To Pilanesberg, Wednesday 26 October, Trip Day Six part 2

It’s clear that the school visits were challenging for both groups: for Ros, Tom, Holly and Hannah, who went with Mike (H and H’s host) to the primary school where he’s the principal, and for Helen, Ed, Ruth and Millie, who went with Ntuku to the secondary school where’s she a head of department.

It would be better if you heard that story from them (check http://matlosane.blogspot.com/ -- though the group hasn't had a chance to write up their experience as I type this on Friday 28th; it may well be uploaded on that site later today) since I wasn’t there. But for Ros, Tom, Holly and Hannah, the challenge was chiefly to do with being split up, placed with four classes, and being left, quite alone, to ‘teach’ for a double period – just over an hour. They rose wonderfully to the occasion by the sound of it, each improvising in their own way. They were struck by the motivation of the pupils to learn and by their discipline. For Helen, Ed, Ruth and Millie, the challenge had more to do with the social and economic deprivation in the midst of which the school they visited is set. They had a chance to speak to teachers and to pupils, and learned for example about the high teenage pregnancy rates and the low recent rate of university entrance (despite the high aspiration of the students to go there).

Both groups had returned from the school visits by 2pm and we were soon on the road north, to our motel -- stopping only to visit the site of a Boer War cemetery and the site of a British run concentration camp for captured Dutch people. Astonishingly, this meant not captured Dutch soldiers, but non-combatants, women and children, of whom hundreds died.

The journey north took over three hours, with barely a stop, and we were all quite tired by the time we arrived. We traveled with eight Ikageng friends: three couples (including Mike and Anna, Peter and Rika our hosts), the Dean and the bus driver. It was a small way of expressing our thanks to treat them to this overnight trip.

There was then a hiatus, as we sorted out some confusion over rooms. The guest house we stayed in is brand new. Indeed, it is not yet finished. The builders were on site, still laying tiles, landscaping gardens and so on. The place opened for guests less than a month ago, and we were the first big group. The first issue was that rooms we were shown were all doubles (which were fine for the three couples with us), when we were expecting 11 to be twin beds. It took several hours for a solution to be found, which involved seven of us being off-loaded to a separate property about 3 minutes drive away. In the end, the management found 11 separate beds for us, across 5 separate rooms. It meant that we occupied 9 rooms in the end, one more than we had originally booked, and we were only charged for the 8 – which was typical of the effort the staff went to, to make our stay a good one. In the meantime, we’d had a delicious evening meal.

The other issue was bugs. The rooms were neither air-conditioned, nor pest-controlled, and all of us found ourselves doing battle with insects of various kinds. It became an nice joke the following day, as we prepared to head for the game park. Ahead of the Big Five, which we hoped to see, we drew up a list of the Bug Five, we wanted never ever to see again: spiders, cockroaches, mosquitoes, fleas and crickets. Escaping bugs involved various strategies: the following morning we heard how Ruth and Hannah had changed rooms twice, how Millie had seen a huge and poisonous looking spider in her room but chose not to mention it to Holly, who would have been the more frightened; how Helen and Ros wrapped themselves in tablecloths because their sheets were flea-ridden and how Ed and Tom had gone on the attack, with Deet spray, shooting on sight.

Thankfully, it was a short night: we were up at 4.30 to prepare for the safari.