'Put your hands up for Shamwari'!!! So me, Abi, Bex & Carla arrived at Shamwari Game Reserve on 3rd Feb 07 after many hours of travelling, and waiting around Joburg airport for 7 hours...our first impressions were quite mixed as we didnt really know what to expect there. Basically, what we were doing there was, we were on a student programme (for lots of gap year students) doing volunteer work around the game reserve for a month. Some people were there for 1 month, and some for 3.

Shamwari is a massive game reserve about and hour and a half from Port Elizabeth, and 15 mins from the nearest town Alicedale...which included 2 bars for the locals and students at the reserve, and one shop and a liquor shop...so was pretty dead there!

After a few days working there we settled in, and met some awesome people...Sadie, Katie, and Grace who was from Aus. Us 7 pretty much stuck together. A couple weeks into Shamwari Maggie came on the programme (34yr old irish lady) who was lovely...and joined our truck.

So the concept of what we did at Shamwari...waking up between 4.30-6.30am to leave the student lodge an hour after waking, then driving for roughly 45mins-1hour on our safari trucks to where ever we would be working that day on the reserve (it is massive, therefore takes upto 1hour 30mins to get from one side of the reserve to the other driving 80mph!)

So some of the work we had to do was chopping down trees and acacia bushes with machetes, packing huge rocks into metal casing to stop erosion, putting up mesh and poles to hold up a bird cage (about 30 by 10m big!!), Collecting bones and animal heads from a cheetahs cage...sick!!, feeding the wild dogs and lions'cheetahs/leopards, darting a lioness and a rhino... So some of it was ok but some boring as hell, especially in 35degee heat!

When we werent working we just went on game drives around the reserve...on average once a day/every other day...so was pretty amazing getting to do that everyday for a month when guests pay thousands for a few days to do that...and dont always get to see all the animals!!

So we'd be driving along during the day to get from one place to the other around the reserve, and just see giraffes walking right next to us, or having our truck surrounded by 40 elephants, or seeing a pride of lions!!!! So...pretty amazing! Although after a couple of weeks it was pretty standard to see all these wild animals strolling past us, and felt normal. lol

We had some really fun times on our truck...mostly because our ranger Anya was a crazy woman and a psycho driver, but possibly the funniest woman you'll meet...a bit of a description - looks like a 12 year old boy, but is actually 24, has a thick afrikaans accent, eats plants and tree leaves (because the animals do) and has an unhealthy obsession with rhinos!! (pronounces them GHINOS) Her room is covered with pictures of them, and she has a shrine!! So everyday at some point we'd have to go and look for bloody rhinos, it got to the point where seeing a rhino was the most normal thing in the world! lol.

Anyway...so she drove about 100mph around the reserve, so bad that one day i was in the back and she went over a bump and i flew out my seat and hit the pole on the roof, blacking me out for a few seconds and leaving me with a big bump and bruised coxix (cant spell) when i fell back into my seat. was sooooo painful :( but very funny...was crying and laughing so much.

It was the hottest month in South Africa but the weather was really schizo - one day boiling to death, next day raining and cloudy (we had 3 thunder storms in February...one so bad all electricity cut out for the night).