What's it all about then?

I guess you should always start at the beginning, so that's what I'll do here.  Set the scene, so to speak.

Rachel (Mrs W) and I are urban born and bred.  Both brought up in the Midlands (UK) and now both working in the City of London.  Good educations, good jobs, nice home, no children.......but life was a bit routine.  We have 1 or 2 holidays a year, most recently to Africa for safaris, but this didn't so much relieve the routine as exagerated the feeling that there must be more to live than the daily 9-5 grind and the odd holiday.

A couple of years ago we set the old grey cells working, thinking about what we could change; we thought of the obvious like new car (I had my eye on a Porsche!), move house (maybe a swanky City apartment) or travel.  Well, the first 2 are nice ideas but what do they really change?  Yes I'd have a flash car, or we'd be in the swanky part of town, but the 9-5 grind would still be there.  There would be no fundamental change.

It then became clear that what we love is travelling.  We live for our holidays.  So travelling it would be.

At that time Rachel was still working on her MBA so the timing was not right.  This was OK though as we had some serious thinking to do; where should we go, how long for etc.  We bought the usual type of books aimed at gap years away, bought travel mags, went to travel shows, used everyone's friend Google and about 18 months ago decided on the tried and tested 'around the world' trip.

We were happy - we'd agreed on a basic plan, it was the detail now to consider.  We'd obviously thought about the 'normal' backpackers sites to visit (Thailand, Laos etc etc) but then moved on to what we'd really like to see.  This took us to Indonesia for komodo dragons, China for pandas, Brazil for Jaguar .. the list was getting endless.  We then stood back and thought - what we're really interested in is animals and wildlife, as much as the travel itself.  So how could we build this new bright spark of realisation into our gap year?

I’m a avid reader and around this time I picked up a book by Peter Allison (Whatever you do .. don’t run); Peter is an Oz chap who went to Africa in search of adventure, and fell into safari guiding in Botswana. This got us thinking – could anyone do this?  A search on Google confirmed that yes, there were courses running where you could train to be a safari guide.

Wow – this is what we wanted to do with our year off.  None of that traipsing from one tourist commune to the next, and following the well trodden path of the gap year, but to d something that we REALLY wanted to do.  The seeds were sown, now to see what grows!

Preparations

In some ways preparing for this trip is slightly easier than a ‘normal’ round the world gap year.  For starters, we are (initially at least) only going to one country and staying in one location (the safari training school) so there will be little to do regarding flights, planning which countries to hit when and at what time of year.  No issues with currency (we just need SA Rands) etc.  But we would need a student Visa and we would need to find a course that would accept us!

Google through up quite a few course options; some just 1 month in length which would then give us a great experience and then leave us 11 months to explore Africa further (more of this later) and some which were a full 6 months.  Clearly the 6 month option was the most appealing.

Of the 6 month courses, some have an age limit of 39 and, alas, Rachel and I have now (just) surpassed that age so this then left about 3 courses to choose from.  Fortunately cost was not a driving force so we were able to choose the course that looked most appealing.  This turned out to be with Entabeni.

We downloaded the application forms, filled them in and sent them to the school.  Sarah at the school sent back an acceptance letter and we partied that night J  This letter then meant we could start the SA Visa application.  And did they need some info!

As the course is 6 months long we had to get a student Visa.  It is a fairly straightforward process, but they wanted loads of info.  We had to get a medical, chest scan, bank statements, police criminal check, amongst others.  It took Rachel a few weeks to pull all this together (fortunately she is very organised – I would have been much messier!) and then around the 19^th October we took everything to the SA embassy in London (on Whitehall, just off

Trafalger Square

).

To our utter surprise (we are used to British public sector bureaucracy so our expectations had been set!) everything went very smoothly and a week later the Visas came back.  This was on 27^th October, which just so happened to be a night we were out in London at our Lamb Tavern karaoke night, so again….we celebrated that night ;)

Visa info was sent to Sarah at Entabeni, course deposits paid, and as of the first week in November we were officially on the 6 month safari guide training course.