Game Capture again!
…so 980km later I met the team and the 2 ACE students Ros and Tina. We caught Springbok and Mountain Reedbok for a couple of days (and got to fly in the chopper pretty regularly again WOOHO!!) in a nice farm near Bedford. I also went on my first real ‘hunt’..in that an animal was shot: we were supposed to shoot a Duiker (little tiny antelop) but couldnt find one so went for a Springbok…turned out it was a Kalihari bok which is the bigger variety (whoopsie!) what was interesting was we could actually see the bullet flying thru the air at the animal (4 x due to Ikey’s inability to shoot straight ;^) ) crazy, I thought
then the whole team went down to PE (Port Elizabeth) to Ikey’s fab beachfront house for the weekend..mainly so we could go to a bar on the beach to watch the Rugby world cup final….the whole bar (and it was a biggie) was packed with Bok supporters…and me. WE had a fab night cheering the teams, I was given roses by a couple of ladies (and guys??!!) when we lost but we all got smashed and had a great time. Shame about the scoreline though, eh?
next day bright and early Ikey woke everyone…and then went to bed leaving us all a bit groggy at 5:30 in the morning with nowt to do!….except laff at me, seeing as I lost my voice with all the singing and shouting the night before
anyhoo, then we went back to another couple of game reserves and caught more animals between LOTS of trips back and forwards to PE (Ikey wanted to keep seeing his new baby daughter, Inka )
THEn we got to catch Giraffe! which was damn exciting – WOO! theyre big animals…the bulls can weigh up to 1200kg!!! we caught 22 with 3/4 days and only one died (which is a good hit rate as it can be dodgy catching them: basically they are darted from teh Chopper, then the ground crew race around (on bakkies
) like eejits to get close, then the guys jump out and run after the giraffe to trip it up with ropes!!!! once its goes down, they get a reversal drug to wake them and are blindfolded and ears blocked, then ropes are attached so we can drag/guide it back on its feet and into the waiting trailer/truck. 
Lots of fun and pretty hard work (except for me as I just stood around mostly, taking photos!
oh, and Ikey and his colleagues arranged tickets for us all to go to Bloemfontein to watch the Cheetahs pay teh Lions n the Currie cup final!…lots of drink later and the Cheetahs won a great game – fab atmosphere with fields taken up by affrikaaners braaing (bbqing) and drinking vast quantities of alcohol. I eventually gave up and went to sleep in the bakkie while everyone else got even more hammered till the late early hours! We all got to stay at a ‘friend’ of Tokmans house…which was nice
Tags: game capture, Travel
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