South Africa - Part 2

As mentioned in the previous post everything had been pre booked. When we arrived in Johannesburg we realised the the hotel we had been booked into was a five star hotel, very flash! We had a little look round our room and the hotel and decided to go for a swim in the pool, very round but a little manky really. After that it was down to the bar for a drink before dinner. My dinner was sublime lamb and mashed potato! Yum! Peter wasn't so pleased with his as they had overcooked his steak. Anyway it was back to the room to this... How neat and tidy is that, and the chocolates were yummy!
Anyway, it was off to bed for me early start and all that in the morning, as I came out of the bathroom Peter was standing in my way (not too unusual) but he was looking pretty serious and then he popped the question and asked me to marry him! I was crying a bit much for him to hear my answer but it was a yes! It wasn't a big surprise as we had just brought the ring together. The next day we started our pre conference tour with 9 other delegates. It was really cool to get out of the cities and see a bit more of the rural areas. This photo was the first photo of us as the future Mr and Mrs Stevens at a lovely place we stayed on our first night on tour. For some strange reason we were booked into the honeymoon suite too!We had dinner at the lodge with the other guests and after a lovely meal we made our excuses to leave to call Ma and Pa with the news, I was dying to tell them! As we left the table I let it slip that we had just got engaged so really 11 total strangers knew before anyone else did, somehow it made it just that little more real and special at the same time.

The following day we headed off to see some more sights this being one of the most memorable...

The second night on tour was spent at a lodge on the border of Kruger national park with a large deck overlooking the river. We had dinner out on the deck and our lovely tour organisers had brought us all sparkling wine to celebrate our engagement, which was totally lovely!

The following day was a day drive through Kruger park to do some game spotting, within about an hour this is what we came upon...

A full pride of lions feeding on a recent kill. Now the road was quite busy as these sightings are quite rare but there was one car that was letting their son (younger then 10) sit on the window to look at the lions. I don't know about you but I wouldn't stick my hand out the window with 11 lions around!

Anyway, we arrived at the camp and checked in. That evening Peter headed off on a night safari and I had the conference opening function. The following morning it was another safari drive for us and we saw among other things these two...

I managed to get a cold for day 1 of the conference and spent most of my time drugged up on cold medicine while trying to demo software. The evening functions were amazing, evening 1 was a night drive to a bush bri. The camp we stayed in was fully fenced to stop animal coming in so it was a little nerve racking to eat dinner out in the middle of the bust with one armed guard for protection. At one point we did have a visit from a hyena but that was nothing compared to the trip to the bri...

We were in open trucks, no sides to speak of and we came across three hippos, so there we are watching the hippos with the lights on them. The driver turned off the engine and then we noticed that the hippos were getting a little agitated, two of them then turned and started to run at the truck, I was on that side and very close to them. The driver yelled out turn of the lights and all the lights went out, so there we are sitting in the dark with two hippos charging at us... I'm fairly sure the entire truck stopped breathing! I heard them get very close and I'm sure if I reached out I would have touched them. The driver turned the engine on and they seemed to vanish into thin air. Scary!

There were so many other stories I wont bore you with them... but there are loads more photos here