Into Africa

Hello again everyone! After some agonizing waiting (and school), I am finally getting back to one of my biggest passions and traveling the world. After an amazing spring last year hopping around Europe, I decided to use Spring 2011 to have some adventures rather than being a straight-up tourist. This trip, I'm leaving the beaten path and headed to South Africa to work as a ranchhand on a Big 5 game preserve (the Big 5 is lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, and cape buffalo, but the preserve has everything else as well). I'll be doing everything from tracking the predator herds with telometry, keeping tabs on the plains game, patrolling the fence for poachers, manual labor, and feeding the orphaned and injured animals within the sanctuary.


I'll be flying DFW-Atlanta-Johannesburg-Cape Town over the course of a good 24 hour period. The kicker is the 15 1/2 hour flight from ATL-JNB that turns into 17 1/2 on the way back. I'll get into Cape Town on Saturday evening and then have two full days by myself in Cape Town before meeting up with my project group on Monday afternoon. For the two days that I'm by myself, I'll be staying with all my stuff at the Tulip Hotel near the V&A waterfront, right in the vicinity of most of the touristy stuff around Cape Town.

Come Monday afternoon, I'll go south to Fish Hoek, a suburb of Cape Town closer to the Cape of Good Hope, to meet up with my project group and have orientation. We'll all stay there in Cape Town at the project house for Monday night before packing up and taking a bus to our project on Tuesday morning. From there, I'll be in Sidbury Village (85 km outside of Port Elizabeth in East Cape) for the rest of my stay. I won't have my laptop like I did in Paris, but there's internet and a shared computer in one of the lodges so I will do my best to keep the blog updated as regularly as possible. I'll have my ipod touch at least, so I'll be able to do quick updates via Twitter or Facebook and then keep notes for lengthier blog posts if I can't write them on site.

Once again, thank you everyone for your support! Stay tuned for more stories!