Hammer and Tongs

All creatures great and small....

Back at work after a fantastic four days with Pam in the Pilanesberg.

The Pilanesberg for those who don't know; is a National Game reserve situated in the Bojanala Region of the North West province 2 hours from Johannesburg in South Africa, so it makes for a nice easy getaway for the weekend.

So we peddled out of town on Friday getting there in time to take a leisurely drive through a part of the park before sundown, At this point I will mention we go to the park twice a year for our timeshare weekends but have missed the earlier one this year due to other travel commitments... we like to travel a lot; if you are interested, our last years entry can be read here.

Weather to start with was a bit rainy, not that that worries us, but as the weekend progressed so the temperature went up, on one of the evenings we were still experiencing 30 Degree heat at 6 PM at night, and that was when it was cooling down.

But back to the main point.... firstly there were thankfully no baboon incidents as experienced the last time, but we did see creatures of the muffin stealing variety (see earlier post)

Now let me explain something to you who uninitiated into sight seeing in a game park, this is not a zoo, the animals walk around wild and free while you sit closed up- nice and safe in your car..... no you cant get out of the vehicle except at designated spots where you can picnic safely behind a large game fence. So to continue.... because said animals are roaming around free you don't walk or in this case drive from one "exhibit" to the next, you have to drive and drive and drive..... and .... d...r...i...v...e until you find something, so you get to look at a lot of great bush scenery and you start looking at the smaller creatures .... the very small creatures, like dung beetles and locusts and shongololo's (African milipede). There we go who says you don't learn something new everyday.

Shongololo (African milipede)

Dung Beetles

Locust

But then you turn a corner and the vista's open out teeming with wildlife, and as usual the Pilanesberg never disappoints with what we saw and the amount we saw.

Geek/Nerd moment:

We like to keep a log of everything we see, this is usually done on a pre-prepared sheet of papers done in Excel and then manually written on. This time however we went all high tech and took an iPad with said form created in Numbers all ready for electronically ticking off, this was then uploaded each day to my Box.com repository for safe keeping, soooo soooo geeky!!!!

Any how moving literally and figuratively along, the vast vista's flowed past, inundating us with creatures large and small, an abundance of recently new borne's were the order of this trip, tiny elephants, warthogs, zebra's and springbok all pointed to a very healthy park.