Blyde River Camp
After saying goodbye to my beloved family and friends I arrived in Johannesburg. At the guesthouse I met the first 3 of my fellow students. We got along well so we decided to head up to the biggest shopping mall in Africa together. There we stocked up on books, battery packs and a sleeping bag for me because – typical for me – I only brought a silk sleeping bag with me. Of course we also had to fill our stomachs with good food before we could leave. We headed out back to the guesthouse with an Uber (which I didn’t know they had here). When we got close to our destination a huge rainstorm with lightning erupted and – lucky me – the power went out so we had an “unplugged” experience being a ‘TIA’ moment on literally the first day of the trip.
On the next day we met the rest of the students. After a 4 our drive we made it to Nelspruit where the head office of Ecotraining welcomed us with a lot of information. Unfortunately we were brought under in a 4 bed dorm room making me feel like I was back in the army: overtired, missing my friends and family, sweating in bed like a pig soaking the pillow and mattress. Can you guess what I was thinking in that moment?
I thought: ‘what the hell am I doing here? This isn’t for me. I want to go home straightaway!
But now, after one week, I have to say I’m starting to enjoy it here. We had a first aid course this week and I was not looking forward to it. Getting up every day at 5am is not the kind of thing I would do back at home and I think a lot of my friends will have a good laugh about that one. The lessons started early and went for ages. But we got lucky. Our teacher Andrew Miller was great at showing us first aid in a disciplined manner but also connected his course with the most imminent dangers in the bush and lightened our moods with his good sense of humor. His stories were very intriguing and he had me soaking up all of their details and the information he passed on to us.
We spent what little spare time we got every day down by the beautiful river Blyde, cooling off in its calm flow or we went to go and find animals to photograph.But now we’re ready to head on to our first ‘big five’ bushcamp named Karongwe out in the wild.
ALL ABOUT THE CAMP