I spent the morning packing and chilling before being driven to the airport for a late morning flight to Port Elizabeth some 450 miles east of Cape Town. From there it was over an hour in a minibus to the reserve. For a large part the journey was flat and boring and hardly remote but as we headed further east the landscape became more varied, more like a drier version of the Yorkshire Dales but with slightly more exotic vegetation.
Our accommodation is more luxurious than I expected, comfortable twin rooms with an en-suite bathroom and a door that opens out onto a small veranda. There is a comfortable communal area and dining room and outside a fire pit and a very small pool (although I’m not sure the colour will entice me to enter). It is also a much more international bunch than I had expected. Of the five in the minibus there were three British, a Frenchman and a Spaniard. At the communal dinner we had once those already here were back from their day's work we met Italians and Portuguese and Germans as well as more French and British.
I spent the evening chatting and playing 'Uno' with Spanish, Italians and French and although we were all in the same game we all seemed to be playing by different rules. EU anybody? Tomorrow we have an introductory brief and we are then going to start working. I am told by those that have been here for a week or more that the afternoons tend to be work free and you are given the opportunity to see wildlife and they certainly had some impressive photos to show for their time here. It promises to be a great experience.
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