Long Day

Well, that was a long Day. Up at the crack of dawn, got to bed at nearly the crack of dawn! I haven't been up at 5am for a long time, so it was not a nice feeling when that alarm clock went off! This is the price you pay I guess for going on SAFARI!

The trip itself to the park was fairly uneventful - just very long. We met the minibus at 5:30, and we got to the safari park at about 8:45. This long journey was not of course helped by the driver's taste in music - we had "The Best of Phil Collins" the whole way! :-( Luckily we were able to doze through moat of it, and finally reached out destination, the Aquila Game Reserve.

After a quick orientation and a buffet breakfast, off out we went in the jeeps before the heat of the day made the animals all disappear off into the shade. Now, most ppl will probably have a mental image of a safari being endless acres of grasslands, with herds of zebra, rhino, wildebeest and the occasional majestic lion silhouetted up against the horizon looking like Simba from "the Lion King". Well, that's Kenya you're thinking of, it's a bit different that close to the Cape. The landscape is more desert and scrubland than forest or grasslands, and pretty much none of the animals we saw (bar the springbok) were indigenous to the area, and were brought into the game reserve from outside.

We were driving around for about 3hrs, and in that time we saw 4 of the "Big 5" - Lions, Rhinos, Hippos and Buffalo (there were Leopard as well there but they're apparently damn hard to spot - so much so that we couldn't spot them). As well as the "stars of the show", we also got to see elephants, zebras, springbok, alligators and cheetahs. Is good seeing hem in the wild all right, but I was thinking as we were pulling back into the game lodge "yeah, good, but not worth the early start and the price of admission".

And then we got to the bikes. After lunch, we hopped on our quad bikes and zoomed back off out into the park for the afternoon. Now, I haven't driven anything more powerful than a go-kart in over 6-7 years, never mind anything where I had to worry about gears, so things were a bit scary until I got used to things (at one stage I'd hit the electric fence around the park - 10,000v! Was a case of "put it into reverse and don't let your foot touch the ground!"). After a while tho I got a bit more confident and was zooming around with the best of them. Once I lost the fear of death from crashing though, there is definitely something exhilarating about bombing along at up to 40km/h on dirt tracks, over rocky hillsides and skidding around corners! Things nearly came to tears a few times, not least when a couple of springbok ran right out in front of me and I had to jam on the brakes to avoid hitting them!

By the end of the ride we were all tired, dusty and very hyped up. Luckily we had the 3hr drive back to cape town and the mellow sounds of Phil Collins to bring us back down to earth!

Once we got back tho, there was a call from one of the guys from work", "come out and join us for dinner and drinks out in Camps Bay". So, we had just enough time to hop in the shower and head out for dinner! Dinner naturally turned into a few drinks, which turned into a few more drinks, and we ended up getting to bed at 2:30am, or nearly 22hrs after we'd woken up! A long and action-packed day indeed!