Fay In Africa

Monday morning and I had a lovely activity to start...horse riding 😃 We drive to look for the horses then herded them back to the paddock for a rub down before going on our 1 and a half hour trek. I had Indi, who was not keen on the rub down but was wonderful to ride.  We saw the whole group of 14 giraffe, Zebra and oryx, and couple of Springbok and an ostrich. Monday afternoon I had the fun job of animal cage cleaning...exactly as it sounds, picking up poop and dried food, cleaning out  then topping up water wholes. Tuesday bright and early Tommie, Pingu and I headed off to Rhino Rangers for the rest of the week. This is sleeping in the reserve with the Wild animals in tents. We started off dumping our stuff and heading straight out to find rhino's, I'm happy to say we got lucky and found one after around an hour. He was lovely, only about 8 metres away. We then went back for lunch before heading out again, we didn't see anything for a while but then got told we were bein...

Day 3 started fairly warm after a better night's sleep and my job this morning is carnivor cage cleaning, I thought they would at least move out the carnivors for this but, no...I was in Lucky the 3 legged cheetahs enclosure with her just 3 metres away hissing and growling, you'd think she'd be happy with a fresh water hole but clearly not! I made sure not to turn my back on her as even with 3 legs she could catch me in under 1 minute!  Day 4 was small animal food prep, sounds easy but not really!! We had to mix 4 huge tubs of slushy corn with fresh cut up veg (also prepared by us) in a bah tub, it was hard work but actually quite enjoyable. We then had to cut up the meat and chicken for the meat eaters (meerkats, polecat, mongoose, goats and monkeys).  After lunch and the one I've been waiting for, Cheetah walk, wow it didn't disappoint, we walked 3 beautiful boys, Bolt, Bullet and Flash for around 100 metres then got to sit with them in the shade for 3 hours, they...

After leaving Capetown Monday morning, I arrived in Windhoek airport along with 3 other volunteers. Tommie, Pingu and Blueberry (not all their real names), Dutch, Norwegian and Polish, all very lovely.  It took an hour drive in the truck, that felt like the floor was going to fall out due to the crazy roads for us to arrive at the sanctuary. We got the short tour, given our uniforms then shown our rooms, turns out I'm sharing with Blueberry, who is not the tidiest roommate! After quick showers we met for dinner and had a chat around the fire pit, we felt very much the newbies! Who knew the temperature would drop quite so drastically, it was freezing 🥶 I actually wore layers in bed and used a blanket!  First full day... Our group thought we would only do our morning activity but turns out they said we could miss our induction in the afternoon and just get straight to it.  I am in Lion group this week, although my one buddy (every other group has 5) hasn't arrived yet so I...

I has an early start today so we could fit in all the fun. There were 8 others on the trip today, still no one who will ve volunteering with me but all very pleasant. It wasn't as warm today so the rip over to seal island was rather chilly and the boat rather choppy, however still enjoyable.  We then drove past the 12 apostles and took some beautuful pictures of the view.  Cape point was lovely, just not as warm as I had hoped. We had a very nice lunch in Simon's Town, which looked very British. We even got to see a whale splashing it's tail out in the water,  that was special as our guide told us it was very unlikely we would get to see one. Unfortunately it didn't stick around long enough for us to get a picture 😕  Lastly we stopped by to say hi to the peninsula penguins. They live on a beautiful beach which we were not allowed on, they had not long had chick's so there were lots of cute fluffy one around!  Of course on the drive home it started to rain and g...