Our hosts made us feel very welcome; perhaps because of this, I felt very much at ease in what was for me a completely new environment. And perhaps there's something to the notion that something in us recognizes landscapes in which, after all, much of our evolution as a species took place, even if we as individuals have never been there. Despite the often brutal heat and the present dangers of the place, I felt at home. #trackinglife

A big difference between this #tracking evaluation and those I've done in the U.S. is that in between each of us giving our individual answer and the evaluator telling us whether we were correct, our group had to come to consensus about what the track ID actually was. While this made the evaluation take a lot longer, I really enjoyed this part of the process and it added a great deal to my own learning. We learned from each other as well as from our evaluators. #trackinglife