Today after our early morning safari we left Elephant Plains Game Lodge and travelled by bus to Hoedspruit and by plane back to Johannesburg. There we met up with the rest of the group for the next two weeks. We are now 16 Canadian grandmothers and grandothers, five SLF staff members and Evie, the amazingly cheerful and upbeat local woman who will be travelling with us and who has handled most of the logistics on the ground here. We had a welcome meeting with an icebreaker and a short language lesson from Evie. The word for “Hello” in Zulu (and Xhosa and Siswati) is SAWUBONA. Xhosa (the language spoken by author and comedian Trevor Noah’s mother) uses an intricate system of click consonants. We also had a bit of an introduction to that!

Then we had a wonderful outdoor barbecue, representing different southern African countries, that included chicken, lamb, beef and Boerewors (sausage), along with veggie kabobs on rosemary skewers and a scalloped potato bake. It feels pretty good to have gradually got to know the group of 10 women we were with for the last few days before meeting the next 12. And tomorrow we are all off to Manzini, Eswatini with our first partner visit scheduled for the next day (Tuesday). Though it is the beginning of winter here the highs for the last two days were 30 and 31 C. The evenings and mornings before sunup are quite cool.