South Africa: The reason for going.

I went to south Africa a month ago because: Peter’s a great friend of mine. His family grew up serving on a missionary ship with the organization Operation Mobilization and he went back to help run things a few years back. I happened to be traveling around south east asia and Australia at the time and managed to hit him up in Papua New Guinea. I met his cool friends and two of them eventually decided to get married. Which is why I went to south Africa. That might have been the worst grammar ever but you get the point.

I ended up getting to shoot the wedding, which was quite literally awesome. I’m waiting for the photos to arrive from Texas but will be sure to blog’em when they do.

Another reason I took the 26hr plane ride to SA was to ride an ostrich. Ok not really but I wanted to do it. Badly. We rented a ballin’ car and drove 5 hours to outsdhoorn. The place was deserted…LOST style. We first stopped at one of those mega cheesy animal parks where you can hug a cheetah etc. so that we could go cage swimming (?) with a crocodile. The video is currently uploading to youtube so it should be done by next week. We pulled up to one of many ostrich farms in the area only to find that they were closed. We were flying out in the morning so it was now or never. The conversation went sort of like this. “Sorry we’re closed”. Us: “Please?” Them: “Sorry”. Us: “You don’t understand, we flew 26 hours and drove 5 more to do this. We don’t need the tour, we don’t want to feed them or hug them. We just want to ride an ostrich”. Semi-long story short, peter and I got to ride an ostrich and it was amazing. It’s like sitting on the big part of an egg. Not that I’ve ever done that but I can imagine what it would be like. So you get on this bird with a bag over it’s head, tuck your legs under it’s chest, grab the wings, bag comes off and BLAM your cruising. So there I am cruising on an egg with extremities and that’s when the thing starts to pant like a dog. Dead serious, sounds like a dog. Apparently ostriches have no sweat glands so they need to pant. When the ride is over you kinda just slide off the back and everything is back to normal. Except that you JUST RODE AN OSTRICH!

More to come…videos are uploading.

Ps- Random ostrich fact – They need to have 1.5 kilograms of rocks in their stomach at all times. Which is why they are constantly pecking at the ground.