The Perfect Adventure Holiday

If you would like to work with animal conservation projects and are interested in crocodiles, snakes and amphibians – this is the perfect gap year project for you.

Herpetology heaven

The extensive Tamil Nadu Crocodile Centre stretches along the coastline of India promising an incredibly interesting and exciting experience. The Tamil Nadu conservation, research and breeding centre contains approximately 2,500 crocodiles. In addition, you will be able to study and handle a wide selection of indigenous snake and amphibian species in their natural habitat. It’s herpetology heaven for crocodile and snake enthusiasts!

World-renowned

The world-renowned Tamil Nadu centre has bred and supplied over 2,000 animals and hundreds of reptile eggs for vital re-stocking and breeding programs throughout India.
You will get plenty of ‘hands on’ work with animal conservation and receive valuable training and experience in the following transferable skills:

� Feeding, cleaning out and maintaining crocodile enclosures
� Assisting with important research projects and data collection
� Giving presentations/demonstrations in local Eco-Awareness camps
� Assisting with valuable research and education
� Act as a visitors’ guide during daytime and nighttime safaris
� Supervising visitors when they are handling pythons and baby crocs
� Participate in wildlife conservation awareness in local schools

This is a great project for volunteers who are keen to fit in varied work with animal projects in different countries.

Have fun too!

Volunteers get the opportunity to experience a different culture, meeting some wonderful local people along the way. Obviously, this is a great opportunity for anyone planning a career in work with animal conservation and related fields. And if you are just an excitement junkie who loves to travel, make new friends and face new challenges, the centre is a super base from which to explore Tamil Nadu. If you fancy a night out, it is quite easy to travel to nearby Chennai. In addition, a relaxing weekend on a sunny beach at Mahaballipuram always proves popular.

Future benefits

You will learn how to adapt quickly to new situations, methods of research and data collection, public speaking and the importance of raising awareness in local areas. Highly transferable, conflict resolution techniques are also implicit in this work, which seeks to educate the local people away from killing what is, from their point of view, dangerous wildlife.

Eco-Tourism

Local conservation education aims to introduce the idea that by conserving these animals in a designated habitat, the local community can look forward to plenty of sustainable employment provided by lucrative eco-tourism. Your involvement is a key component in this process. Only when locals see how many people volunteer for conservation and educational work with animal projects in their area, do they begin to believe in eco-tourism.

Whatever career you choose, your experience in crocodile conservation work, with animals feared by many, whilst also helping rural communities emerge from poverty – will earn the respect of your peers, your professors and your potential employers!

Conservation volunteers can work with animal conservation projects in the otherwise inaccessible (to tourists) Wasgamuwa region of Sri Lanka.

Crucial conservation

The main aim of the Wasgamuwa leopard project is to create a protected biological corridor extending over the central, north-central and eastern provinces. Your assistance in this crucial conservation work with animal species in danger of extinction will be of great practical value. In brief these are the objectives:

� conservation and protection of the native Sri Lankan leopard and its Wasgamuwa region habitat;
� to minimise human-leopard conflict (HLC) by studying leopard feeding ecology;
� to create standard protocols for monitoring leopard populations and reducing HLC issues, which can be applied to other regions in Sri Lanka.

Experienced supervision

The leopard research study provides a truly unique chance to visit many other areas of the amazing Wasgamuwa region, under the close supervision of experienced rangers. By participating in this study to estimate the density for the Sri Lankan leopard, you will also learn statistically rigorous mark-recapture methodologies. These are done by remote-photography and field investigations.

Jungle explorer

This is rugged work with animal conservation that challenges volunteers both mentally and physically. You need to be very physically fit and ready to walk 6 – 7 miles (10 km) a day in hot and humid conditions. In addition, be prepared to carry supplies and set-up camp in the jungle to position and monitor the cameras. You should also be aware that these hikes can be dangerous owing to the presence of elephants, sloth bears and other animals in the jungle.

However, if you relish the idea of hiking through the jungle in much the same way as explorers have done for thousands of years – this is the perfect activity for you!

Field research

Volunteers are divided into small teams to conduct field research – carefully supervised by experienced workers. This method of ‘shadowing’ and sharing the activities with other team members enables volunteers to master new techniques quickly.

Team work

The presence of experienced rangers helps volunteers to assimilate to local customs and encourages the development of close co-operation between the different nationalities in each team. The teams are assigned daily tasks that can only be achieved through full co-operation within the groups.

Strong bonds

After physically tiring days of field work in the hot temperatures, the evenings are fairly quiet, although there may be elephant observations, tree hut monitoring or data entry to attend to. Evenings spent around the campfire can foster strong bonds between the volunteers and local workers, and projects like this are a wonderful opportunity to gain in-depth research experience and work with animal projects – interacting with creatures that most people will never see in the wild.

We didn’t see very much on our coach trip through the desert as we slept for most of the time but we arrived at Uluru around five in the morning before the hoardes of other tourists began to arrive. We were just in time to watch the sun rise over the rock which was a magical experience as it seems to change colour visibly throughout the day from a dark silhouette through blues and oranges to a sandy reddish hue in the full light of day.

The desert is bewitching at that time of the morning anyway, as the pink and orange sunlight creeps over the sandy wilderness, peeking softly between the ancient gumtrees. In the presence of something as ancient, alien and understatedly spectacular as Uluru the experience borders on spiritual.

Uluru is what the local Pitjantjatjara people call Ayers Rock. Surprisingly this word has no specific meaning in their language, but it is also used as a local family name by the Traditional Owners of Uluru.

It was first seen by white settlers on 19 July 1873, when surveyor William Gosse sighted the landmark and named it Ayers Rock in honour of the then Chief Secretary of South Australia, Sir Henry Ayers. Since then, both names have been used, although Ayers Rock was the name used by most people up until 1993 when it became known officially as Ayers Rock/Uluru in order to highlight its cultural significance to both aboriginal Australians and those of European descent or “Blackfellas and Whitefellas” as they are known in the area. This dual naming was then reversed to Uluru/Ayers rock, presumably in recognition of the fact that the Blackfellas had been in the area for approximately 30,000 years longer than the Whitefellas had.

There are many myths legends and stories connected with the rock, and these are each connected to specific sacred sites in the area. Most are connected to the dreaming, the aboriginal belief system which explains the formation of the landscape through the ancestors, the spiritual fathers of all the animals of the bush. According to the aboriginal owners of Uluru;

The world was once a featureless place. None of the places we know existed until creator beings, in the forms of people, plants and animals, traveled widely across the land. Then, in a process of creation and destruction, they formed the landscape as we know it today. Anangu land is still inhabited by the spirits of dozens of these ancestral creator beings which are referred to as Tjukuritja or Waparitja.

There are a number of differing accounts given, by outsiders, of Aboriginal ancestral stories for the origins of Uluru and its many cracks and fissures. One such account, taken from Robert Layton’s (1989) Uluru: An Aboriginal history of Ayers Rock, reads as follows:

Uluru was built up during the creation period by two boys who played in the mud after rain. When they had finished their game they travelled south to Wiputa… Fighting together, the two boys made their way to the table topped Mount Conner, on top of which their bodies are preserved as boulders. (Page 5)

There are tales of serpent beings who waged many wars around Uluru, scarring the rock in various places which are still told today. Others tell of two tribes of ancestral spirits who were invited to a feast, but were distracted by the beautiful Sleepy Lizard Women and did not show up. I am all for signing up to any religion that has beautiful Sleepy Lizard Women to be honest.

In response, the angry hosts sang evil into a mud sculpture that came to life in the form of a dingo. There was then a great battle, which ended in the deaths of the leaders of both tribes and in sorrow, the earth itself rose up in grief at the bloodshed, becoming Uluru.

It is sometimes reported that those who take rocks from Uluru will be cursed and suffer sickness and bad luck. There have been many cases recorded where people who removed rocks attempted to mail them back to various agencies to remove the curse.

The rock is littered with sacred places, each with its own dreaming story attached to it and the aboriginal guides do not like you to take photographs of them so as a result I have few pictures of the rock. Many people choose to ignore this which I personally believe shows a tremendous lack of respect for the people who have looked after it for so many thousands of years. Even more so those that climb it. It astonishes me that people even consider climbing it and personally I think that the practice should be stopped altogether. Several controversial incidents in 2010, including a striptease, golfing and nudity on top of Uluru, have led to renewed calls for banning the climb.

When we had been around the rock and the accompanying visitor centre, we headed out to Kata Tjuta, another sandstone formation nearby. This was almost like a gorge, raised above the desert floor and had its own associated dreaming stories such as marks on the walls where the spears of great ancestral hunters had struck them in the dreamtime.

A number of other dreamtime legends surround the great snake king Wanambi who is said to live on the summit of Mount Olga and only comes down during the dry season although the majority of mythology surrounding the site is not disclosed to outsiders as it is still actively used by the local aboriginal people in ceremonies.

The day we spent in Uluru Kata Tjuta national park was one of the most memorable of the whole trip. The atmosphere is difficult to describe, even with such large crowds visiting it. Uluru seems almost to transcend all that surrounds it, ignoring the hoards that visit it every day. It is easy to see how this became a spiritual place to the Pitjantjatjara people. Although not religious people ourselves, Faye and I still agree that this was as close as we have come to a truly spiritual experience.

Nearly ten years ago, I was backpacking around the world with my girlfriend (who is now my wife) and while on the backpackers trail, we learnt many valuable lessons. Amongst the most important stands the one I am going to impart to you now.

Never, NEVER strike up conversation with the guy on his own at the bar.

That’s right. He may seem approachable, friendly, affable, polite, positively welcoming in fact. But do not be fooled. That man, is an idiot.

Now as we all know, the universe is held together by ‘The Force’ and the force has a light side and a dark side. These two opposites are delicately balanced and as a direct result of this, if a man finds a handful of change down the back of his sofa in Hong Kong, a sales rep in Basingstoke will accidentally toast his genitals in a Corby Trouser Press. Unfortunately this universal law means that everything good in the world is naturally accompanied by something bad. This means that like curry and the trots, pubs and idiots often go hand in hand.

The pub idiot comes in many guises, each more cunningly designed to lure you into their dingy corner of the bar than the last. I shall now attempt to describe them in order to warn you before it’s too late.

1. The crazy old man. He has had a skin full by mid afternoon. He doesn’t have to be back into the hospital for a few more hours and he is looking for somebody to talk to. That somebody is not you. Remember this.

2. The aging alcoholic. He likes to get up bright and early so he is ready to face the day ahead, which is the reason he is outside the pub before the barman has even arrived. He prefers real ale because of its strong flavour and he prefers Wetherspoons pubs because of their lively atmosphere and sophisticated clientele. The fact that the beer is dirt cheap and the bar staff are not troubled by excessive levels of inebriation is unrelated.

3. The friendly young guy. The most devious of them all, this man looks well dressed, well adjusted and well heeled. Do not be fooled. Should you come within 6 feet of him he will politely introduce himself before embarking on a series of lies that would make Baron Munchausen blush. I have heard many of these over the years, and I will now give you a small selection of the best in no particular order.

- I am not allowed to talk about what I do for a living.

- I’ve got a Porsche and a Lambourghini at home but I decided to take the Fiesta today.

And my favourite by a country mile,

- I was at a friends flat in New York when an argument broke out. One guy threatened another with a pistol, and to diffuse the situation my friend threatened them both with a rocket launcher. I wasn’t scared because that sort of thing goes on all the time where I’m from.

Pure comedy gold.

So, the lesson to take home today is this. If you go into a strange pub, take a deep breath and start chatting with the group of friends in the corner. Don’t take the cowards option and chat to the friendly stranger on his own at the bar. He is on his own for a reason. He’s as mad as a bag of snakes. The locals already know this. Make sure you do, too.