Woo hoo it's my birthday and I got to skype Mum with video - clearly some birthday luck! I was on cook group this morning so got up and assisted with cooking pancakes for everyone. My cook group offered to do breakfast without me, but didn't want to make them do all the work and to be fair, if you are not cooking there is not much else to do on a day when we are not moving.

We headed to Matopos National Park for a spot of Rhino walking. This morning we went to a bushman's cave painting site and saw some paintings that are thousands of years old. The Bushman no longer exist in Zimbabwe, but thousands of years ago used to roam the country and were a nomadic tribe. They were small, never over 5 foot 2 inches and only took from the land what they needed to live. There are cases now of their paintings being used to restock game into areas based on what was there in times gone by. The paintings where not amazing, but were amazing that they were that old and still relatively well preserved. In Matopos there are over 5000 painting sites, however in the 70s the belief was that Linseed oil being put on the paintings would help with their preservation, however it actually just stripped the paintings from the cave walls - got to love how some people think they know if all and more problems end up resulting.

We had lunch by a lake with resident Hippo's, however they were unconcerned with us and just stayed out in the middle bobbing up and down and making bubbles. We were more worried about the crocodile on the bank which ended up going into the water and then we didn't see him… luckily he was also seemingly unconcerned with us and we didn't see him again either. We then spent the afternoon seeking out White Rhino. A few times we were allowed out of the car to walk through the bush, which is really rare in a game park. Our guide, Dave, carried a rifle slung over his shoulder to protect us in a dangerous situation. Unfortunately my birthday luck had clearly been used on my skype call this morning and we could actually count the amount of game we saw all day on 2 hands and there was unfortunately no Rhino in that count.

Things we were told:

- Matopo has the most visible granite landscape displays in the world

- That we would get to walk within 5 metres of the Rhino

- That we would see Bushman paintings in the morning

What we were not told:

- That rain meant that the game would simply hide and it would seem like the park had no wildlife in it

- That we would only see one bushman cave painting, but that it would take at least 2.5 hours to get there!

Despite all this we were in good spirits and the group sang me Happy Birthday every hour on the half hour for the first 6 hours of our trip. I definitely felt the birthday love today!

I made chocolate cupcakes in the owner of the campsites' oven last night so tonight we had 2 cupcakes with a small blob of caramel added lovingly by Julie and me and hot custard. What a birthday treat J