Another week filled with animals at Thanda. My number of photos is quickly increasing and I am having a crash course in Lightroom and backing up. I am crossing my fingers constantly that my computer does not die a horrible death and take all of my photos with it. I hope to be in a position later today to do my first ever back-up! Big scary that I have gotten to this ripe old age and never had to back up… but I won't say that too loudly lest my computer hears and gets ideas.

Seems that all of our feedback has been taken seriously and we have moved out of concentration camp food rations to having a large salad each day and the general quality of food had improved which is a great relief.

This week's highlight was definitely breakfast at the main lodge on Saturday morning. 4 of us left our camp (Intabane) at 8am and were driven to the main lodge. The main lodge is a 5 star facility which has 9 individual chalets that each has their own personal plunge pool on their deck. It was unfortunate that the lodge was booked out so we were not able to see a room. The staff met our game viewer with ice cold hand towels to cleanse the dust from our paws and faces - a luxury we do not experience at Intabane where having water is seen as pure luxury let alone ice cold water. We had a table on the deck which overlooked the park and a watering hole. The main camp has no fences and so animals wander freely and actually come to the waterhole that guests overlook from the main lodge's deck. We saw some Kudu and a turtle popped out of the pool to say hello. We walked in to the see the buffet and what a sight it was. There was granola, cereal, yoghurt, seeds, nuts, 2 different breads, 4 types of sliced fresh fruit, 2 cold cuts of meat, including Springbok, 2 types of cheese wheels, chutneys, gherkins, croissants, muffins and 4 freshly squeezed juices. They clearly shopped in a different shop to the Intabane staff. We had a nibble and were feeling very blessed when the waiter appeared with the hot menu. We could order eggs in any way one wished, omelettes, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, tomato and 2 more types of toast - we then knew that we had come to heaven! Following a cold and hot breakfast; impossible to choose one over the other, we headed to the curio shop and bought a few trinkets. Food and shopping, what lady could not be happy with a morning of these two ingredients.

This evening was Earth Hour, so we switched off all the lights -which took about 2 minutes - lite the campfire and stuffed ourselves full of toasted marshmallows. We even managed to do some painting with light photography and capture 'Earth Hour 2013' written in torch light which we were all very pleased with. Takes quite a bit of trial and error when painting with light on the camera.