Monday we started off with a camp clean up after our week off, and then I headed into town to drop off the car and pick up supplies for the next month. The afternoon was spend in an weather and climate lecture, which made absolutely no sense at all, and as a result I spent the rest of the week attempting to understand what warm and cold fronts are, anabatic and katabatic and berg winds, the summer and winter weather patterns of South Africa, all the different cloud types and what type of weather they bring, wind, the coriolus effect, high and low pressure systems. By Friday morning I had give up and resorted to rote learning!
Tuesday was a game drive in the morning where we saw the two cheetahs 100m from the gate and got a fantastic sighing of them for about 45 minutes. we then got a brief sighting of a large herd of elephants towards the end of the drive-perhaps our luck is changing and we are going to start seeing some stuff! The afternoon was spent doing rifle dry runs again, this time we moved onto another couple of the tests we are going to do-it is hard to practice loading and aiming and shooting (slightly difficult due to the lack of bullets, our dry run turned into more of a "imagine you are putting a bullet in here" and air and pretend to pull the trigger run, but was still good to get some idea of what we need to do, and the time we have to do it in)
Wednesday was game drives all day again, as half the group were off doing their drivers tests. We didnt see much in the morning but as we were heading back from the afternoon game drive we saw some lions again, and got quite a nice sighting of them resting and playing in the grass.
Thursday sarted with our Biomes lecture, which was quite simple, but has a lot of information to remember (9 biomes with species, climate, vegetation type, geography, location). As our test had to be bought forward to Friday we got the afternoon to study.
Friday I had my drivers test, which involved a nice long day, leaving camp at 5.30, sitting at the driving centre all day studying, doing the test (which only took 30 minutes) more sitting and studying at the driving centre as the rest of the group did their test, then getting back to camp at 4.30 in time for the weekly test at 5! The positive was that I passed my drivers test (got told off for speeding as I was doing 30km which is apparently the speed limit, not the 60km that our instructor told us, and certainly not between 2 and 3 on the rev counter in third we were told to stick to as the speedometer didnt work in the truck. Mind you that didnt help me much as the steering wheel was so out of alignment I couldnt actually see the rev counter or speedometer anyway!)
Today we have off as half the group has gone to help at the Rocking for Rhinos festival, while the rest of us will go tomorrow.
Two cheetah brothers
Cheetah walk
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