After a few days of living the life of a professional photographer,
I was getting used to it; I was up and ready before 5:00 a.m. We had our
breakfast then set out for our last game drive before flying to Cape Town in
the evening.
We caught sight of some impalas and various types of birds, such as
the Lilac Breasted Roller Bird, one of South Africa’s most colored birds. At
one point, I saw everyone stop to examine… a pile of elephant dung! That wasn’t
exactly what I had in mind for a photo subject but things got more interesting
when I took a closer look: there was a dung beetle digging its way into the
pile. This may sound like nothing, but I had never seen a live dung beetle
before so I lay with my belly on the floor next to Jason and intently watched that
little guy form its ball of dung and roll it away towards its burrow for food
storage.
A bit further down the road, we stopped to take some macro shots of
orb weaver spiders and I was amazed by their size. Time was flying by and we
still wanted to visit a nearby village before our 7-hour drive to
Johannesburg’s airport.
On the way back, I realized that so far I had come across 3 animals
of South Africa’s Big Fives: I had seen a lion, an elephant and a buffalo – all
that was left were the leopard and the rhinoceros. Not bad! Then Guts said that
I missed the Small Five! I found out these were the elephant shrew, the lion
ant, the red-billed buffalo weaver, the leopard tortoise and the rhino beetle.
We arrived at Shalati Pre-School in the Mnisi community where we
were welcomed by a few students and the only teacher there. Shalati provides
support to children and prepares them for the transition into primary school.
The kids were fun; I took some photos of them and showed them how they looked
in the picture, then it wasn’t long before they were posing and making funny
faces. After that, I grabbed my notebook and started drawing while they watched
then tried their hand at sketches too. As we were making to leave, I gave my
pen to a very shy kid and joined the team while the kids were shouting to us
“ChupChup, Chup Chup”, which means “everything is alright” in Xhosa, a South
African language.
As we drove towards the airport, we stopped repeatedly to take
photos of the beautiful landscapes along the way. It was raining a lot and we
had to hurry to catch our flight to Cape Town. I felt we were going to miss it;
I think we all did and were cool about it. We finally arrived there only 15
minutes before departure and Jason grabbed our passports for the check-in,
while we unloaded the ton of material we were carrying. We went in loaded like
pack mules only to find out that we had missed our flight!
Oh
well, we spent the night at a guesthouse owned by Guts’ family sipping Amarula
and wine, laughing as we recounted the adventures of the day.
