The Super Seven

Earliest start of the tour as we were in our open sided truck off to Kruger Park at 530am for some early morning safari action. It was a bit brisk but being an early morning cyclist in Welly I found it a bit easier than most, oh and I’m as hard as nails. Some people on the other trucks looked like they were gonna cry from the cold. Anyways, my hanging out of the truck paid dividends early as I spotted out first giraffe of the tour, a few metres off to the side of the road.

On this early morning safari the animals were a lot more active and there was much more to see, we pretty much saw everything we did the other day, ticked our big five box number 3 with a big herd of Cape Buffalo, they are supposed to be pretty nasty but they just looked like friendly cows to me! The highlight of the ride this morning was when a cheetah walked across the road in front of us, apparently stalking some impala, a breakfast kill would have been mint to see, but after hanging round for a few minutes, and no action we moved on. The cheetah is one of the hardest to spot in Kruger as there are only 200 of them, so we got pretty lucky and outside of the Big 5, they with the wild dog form the super 7. As for the elusive 2000 lions in Kruger, they again proved too hard to find today, ah well, still an awesome trip and it was great seeing all this stuff in the wild,

The 4 hour ride back to Jozi (local lingo for Joburg) was highlighted by a number of fires, which seems to be a favourite African past time, you don’t drive very far without seeing a blaze. So when we got back we figured it was Friday night in the big smoke so after a number of confusing conversations with the African locals at out hotel bar, some white guy saw me struggling and recommenced a place called Newscafe, so cab ride later we were on the lash out in Jozi for the first time, the place was packed with football supporters, Argies, Brazilians, and of course the Aussies, it was a large night of beers, cocktails and shots and even a couple of dodgy haka on request, but everyone seemed to love them and we were easily the most vocal fan base in the bar. An interesting aside, every second bird in the place seemed to be a hooker, or maybe it was the just the ones I got chatting too, anyhow I did go home alone, well apart from Rosco.