Glorious Holidays

As amazing as the bush is, after six weeks of working 18 hour days you tend to get a little tired, and there is nothing more rewarding than a two week holiday. This holiday was building up to be epic and it hadnt even begun yet. My best friend, Ross, had organised a boys weekend away where 12 of us were all heading up to a game farm near the border of Zimbabwe to do some hunting. Only a few of us were going to do the actual hunting but most would walk away with some meat for biltong and dry wors. The topper of it all, was the fact that it was my birthday weekend and it was going to be a raucous party.

After a long scenic drive up to the farm we all arrived and we had already started cooling the beer before we got to the lodge. The weekend was packed with plenty fun and excitement. We unfortunately missed our meat quota by one impala but none the less we had a blast. The definate high was the fact that it was the first time hunting for all the hunters besides me and there are some traditions that needed to be upheld. For all first timers it is madatory that if your first antelope is a female you have to eat some of the heart and if it is a male the unfortunate candidate has to enjoy the testicles... As a matter of decency I offered to cook these tasty morsels for the guys but they all chose the barbaric route of eating it all raw and OBVIOUSLY this idea came up after way too much beer and shooters!

The biltong was all processed at the lodge and it was up to us to head home and find a place to hang it which only took three of us all of six hours to put up racks and hang the meat. Below you can see the end product of our hard work.

The rest of the week was spent in Joburg catching up with friends and family. In the middle of all the catch up sessions i managed to fit in a bit of microlighting which was awesome. The only thing that was not so pleasant about the experience was the fact that it was near freezing on the ground and we were 5000 feet in the air moving at 40km/h....you can imagine the temperature....it took all of about 2 hours before I could feel my toes again.

If you click on the link below you can see some of the photos .

The view from above

Then it was off for some diving in Sodwana. This was five days of bliss, beer, sun, friendly people and of course some major scuba! I went down to complete my advanced open water diver which I did successfully and it was amazing. The marine life was incredible and I saw everything from rays and turtle to paperfish and scorpion fish. This was exactly the recharge I needed before my next 6 week stint in the bush.

Now its back to the lodge to get into some major photography and see some crazy things...