Gap Year Experiences

Some horses, not many fish and lunch behind a waterfall

Friday 4 April 2008

I’m now sitting in the city that never sleeps, Johannesburg. We are here for one night before we head up to begin our 2 week game reserve programme tomorrow.

We left Durban on a huge high after watching the mighty Sharks defeat the Queenslands Reds in a full KingsPark stadium. As I mentioned in my last post, KingsPark is always an amazing experience and it lived up to its reputation with a great atmosphere during and after the match. On Sunday morning, we woke up to the perfect send-off from Durban. A 6 AM surf at NorthBeach saw us finding some perfect clean waves, a great way to end off the Durban surfing camp. It was awesome to see how everyone has not only improved with their surfing but how enthusiastic they are about it. The stoke of surfing has really affected a lot of the group! The one image that stands out in my mind of our last morning in Durban was Enzo hooking into a perfect 4 foot wave and riding it almost into the beach, An incredibly impressive display from someone who first got on a surfboard less than 2 months ago!

It was a bitter-sweet goodbye, but eventually we have had to leave the coast and head inland. Our first stop was a horse ranch in the southern area of the Drakensberg mountains. This is an incredibly beautiful area and we spent a couple of days there, horse-riding, fishing and enjoying the amazingly peaceful surroundings. From there we moved into the central area of the mountains where we managed a great hike to a waterfall. We had our lunch on a ledge behind the waterfall looking through the curtain of water. (pictures coming soon!) We left the mountains this morning and are about to head out for a bit of dinner and a few drinks in Joburg, before leaving civilisation behind for a couple of weeks in exchange for the beauty of the African bush and its wildlife. We will be out of touch for at least a week so there will be no more posts till then but I’ll write again as soon as I can so check back next week to see how our game reserve programme is going!

Cheers

Vince