So yeah I haven't written in ages, a nice mix of being busy and being lazy! When did I even last post? I think since then I've had an off week, done my mock drive, done some wine tasting and now getting stuck into the last week of studying before our exam next Tuesday 😬 Off week was lovely, went on a little holiday with Gabe's family to a farm near Lydenburg, staying in beautiful little cabins right next to a river. They're all amazing at cooking so we just ate great food, went exploring up and down the hills on the farm, and looking for snakes under rocks and dead logs. Just a really nice week and so nice to meet all of Gabe's family! Not so fun to come back to work after such a nice week, with the stress of mock drives to do and only a few weeks before our exam, was a bit of a harsh drop back to reality.

Everyone has now done their mock drives where, instead of sitting in the passenger seat, our trainers pretend to be the assessor and sit right at the back of the vehicle and mark us as if we're doing our actual assessment. Kind of freaky suddenly having to be in charge of everything, completely on your own initiative. Of course on our full drives up to now we've already been mostly in charge, but actually sitting on your lonesome in the front and running the whole show just feels way more serious! I was really happy with my drive, I'm pretty sure I covered everything except for astronomy, but that's a bit hard to do when you've got a cloudy sky! We didn't really see any animals so, again, my time was only just long enough, but hopefully if I get just a couple of sightings on my actual drive then it will easily make the time up. Well actually we did have an awesome hyena sighting- we were driving up a little hill with dense vegetation on both sides and it was walking down the road towards us. I stopped and turned off the engine and the hyena kept coming towards us, then just looked really confused as to why it couldn't keep walking down the road! It must have stood there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what we were and whether it could get past us, then clearly decided it couldn't fit past us and turned and walked off. At one point it got so close to our front bumper and was studying us so closely that it looked like it was going to jump up onto the bonnet! On all my previous drives I've mentioned how elephants apparently really like the area and pointed out trees pushed over by them and dung and what not. Well, on this drive you could *really* tell that they'd been through in the last week or so! We had to saw up a few trees that had been pushed into the road so that we could drive past and you could see where they had chowed the tops of the branches; it's kind of terrifying seeing how easily they push over massive trees! But yeah I would have passed had that been my assessment so I'm happy, there's still more that I want to do and learn before the final assessment but I'm pretty confident that it will be fine 😊 Gabe's mock also went really well, of course, and on that afternoon drive both groups had the most amazing sightings of the same herd of elephants. We stopped on the road while they were on our left and they came right past the vehicle; about 10-15 of them including young ones and a huge male who looked like he was coming to the end of his musth. They studied us a bit, one youngster tried his luck stepping at us until Ed warned him off with a "hey!". One of the older females stood right in front of the vehicle mock feeding, picking up trunkfuls of bushy honey cups and bringing them up to her mouth, but just dropping them and not actually eating! Apparently this is something they do when they're keeping an eye on you but want to look like they're not- sneaky sneaky!

This week is a bit more relaxed than last week's continuous mock drives. We're back to doing rifle handling and drills to prepare us for our advanced rifle handling at the end of the semester. It seems a bit weird to have gathered all the momentum for mock drives then to just stop for a week before the assessment drives start, but it makes sense to give us a week without the stress of drives and 5am starts, so that we can study for our FGASA test on Tuesday. We had a big birds sight and call test on Monday which I think went really well, then in the afternoon we had wine tasting! Nice to relax a bit and whilst everyone "knows" that you have white wine with chicken and fish or whatever, and red wine with red meat, it was awesome to properly try different food and wine combinations and understand exactly why certain flavours go together or not.

Then on Tuesday we started rifle drills and shooting. My group started with practical shooting in the morning and, whilst I wasn't that happy with my shooting on the static targets, I managed to shoot the lion in the head when we did the simulated charge! That's where a life size lion picture on a sled is pulled towards you at the speed of a charging lion- 22.2m/s, or 80kph! And before it reaches you, in 2.5 seconds, you have to shout at the lion, shout at your guests to stand still, chamber a round, aim, and fire. And holy crap is that thing faster than you'd think! We didn't even do the gusts handling or yelling part, just the chamber, aim and fire part, and even that is difficult. You honestly don't even have time to aim properly, it's just instinct so I was quite surprised I actually managed to get it! Only on my third go, but frankly I wasn't expecting to get anywhere near the target so I was bloody happy that I got it at all. The red dots on the pic are my second and third

shots.

In the afternoon we practiced the shouting and guests control part, which feels so stupid at first. Yelling "HEY! STAND STILL!" at a cardboard cut out of a lion and then reassuring your "guests" that everything's ok feels so weird! But obviously you get used to it and I discovered that I can yell pretty frickin loud at a fake lion. Lots of revision to do this week for FGASA exam on Tuesday, then my assessment on Saturday! It's all happening now 😊