Sticking point

I sweated through the night at the hotel in Nampula as the aircon was stuck at 28 degrees and couldn’t be lowered. I’ve long theorised that it takes 1-2 nights with an unfamiliar air conditioning unit to manage its idiosyncrasies. I’ve also long theorised that I overthink many things, including the fine-tuning of airconditioning units.

There are two main ways of reaching Niassa Reserve, which I visited for the first time in November. To the part of the Reserve I needed to be, the road journey at the best of times takes 15 hours from either the provincial capital of Lichinga or the coastal city of Pemba. Being the wet season, these are not the best of times. The other option is to charter a light aircraft, which is expensive. I’m visiting this time with a project counterpart from Kenya, and as time is limited, we opted for the aircraft option, and we were piloted by an American called Kent.

The Reserve is lush and green in March, in stark contrast to the dryness and brownness of November. Large herds of impala congregate on the airstrip at Chuilexi, the area of the Reserve that we most directly support. One of the gargantuan challenges here is moving from a model where Chuilexi survives solely on philanthropic funding, to developing what we call in the biz ‘sustainable streams of finance.’

An opportunity has arisen to investigate a commercial honey project within Chuilexi, with local employment opportunities and revenue back to the Conservancy to help with its ongoing operations. It has to have positive benefits for biodiversity or we should not get involved, so whatever is developed has to be wildlife-friendly and low impact. There are various ideas to link the marketing of high end honey to the fact it will be produced in a wildlife area, such as by allowing consumers to scan a code and be taken to camera footage of wildlife moving around the hive from where their honey was harvested. The reason for this particular trip is to allow the honey expert to view the flowering of key species in Chuilexi in the wet season, to confirm the area’s suitability for installing hives. It was immediately clear to him that the miombo habitat provides excellent conditions.

This project sounds doable in theory but there are myriad issues to wade through, and it’s one of the trickier partnerships I’ve had to navigate over the years. Commercial and conservation interests can clash easily and as we have found ourselves trying to facilitate this idea, I’m spending a lot of time ensuring the partners are aligned and sympathetic to each others’ perspectives. There is much to arrange and seek permissions for, so the blip community can expect honey to be a recurrent theme.

Some roads here are terrible during the rainy season, and the delays and muddy stretches were very reminiscent of fieldwork in South Sudan.

The Chuilexi team is already providing camp treatment that is memorably good (not reminiscent of South Sudan...). We are going to be well provisioned on this trip. On arrival at camp, over biscuits and coffee there was much banter with my Portuguese-English dictionary. It’s great what entertainment can be derived when offline.

After an extremely hectic UK trip, these moments are good for the soul to recharge.