 o'clock I started feeling as if I was coming down with flu, and by 6 decided I was definitely not well and went to bed. On Monday I had a temperature of 39 and stayed in bed all day. Then Kristen happened to notice that my left leg was very pink. I didn't think anything of it at first but by the evening the whole of my lower left leg was red and sore and Adele took me to see Dr. Katchika at the local clinic in Bangula. There is not much in the way of medical facilities in Bangula but the guy who runs the clinic is very nice and he gave me anti-histamines and said I should be taken to the hospital in Blantyre, so on Tuesday Adele took me up to Mwaiwathu private hospital (thank goodness I was close to Blantyre and had transport) where they diagnosed some sort of bite or sting and gave me steroids.
Under normal circumstances that would probably have been then end of it.  The drugs seemed to work and the rash went away over the next few days, in fact I even emailed my Mum to say "Stop panicking, the leg's fine again". However, whatever it was got me on the same leg that I broke skiing ten years ago and there was an area of skin that never really recovered from the break and had a poor blood supply. Unfortunately the poison got into this and the steroids couldn't fight it. The result was that while the rest of the leg got better this one patch went bad, and over the next few days, in spite of the steroids, got sorer and sorer. By the end of the week it was extremely painful and starting to ooze, and it was obvious that is wasn't going to get better on its own, so on the following Sunday we all decided I needed to get back to the hospital. As luck would have it, Ed and Lucy, who had been doing the filming for the Wallace and Gromit programme, were heading back up to Blantyre, and they gave me a lift and dropped me at Mwaiwathu hospital. Even then I was still thinking that some stronger antibiotics would do the trick, but at the hospital I was seen by the surgeon, Dr. Vigna, who stuck a needle into my leg, drew out a syringe full of pus and and promptly admitted me. Before I could ask whether they actually had an operating theatre, or just a wooden table, I was scheduled for surgery the following morning. Thankfully they did have proper facilities, including a qualified anaesthetist (Mrs. Vigna as it turned out) and first thing Monday they removed a 7cm diameter piece of infected flesh from my leg right down to the bone.
 There followed two weeks languishing in Blantyre hospital. The wound was still badly infected, and I was on a cocktail of intravenous antibiotics. The highlight of each day was around six when Dr. Vigna came round to change the dressings (yes, the surgeon himself did it - not quite like the UK !). The bandages would adhere to the infected tissue, and despite pumping me full of every sort of pain killer (including, on one occasion, neat morphine) they were unable to stop the agony as they were unstuck from the wound, and I, never being one to suffer in silence, and despite being less than semi-concious with the drugs, would wake the entire hospital with my yells. (One memorable night, much to the amusment of Dr. V. and his team, I spent the entire rime reciting Shakespeare, to try to distract myself from the pain. It didn't work though, and by the time I got to "to die, to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream" I decided it was better to bear those ills I had than make the rest of the ward suffer the slings and arrows of my agonised recitation.) Dr. Vigna reckoned I had some sort of resistance to pain killers - I reckon it was just that he was used to treating local people. It is a strange and interesting fact that native Africans have a massively greater tolerance for pain than we wimpy white people. Whether this is a cultural thing, or whether there is a real physiological difference I have no idea (I reckon it would make an interesting subject for research).
The prognosis was that the leg would take many weeks to recover and might even need skin grafts, so there was little point in staying in Malawi, and anyway all decisions about my immediate future were now in the hands of the insurance company, who immediately arranged to have me flown home. I owe a huge debt of thanks to the team at Europ Assistance who handled the repatriation, especially to Jo Norman, the chief nurse who flew out in person to accompany me home, and was great company on the long (but very comfortable business class) journey home, Catherine "the admissions queen" who arranged for me to go straight to Whiston Hospital, apparently one of the best skin and plastics units in the country, John Millins, Tracy in the South Africa office and no doubt many others behind the scenes. They were magnificent! Jo in particular moved heaven and earth to overcome a flood of problems with the payment of my medical bill - in the end we found ourselves, a couple of hours before my flight, in the local bank, withdrawing the entire amount (about £2500) in cash - and remember that the highest denomination banknote in Malawi is worth about £2.50.
I arrived back on Sunday 18th July and as I write am ensconced in Whiston hospital with a vacuum cleaner (actually a modern contrivance called a Vac Dressing which sucks the gunge out of the wound and allegedly works wonders in promoting granulation and healing) attached to the hole in  my leg waiting for the results of various tests before the doctors take a slice from my thigh to graft on to it.
So sadly my gap year has been reduced to six months. We still don't know what caused the problem, although the most popular theory is a bite by a violin spider. It was just unlucky that it bit me right on the old wound, otherwise it would probably have been no more than a nuisance. But I will continue to be an active part of Project African Wilderness, and as far as Mwabvi Wildlife Reserve goes . . .