Saturday 1st February 2014

Heavy rain from the middle of the night through to lunch meant that we were camp bound with no walks. This gave me the opportunity to talk to Dee about my placement. When everyone else leaves on Tuesday I’m going to stay on for the next three weeks before taking leave to meet Mum and Dad as well as my brother and sister in law in Cape Town.

It’s great knowing where I’m going to be over the next couple of months and to boot there are some great courses being staged here so I should get some really good experience here in the veld. Fingers crossed the eles will be back soon in their numbers and I can get plenty of encounters. Before I can be assessed for my lead I need to walk 100 hours as back up which shouldn’t be a problem, I also need a minimum of 50 encounters.

I’m so pleased I’m getting to walk trails as my placement, this is what I’ve wanted to do right from the start, one of the instructors from early on in the trails course said that, from a safari point of view:

“Driving is like watching the movie, walking is like reading the book” Alan McSmith

The rain cancelled our fitness session but Bruce set us the challenge of doing 500 push ups in a day which Cliff, Jomi and I managed within 2.5 hours.

I had a pretty relaxed day, barely touching the books, that will have to change tomorrow as I don’t want to let the momentum slip. Cliff and I worked on the “charges” for fines night making sure that we had something for everyone. The rain let up so we headed out for the penultimate round of assessment walks in the afternoon which relieved our cabin fever.