Disclaimer: I used a £100 point and click camera during this trip so some of the photos (especially those taken in low light) could be better. I buying a DSLR next time I do something like this.



I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. I decided to do a two week volunteer programme as going for one day wasn’t going to be enough and the volunteer programmes seemed to offer the most bang for your buck in terms of time at sea.

Marine Dynamics and White Shark Projects both offer volunteer programmes. I went for the programme offered by Marine Dynamics. One thing I found quite surprising was the large discrepancy between the amount that different volunteers paid. Some agents charged considerably more than others for the same programme. If you’re thinking of booking a similar sort of trip it’s definitely worthwhile finding out which company runs the programme and contacting them to see if you can book direct.

On the first day you go onto the boat with all of the day-trippers. Unfortunately I ate too much beforehand, got seasick (first time ever) and vomited whilst inside the cage. It was still very good fun though and I think that anyone that has the slightest interest in Great Whites should do this at some point in their lives.

After the first day you have to lend a hand on the boat. It’s fairly basic stuff like hauling the cage onto the boat, handing out sick bags and so on. You still get plenty of time to see the sharks and take photos. You also get additional opportunities to go into the cage. However, this depends on how many day-trippers there are. If the boat is full your chances of getting in are slim. I went into the cage three times over two weeks.

Onto the worst part now. You aren’t always guaranteed to go to sea as trips may not run due to bad weather. We had five or six no sea days whilst I was there. The people that run the programme can arrange other activities, such as horse riding and quad biking, for you to do on no sea days. However, these are with different companies so you have to pay for them. It can get quite expensive if you do a lot of them. The marine biologists that work on the boat also run lectures on things like tagging and tracking the sharks.

Although some of the no sea days were slower than a week in jail being there for two weeks was worthwhile. Obviously this comes down to how into sharks you are. I’m a big kid when it comes to this kind of stuff and I was as excited on the last day as I was on the first.

You can also go out on the whale watching boat if you want. This is nowhere near as good as seeing the sharks.

Onto the photos now:









Video here. I can't get it to embed so if any mod wants to edit the post feel free.




I did all the usual tourist stuff here. I don’t think there’s any point going into much detail as it’s already been covered in this forum but if anyone has any questions feel free to ask.

Table Mountain is good, abseiling off it is terrifying and Robben Island was a massive disappointment as you’re only on the island for a couple of hours and you don’t have a chance to look around on your own.




Next I did an overland camping tour with Acacia. The tour I went on is called Desert Tracker. It starts in Cape Town, goes through Namibia, Botswana, up to Victoria Falls then backtracks down to Jo’Burg. I’m going to ignore quite a few of the stops as this thing is well over 3000 words long. The itinerary is available on Acacia’s website so if anyone has any questions about parts that I’ve missed ask away.



I’m going to start with one of the negative aspects of the tour. During the first week we had a couple of slight problems with the truck. Once we got into Namibia one of the rear wheels came off the truck and hurtled away into the distance. We didn’t manage to find it so God only knows where it ended up. This lead to the other tyre that was in the same location going flat. We were very lucky as we were around 500 meters away from the nearest town. As such it was easy to get a mechanic to come out to us. Also, the wheels weigh around 100 kg and we were travelling at 100 km/h so it could have been very messy if we had been in the town.

This also resulted in one of the threads on the wheel bolt being ****ed. We were unable to get this fixed at the time so for the next few days we had to stop every 1.5 – 2 hours to tighten the bolts.

It turned out that the mechanic that checked the vehicle before handing it over to us hadn’t tightened the wheel nuts properly. Whilst we had been travelling over the dust roads they worked loose resulting in the tyre going AWOL. Our tour guide thought that the mechanic would be sacked for negligence.




A few days later an ungodly amount of smoke started coming out of the exhaust. We were a good distance from the nearest town so it took a few hours for a mechanic to get to us. It turned out that the turbo was knackered. The truck had had a complete overhaul just before the tour started so I’m assuming that the company that did the service installed a faulty component.



We were unable to get a replacement at the time so we had to spend the night camping by the side of the road. Acacia sent a coach to pick us up early the next day to take us to Etosha National Park. We got a fully repaired truck back a few days later.

Although the breakdowns were frustrating I was impressed by the way Acacia handled the problems. I’ve no idea how much the repairs and coach cost but I would be surprised if they made much if any profit on this leg of the tour. We didn’t miss any of the itinerary so it wasn’t a big deal. Obviously my opinion may have been slightly different if the delays had cut into any of the game drives.



Onto the good stuff now. First of all the guides we had on the tour (a middle aged married couple) were excellent. They kept us fully informed of the situation when we had problems with the truck, were very well organised and great fun.

I think I got quite lucky with both the tour guides and the other tourists that were on the trip on the trip. I’ve spoken to a few people that weren’t so lucky and ended up travelling with crap guides and people that disrupted the journey. Unfortunately this is luck of the draw. You never know what the people you are travelling with are going to be like.

Dan modelling Annalisa’s Secret Santa present. I was hoping Andy (6 foot 7 bloke in the background) would get it






Onto the meat and bones of the trip now.

I found the sightseeing on the first week or so of the tour fairly slow as I was there primarily to see the wildlife and it takes a loooooong time to get to the national parks.

Before leaving Cape Town we did a township tour. This was pretty depressing as some of the multiple occupancy houses are smaller than my bedroom and a year’s rent costs less than the meal I had the night before. It makes you realise how pathetic you are when you complain about **** that doesn’t matter.

The first stop of any note (3rd day) was at Fish River Canyon. We did a short 20 minute walk along the top of the canyon. It is possible to do a 4-day trek through the canyon. It’s very hard going due to the extreme temperature fluctuations and people have died attempting it.





The next day we went to Sesrien Canyon which I found fairly dull. The highlight was watching some baboons pissing about on the rocks





The following day we went to Dune 45 (highest sand dune in the area) for sunrise. It’s a hard trek to the top but worthwhile as the view is good.










After digging the truck out of a ditch we did a Bushman Walk through part of the Namibian desert with a bloke that refers to himself as The Boesman.





He did a 60 km charity walk charity across the desert with only the clothes on his back so he knows what he’s doing in this environment. They’ve had 300 mm of rain this year so the desert looks very undesert like.

Photo of The Boesman holding a photo of what the desert usually looks like:





I wasn’t expecting much from this part of the trip but I thoroughly enjoyed the walk. The Boesman seemed to know his **** and is a strange (that’s saying something coming from me) but entertaining fellow. Apparently hyena poo is an effective source of pain relief for “women’s problems”. I’m not sure what they’re meant to do with it. Eat it? Dry it and smoke it?

Next, we spent a couple of days in Swakopmund, which is Namibia’s adrenaline sports capital (only place in Namibia that you can do them?). You can do sky diving, sand boarding and loads of other crap here. I spent a few hours charging across sand dunes on a quad bike. This was great fun.




The following day we visited the seal colony at Cape Cross.

What they don’t tell you is that the baby seals are clubbed.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news...als009.html#cr

After doing a bit of reading I decided to send an email to Acacia complaining about this. All of the overland companies that I’ve looked at visit this place. Entry to the colony is included in the basic local payment so you don’t have the option of boycotting it and surprisingly enough they don’t draw attention to this in any of their literature. I didn’t receive a reply from Acacia. To be fair to them my email was labelled “tour feedback” and I didn’t state that I was looking for a response.

Photos of baby seals. This is an incredibly blatant attempt at making you go "aahh" and then deciding to boycott the seal colony if you're ever in the area.





This stop was promptly followed by the aforementioned turbo packing in. We were awakened nice and early the next morning by the coach that had been sent to transport us to Etosha National Park whilst the truck was being fixed.






Our two day/one night stay here is my highlight of the tour. They have a floodlit waterhole, which was 2 minutes from the campsite and open 24 hours a day. As such you could put in as many hours as you wanted. We had one game drive on the afternoon that we arrived and two the next day.

The best part of the game drives was seeing three lions. Unfortunately they were a good distance away so they were very hard to see without binoculars. How Amanda spotted them is beyond me. There were also lots or giraffes, elephants, zebra and other herbivores.

























On the last night I was very disappointed that I hadn’t seen any cats moving around. As such I decided to pull a Red Bull fuelled all nighter by the waterhole. Best decision ever At around 11:45 there were 9-10 giraffes and one elephant at the waterhole. The giraffes bolted and a couple of minutes later 2 male lions turned up. The elephant was completely nonplussed by their appearance and carried on drinking. The lions only stayed around for a few minutes so I didn’t manage to get any decent photos.

This ever so slightly blurry shot is the best I managed:



5 minutes later what I think were 3 lionesses turned up, had a drink and a shouting match with some other animals that were off in the distance then disappeared. Shortly afterwards 3 more lions showed up. I’m unsure if it was the same group or not. My camera couldn’t handle the low light so these are the best shots I have of them. I have some half decent videos of them however, when I try to upload them to Youtube they come out completely black. I’ve taken a few screenshots of the videos:

One of the lions appears to have the start of a mane so if someone with more knowledge than myself can clarify if it’s a lioness or a young male I would be grateful. The lions were active at the waterhole for around an hour. The rest of the night was uneventful.














To get here were got up at stupid o clock and were taken to a campsite in these boats.



We then proceeded to spend the next 6 hours dossing about the campsite. Why we got up that early only to do bugger all for the rest of the morning and early afternoon is beyond me. We weren’t allowed to leave the campsite on our own due to the potential presence of dangerous wildlife so there wasn’t anything to do aside from having a shot in the boats and going swimming.

In the early evening we were taken on a bush walk. Apart from a fish eagle we didn’t see any wildlife.



We went on another bush walk in the morning. We saw a herd of zebra, which by this point was akin to seeing cows as I’d seen so many of them. There was also an option to do a 50 minute scenic flight over the Delta for around $70. This was worthwhile as you got a good bird’s eye view of the delta and the wildlife.








The next national park was Choebe. The morning game drive was fairly dull as, with the exception of a vulture and some hippos that were too far off in the distance to get a decent look at, we didn’t see anything that we hadn’t seen before. This is par for the course with safaris. Sometimes you’ll see lots of interesting stuff and at other times you’ll be bored ****less.









In the afternoon we went on a cruise down the Choebe River. This was very good as we got close to hippos and crocs. Unfortunately I left my memory card in my laptop so I had to work of my camera’s internal memory. As such the photos aren’t the best as I used the smallest size and I was limited in the amount that I could take.














I’m not going to go into any detail here as everyone should know what it’s like.





There’s lots of overpriced activities that you can do here. I did the big air combo (zipline, bungee jump and bridge swing) and Lion Encounter. The annoying thing about the bunjee jump was the number of hawkers trying to sell you useless crap. These guys are relentless and won’t take no for an answer no matter how many times you tell them you aren’t interested.

As a general rule I’m not a fan of seeing animals in captivity but I decided to go along to the Lion Encounter as I wanted to see how they planned to reintroduce the lions to the wild. As things stand no lions have been released. This is to be expected as the programme is only 2 years old.

The lion cubs are removed from their parents, which seemed a tad unethical and counterproductive to me. As such I was very sceptical about the chances that the programme would be successful. However, there was a zoologist, who is studying monkey rehabilitation for her PhD, who was in the group. She thought that their model was reasonable and had a decent chance of success. She stated that animals that live in captivity tend to teach their offspring habits that hinder their introduction to their natural habitat. She obviously knows a fair bit more about the topic than I do so her opinion carries a tad more weight than mine

From a tourist’s point of view this effectively a petting zoo so if you’re into that you’ll love this. Personally I didn’t get much out of it despite getting exactly what I expected so I’m not really sure why I went. Monkey tilt IMO. Everyone else I spoke to enjoyed it.








At this point the tour broke into different groups. Some of the group carried on up to Nairobi whilst the rest joined another group and backtracked down to Jo’Burg via Choebe and Kruger. The highlight of second leg of the trip was seeing three wild dogs in Kruger NP. Apparently there’s around 110 of them in Kruger and less than 400 in South Africa so we were VERY lucky.







Videos here and here.









The roads in Kruger are very good so you can take any car you want in if you self drive. However, I think it’s worthwhile paying for a guided tour. Our guide had eyes like a hawk and could spot wildlife from what seemed like miles away.

The downside of this part of the tour was the amount of driving. There’s always a lot on overland tours but this section of the trip was bordering on the ridiculous. Of the 6 days it took to go from Vic Falls to Jo’Burg 1 was spent in Kruger and the rest were pretty much non-stop driving. The people that joined us at Vic Falls went on a cruise at Choebe National Park. Those of us that had travelled from Cape Town had already done this on the way to Vic Falls so we spent a lot of time hanging around the campsite. In hindsight I should have carried on up to Nairobi or stopped at Victoria Falls, flown to Kruger and done a few days sightseeing off my own back. If I do another overland trek I will study the itinerary much more closely to see if any backtracking is involved.

In conclusion, despite the problems mentioned I had a great time on this trip and seeing the lions at the waterhole is something that I’ll never forget. A lot of the fun I had was down to the fact that I was in a good group. As previously mentioned there were quite a few days were all we did was go from one campsite to the next and having a good group obviously helps pass the time. If your main interest is viewing the wildlife you might get better value for money spending a week or two at a specific national park as it will cut down on the amount of travelling.

It’s also worth mentioning that some of the roads we travelled on are absolutely horrendous. I took Mathematics of Poker and Winning in Tough Hold’Em Games with me in the hope of getting some study done. After reading the same paragraph 5 billion times I gave up and moved onto some lighter reading. On the plus side watching one of the girls spend 45 minutes putting her slap on whilst bouncing all over her seat was very entertaining.

From what I’ve gathered speaking to other people that went on similar tours Acacia are a fair bit more expensive than most other overland companies. I went with them as the company I bought my flights through dealt directly with them. You may be able to get better value elsewhere…




When I asked on here for advice on things to do in Jo’Burg I was told to get out as quickly as possible. Solid advice IMO. I went to the apartheid museum but didn’t get much out of it apart from feeling depressed. When I was in Beijing I found the Forbidden City incredibly dull as well though so that probably says more about my interests than it says about the museum. The two people I went with enjoyed it so if this kind of thing yanks your crank you’ll probably like it. For a safety point of view the area of Jo’Burg that I was in seemed fine. However, I didn’t go out at night so it might be different then…

Good stuff, I've been to all those places too :-)

Nice

What camera do you use mate?

Skimmed the text enjoyed the pics, looks like a great experience

Canon 40D, lens for this shot was a 70-300mm

Nice trip report

Very nice, I like reports that outline both the good and the bad.

Are those big trucks comfortable? Or is the suspension really hard and the ride really bumpy.

They're fine when you're on tarmac but it's VERY bumpy on the dirt roads. They also turn into a sauna when it's hot. As we were going through Africa this was all of the bloody time. Whilst in Namibia we didn't leave the windows down for long as it lead to a lot of dust being blown into the back of the truck. As a result it was uncomfortably hot most of the time. The truck breaking down turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the coach had air conditioning.

nice read, well done.

I've done 2 truck safaris, comfort has never been a problem for me. What makes or breaks the trip is the people you are with for the duration, one trip was fantastic with a great bunch of people and the other had 3 or 4 dickheads that were difficult and just hard to be around, that deffo took away from the experience.

I did Namibia in a 4x4 and even with the back of the truck sealed the whole time our luggage still got covered with sand/dust, that's just what happens in Namibia and it hard to avoid.

Great tr! To op and others who have done similar journeys, would you say it's pretty essential to familiarize yourself w the itinerary and plan a trip like this thoroughly? Or is winging it and keeping things spontaneous (to an extent) alright?

Wait, those giant trucks don't have good A/C??? Ouch.

Do not wing it. You will miss things, you will do things in suboptimal way, and you will have unnecessary delays. (That's my opinion after completely winging it.)

Buy Southern Africa/Lonley Planet guidebook and see what the top 5 things are in each country and see what you want to do. The books are pretty comprehensive. If you need more info on anything specific, just Google for details and images.

Im one of the most unorganised people on the planet. As such I always end up winging it and miss stuff that I really want to do. Do not follow my example. You will regret it.

They don't have any air con

I wouldn't say the truck itself was uncomfortable. The quality of the roads was a bit frustrating though as I'd planned to get a fair bit of study done but ended up spending the whole time listening to Machine Head at ear bleeding volume. Silly expectations on my part really. If I'd done a bit of reading I would have known that this was a none starter.

Coming from Scotland the heat is always going to cause me problems On the plus side I slept in boxers and t-shirt every night whilst everyone else was complaining about the cold

I completely agree with you about the people that you have on the trip. As previously stated I think that I was lucky here.

Holy crap you're a tough cookie going in that trick with no A/C. I was always under the impression that those trucks were super expensive and had everything inside... like a pimped out RV.

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit

I don't see any sarcasm in my post. I'm 100% serious. I occasionally saw those trucks on the roads packed with seemingly rich tourists and it seemed like it was super expensive, but super comfortable.

Woops.

I thought you were taking the piss

Great pics. well done.

How much did the cage diving cost you? How much does it cost for a day trip? I definitely want to do this before I die.

If you book it direct the volunteer programme comes in at around £350 a week. That includes accomodation and all the food you can shovel down your throat whilst you're on the boat. You have to pay for other meals.

I think a day trip is around £130. If you don't see any sharks the company I went with take you out again free of charge or give you a third of your money back.