South Africa Part 2

Hello and welcome to part two of our South African adventure! At the end of the last post I left you with a few photos from our last few quiet days in Cape Town, after which we jumped back on the plane and headed back to Jo'burg for a couple of days before heading off to Meagen and Matthew's wedding.

After gathering some food, it was time to head off to the Blue Moonlight Lodge for a couple of days to celebrate the wedding and take a game drive, so here are a few photos from the game drive and the beautiful wedding, where I took the photos of the girls getting ready.

You can see more of the photos from the day here: Victoria Woolley Event Photography

After a wonderful few days of celebrating, it was time to say good bye to the family for a few days and head of to Mongena Reserve for a few nights with mum and dad, and chance for the four of us to celebrate our respective wedding anniversaries together. On arrival we had a bite to eat and discussed activities for the next few days, then after a quick unpack it was time to head off on our first game drive and what a way to start, rhino, elephant and even a caracal!

We decided as well as the drives we should take a bush walk and tracked a rhino and find some cool bugs, which led to a conversation that would see myself and Chris take off with Jessie the following morning for the best part of four hours in search of the smaller things, insects, small mammals, reptiles, basically whatever we could find and we were certainly not disappointed. Top of my list was a chameleon, but having no luck we set off to the dam and found some damselflies, butterflies and even a mother mouse and her babies but still no chameleon. But our luck was in and as we got back to the vehicle there it was small, cold and covered in dew drops right in front of the adapted land cruiser, not entirely sure my excitement was fully understood but I could have happily spent the next couple of hours with this little fella! So, here are a few photos of that encounter and some of the other cool critters we found on that fantastic morning in the bush.

Not one to miss an opportunity, I also wandered around the grounds looking for anything else of interest and managed to find a few lizards that were very obliging when it came to having their photos taken! Here are just a couple of them.

If you would like to see more of the images from this amazing trip just click on the link below which will take you to the album on Facebook.

South Africa 2014

I would like to take the time to extend a huge thank you to the amazing, dedicated and enthusiastic rangers at Mongena and in particular Jessie and Dafnika for all their help in finding everything that they did, it was an incredible morning and thoroughly enjoyed! I think that often when people go on safari, be it to South Africa or any other part of Africa they don't take in all the smaller species that are so vital to the ecosystem, we all love lions, elephants rhinos etc, but the invertebrates, reptiles and small mammals are so fascinating I cannot wait to have the chance to go back and spend more time looking for and photographing these smaller animals.

For now though, I am back home and there is no rest for the wicked as in less than a week I will be opening up a pop-up shop with my mum in Frome and there is lots to do! More about that in my next post, for now time to go and get wrapping and pricing!

Thanks for reading, hope you have enjoyed my instalments from South Africa. In my next post I will be sharing my thoughts on the Sigma 120-300mm lens with images.

Bye for now!!