Lesedi Cultural Village, Pilanesberg and Sun City

This weekend was one of the busiest we have had in South Africa. Warwick in Africa planned a weekend excursion for us, which we embarked upon on Saturday morning. Sadly, my version of this trip was slightly marred by the fact that I developed a nasty stomach bug overnight and spent all weekend feeling a bit sick with my stomach churning like crazy.

Our first stop was at Lesedi Cultural Village, here a selection of actors pretend to be members of various traditional African tribes, while a guide takes you around. Honestly, it's a little odd, but it was quite interesting. At the end they performed a variety of tribal dances which were, unsurprisingly, amazing to watch. I did, however, turn down the offer of friend worms, since I had limited faith in my stomach's ability to deal with it. Apparently, they taste a little like fish and are rather chewy and difficult to swallow.

Miniature Zulu Homestead

We then carried on to Pilanesberg Game Reserve. We had a little under two hours before the park closed to take our first drive through, in our own mini buses. We saw a variety of animals, including elephants, giraffes, antelopes and quite a lot of gnu. The highlight of the drive was definitely at the end when we came across a herd of giraffes grazing at the edge of the road, followed by a mother elephant with her two babies. Unfortunately, the mummy elephant appeared to object to flash photography, and decided to charge our bus which lead to some extremely quick driving away by Lewis, as well as some awesome photos.

After this, we went to a guest house close to Pilanesberg where we were staying the night. Most of the group went out to the casino at Sun City, and, I'm told had a really great night out, I took the opportunity to go to bed and try and sleep off my stomach bug.

While this didn't work too well, it did mean that I had had a reasonable amount of sleep when we got up at 6.30 this morning to go on a second game drive. This time we had two and a half hours in a large open ranger's truck, with Bert, one of the Pilanesberg rangers, who not only drove us around but told us about the flora and fauna we were seeing. Along with more of the animals we saw yesterday, we saw hippos, warthogs and came extremely close to two white rhinos.

The final part of our trip took us to Sun City, a tourist reserve which has hotel rooms, a casino, food courts, and an artificial beach. We spent the afternoon on the beach, enjoying the sunshine. I didn't go into the water much on account of still feeling rather poorly, but enjoyed my book in the sunshine, and I did get the chance to go on a wander with Mathilde and saw some really pretty woodland paths, and streams.

It was a lovely, if exhausting weekend. Now to try and get over this bug in time for teaching tomorrow morning!