What is happening with us

If you are waiting for a post on my Pluto trip to Etosha, I promise it will come soon.

I realized that there are so many people who read my blog or follow on twitter who actually know me, and don't know what is going on in our life. So this post is to inform all of you what is going on with us.

If you don't actually know me, you may find this post a little boring.

We currently live at the coast where I had hoped to start up Frantic Naturalist Tours and Safaris. Things have not gone so smooth, and I have mainly been freelancing. Actually, this year I have done just odd jobs here and there. I have landed a great deal with Safari Wise, but that is also very slow off the ground. (I wish them luck with it in the future though...they are a great company.)

So now we are going to Windhoek to help my wife's mother with here business. My wife is going to manage her business and I am going to work on doing some web design and probably will keep freelancing (tours). I have a few trips lined up for later in the year, which I certainly will do.

What is going to happen to frantic naturalist? Well, I want to keep the company alive. I want to take it back to what I had wanted right from the beginning. The idea of Frantic Naturalist for me was never to be a company, but rather to create a club or organization that gets nature enthusiasts out into the wild together. It is a registered company now, and I will keep it like that, but I will mainly aim to do trips for the serious nature enthusiast. I may put some trips together, and advertise them as a once off thing. I have some good ideas...watch this space! I hope to do four of five trips that are really interesting each year, with a specific focus and a get a group of enthusiasts out into the wilds in Namibia. I have a passion for the desert and also for birding, so most of this stuff will focus on that.

I would also love to do a trip like the one that I just did, where I provide logistical support and a little guiding for people doing things out in the deserts or bush, such as scientists doing a research project, small film crews (I am very selective about those,) and whatever interesting things come along.

Moving to Windhoek is rather sad for me. Most of all I am going to miss the wetlands and the dunes around here. But there are birds in Windhoek, and there is the bird club. So I will keep birding and writing about that.

My first web design job is going to be for Safari Wise and I will hopefully keep working on their website doing updates. One of the first things that I will be doing is trying to rid the site of a lot of it's pdf files. I hope to get a few of the smaller tour companies and perhaps environmental orgs to do their websites. It's really a new passion for me, but I have enjoyed learning and had lots of time to do it. I will probably register the name "sandcurves" as a company for doing the web design, so that if I manage to build up both companies, I can one day either sell Frantic Naturalist (small chance) or the web design company. Don't like SandCurves as a name for a web design company? Well give me some ideas?

The Frantic Naturalist Website will remain on the internet, and I will keep using it as a nature tours directory. It's cheating a bit from a search point of view. Since I started the directory the traffic to that site has been fantastic. It's fun for me, people who want to do tours with me can find me through ti, and it probably helps other small nature tour operators get found.

All in all, this blog and my website is going to get more and more personal. I do both (the blog and the website) for fun, more now than ever. If I get some work out of it, all the better. But I don't want to worry to much about what I write. I am not a marketer, I guess.

The Pluto trip that I just did (I didn't actually go to Pluto - it's far away, I just went to Etosha to look at Pluto,) ...came through this blog!

I will be moving this blog to my own website soon. I will drop all the other blogs, aside from African Bush Stories, which I think is a great idea, I just need more people to give me their stories. It was rather amazing...I thought it would be easy to get hundreds of stories from friends for that site, but the stories that pop out over a beer dry up when you want them in media form. I would love to have a co-author for the blog. Or you can even take over the whole thing...if you look after it. I will contribute from time to time?

The other blogs were just there for search anyway.

The up side of moving to Windhoek...lots of our friends are there (some of you who read this blog.) It's the next chapter in our adventure. Frantic Naturalist hasn't flopped yet...it hasn't started yet. It was really a bad time (or interesting time) to try to start a super niche product in a small, far away place (in tourism world market terms.) When all of you are making lots of money again, so will Frantic Naturalist. It was all getting watered down. Now I can really put the 'frantic' and the 'naturalist' back in the company.

If this blog post was super boring...sorry, we'll be back to the good stuff soon.

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