I have finally touched down in South Africa! The last week has been just as hectic as the week before I left for Whitehorse. I finished moving all my stuff from my apartment to a storage locker at the edge of town at around 3pm, and I was at the airport by 5 where I met up with everyone I would be living with for the next several months. Seven of us left Winnipeg; Five undergraduate technicians, a fellow MSc student and myself. The flight from Winnipeg was absolutely brutal. I remember the excruciating pain that I had on several flights to and from Newfoundland when I was younger, but haven’t really experienced it since. The trip to Toronto was basically two hours of ear pain. Meanwhile, the lady sitting a few seats away from me was having a mini panic attack and getting hammered off of wine. Every so often she would ask me a question or just yell “HEY, BEARDED MAN”. I thought that I might have to deal with a day and a half of ear pain, but fortunately the flight from Toronto to London was much nicer. I watched a movie, and slept the rest of the way. After a seven hour layover in London we hopped on our last flight to Johannesburg, which was less than half full. Everyone had at least two seats to themselves, so it was a very enjoyable flight. We arrived in Johannesburg at about 7 in the morning (two days after we departed).

As soon as we left the airport we headed to our hostel in Pretoria. Even after my visit to Scotland last year, I was still a bit shocked that everyone was driving on the wrong side of the road (yes Dawn, the wrong side). Most of the two first days in Pretoria were spent running errands and gathering lab supplies. After our first grocery shop, one women felt obliged to ask us why we were buying 10-15kg of peanut butter. When we told her it was to catch squirrels, I couldn’t tell if she was amused, confused, or interested. Overall the area in Pretoria that we stayed in was quite nice. One of the highlights of our few days in the city was the low cost of restaurants. At the local bar I ordered a steak, calamari, and a beer for about 13 dollars Canadian. We also managed to spend some time on the University of Pretoria campus while visiting some research collaborators, and it is perhaps the nicest looking University I’ve seen. I suppose when you don’t have to worry about snow, you can afford to do a little more landscaping.

On our third day in Pretoria, we decided to take a trip to Pilanesberg, which is a game reserve about an hour and a half away from the city. We got to the reserve at about 9am, and on the way in a troop of baboons walked across the road in front of us. The entire day was completely overwhelming, with new species around every corner. Here are a small snapshot of some of the things I managed to see:

This Fork Tailed Drongo posed for us on the way in

This vervet monkey with her juvenile that were hanging out on the roof of one of the hides that we were staying in. She had just finished nursing when I took this shot.  

Both this African Spoonbill and these two hippos were sitting in a watering hole just in front of the same hide. Unfortunately the two hippos did not move the entire time we were watching them.

These are both Greater Kudu. The one with the horns is a male, and the one without horns is a female.

  

Don’t Warthog look kind of funny when they are feeding?

  

This Marabou Stork was hanging out at a fairly large watering hole that was full of birds. I managed to see my first Ostrich here, tonnes of black heron and cattle egrets, white faced duck, and an African Fish Eagle.

This Blue Wildebeest calf decided to have a bit of a drink pretty close to our van.

For all you rugby fans out there, this is the antelope that the South African team is named after; the Sprinbok.

This Pied Kingfisher and Little Grebe were both hanging outside of one of the hides we stopped at. There was also a Crocodile hanging around at the shore, but I couldn’t get a half decent shot of it.

This dark capped bulbul is fairly common, but they are still quite stunning

There isn’t much of a scale here, but this steenbok is fully grown and less then waist height.

This zebra was so close to our car that I couldn’t take many shots with the lens that I had on. S/he was quite curious though.

I was so excited to see my first wild monitor! This water monitor was basking on some rocks under a small bridge that we passed over.

I was amazed at how many white rhino we managed to see. Towards the end of the day, a mother with her calf finally decided to move out of the grass to let me take a photo.

I was taking some shots of this giraffe for a good five minutes before I realised that I cranked the exposure compensation down to about -2.5. Luckily some of the photos were salvageable.

  

At the very end of the day, we had managed to see most of the relatively common animals in the reserve with the exception of elephants (and lions, but they are less common in Pilanesberg). At the very last stretch before the gate, there was a fairly large herd of elephants. All in all, its been a pretty good day.