Sunday 8th November
Don't Film Me When I am Eating! OK!!
Rather in the same way that a fall of snow in the south of England disrupts everything, a bit of rain does the same job in Cape Town.
The new flashy airport terminal at Cape Town, built specially for the coming Word Cup in 2010 certainly looked good. It had opened for the first time yesterday.
In the pouring rain a posse of porters helped take our kit to the check in. There was not too much of a queue. We were all quite chilled because we had arrived in plenty of time.
The people at check in insisted that we check in as pairs. So in twos we obediently went to our respective desks.
Simon and I had a very pleasant and obviously experienced check in lady. She had our bags weighed and tagged in double quick time.
All we needed to do was pay the excess and we'd get our boarding cards.
Unfortunately the other two check in girls were not quite so efficient. They made the guys weigh the bags, out them back on the trolleys, take them away and pay the excess baggage bill before she would either take them, tag them or provide boarding cards.
Even the simple process of weighing the bags and working out the cost took ages.
Eventually Jack had paid the combined baggage bill and the bags were ready to go.
For some reason one of the girls refused to accept one of the bags. We were a bit baffled by that particularly when the only reason she would give was that it should have been given to the lady that had checked Simon and me in.
The flight was due to take off in less than half an hour.
We had stopped panicking about getting on the flight because it was delayed by the bad weather but that did not stop us getting a tad annoyed about the inefficiency of it all.
New terminal, mix up in the baggage and really bad weather.
Simon and I though we might see the bags some time never.
Our delay ended up being over three hours.
New terminal, mix up at check in, really bad weather and a change of flight number.
There was no way we’d ever see any of our bags again.
I began to mentally plan how I might kill the time until we managed to get hired kit organised and what kind of clothes I would by to keep me going.
The sun was shining in Port Elizabeth and all the bags joyfully tumbled on to the baggage belt.
At least we'll be working in the sun.
Our kit was quickly loaded onto a Land Rover and we got in a mini bus for the 45 minute drive out to the African bush and a meeting with big game and big cats.
The planned welcome lunch and unpack time had gone.
We all trooped straight out to do a bit of filming at on of the Born Free Centres in Shamwari.
Greig who is in charge of the welfare of the animal that Born Free have rescued and entrusted to the safe keeping of Shamwari showed us around and did some little interviews.
We did some filming with Achee a lion that had been rescued from Romania and her friend Ma Juah.
I had come out with her and Amanda Holden when she was released in to her more natural surroundings.
Achee was a little shy at feeding time but Ma Juah certainly did not like being filmed while she was eating. She mad that quite plain by rushing straight at me.
Even although there was a sturdy fence coursing with many thousands of volts I still did a bit of a step back.
At least I held the shot and it looked pretty good.
Another awesome blog posting - we need you GMTV guys to visit South Africa more often. I've linked to this blog posting from our Shamwari page, so that our readers can also enjoy your photos.
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