Ken's Travel Diary: November 2005

Well, as you probably realised I'm back in London. It's Wednesday and I'm half way through this week's training session to re-introduce me to the intricacies of corporate law. It's pretty useful if not rather full on.

I found out on Monday that it's our annual group retreat this weekend too, so Friday evening I'm being flown over to Frankfurt for the weekend. We get put up in a hotel, have a day of talks, and then a nice dinner on the 53rd floor of a tower in the middle of town. Quite a nice surprise, although it does throw my plans of getting myself and the flat organised this weekend into a bit of disarray.

Speaking of the flat, I went over this evening for the first time since I've been back and have taken a few photos for your perusal. It is still a work in progress and most of the furniture is still in its plastic wrapping and none of my pictures have been hung on the walls yet.

Here you go...

My first sign that I was home...

Pic in my kitchen

Bathroom at the flat - I came up with the tiling scheme myself!

Bedroom - Tibetan chest at top of picture

Bed - 200x200cm mattress :-O

Hallway

Shelving for CDs and DVDs in the hallway

Bath - jacuzzi-style!

Sink and unit

Shelving in living room

Nice wooden blinds

Shelving in hallway again

Bathroom

Well...where to start. As soon as we got through the gates of Kwandwe Private Game Reserve we were confronted by all sorts of animals you only ever see staring back at you accompanied by a David Attenborough narration on TV. We arrived around 2 at the lodge, and had a quick lunch and then had half an hour or so to settle into our cabin before we went out on the first game drive in the afternoon.

The format was 5am wake up call, tea/coffee and biscuits at 5:30, set off on the morning game drive by 5:45 and back by 9/9:30. Then you'd have breakfast, go nap for a while or sit in the plunge pool, have lunch around 1-2, and then be out on another game drive by 4, returning around 8 to have dinner. It was fairly hectic, and I'm pretty tired now after it.

I'm not going to have enough time to write out every single encounter we had, but suffice to say we saw all of the big five except a leopard (there are only 3 in Kwandwe so the odds were against us), and many more. Highlights were tracking and finally finding two lionesses, being chased by a bull elephant this morning, seeing the cheetahs resting under a tree, seeing the white rhino and her calf up close, finding the rare black rhinos in the bush, going in a helicopter for the first time up to a mountain range to do some fly fishing, seeing a warthog looking out of his hole at us and then dashing out and much more. We saw scores of different animals and I'll have to tell you in person all the different things that happened, but there are lots of photos below.

K