Zett and I went riding at our favourite local spot on Sunday, it’s about a 15-20 minute drive down the road towards “beautiful” Pretoria city.

We were in need of a bit of extra exercise so we planned to do two laps around the loop we usually do, on the first lap we didn’t see much, we’d not seen the Giraffe in the last few trips there and we started to hypothesis that they had been eaten by hungry workers.

As it turns out they had not indeed been eaten, either had the Zebra!

A couple of weekends ago we had a little weekend away with the other Pax executives and their partners.

We got put up in a nice retreat/conference center place with a heath spa and few activities on offer.

On the Sunday morning we all headed out on a canopy tour, this was the same canopy tour that Zett and the girls did for Celeste’s hens party. You basically slide from one side of the gorge to the other on a flying fox attached to a harness.

You get a nice view as you slide across, some people ie Ilzette turned it into an extreme sport, roaring into the end points with no chance of stop apart from the emergency brake controlled by the guide.

Their web site states Timamoon is "the most seductive lodge on the planet", after our great little anniversary celebration with them I tend to agree.

I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking, as you can see the lodge was beautiful, decked out with bits and pieces from all over the world (bed was from India, doors from Morocco, couch from Thailand) and a stunning view. You get breakfast and dinner included, served in the restaurant (it was more a dinning room seeing there are only 5 lodges all up and they only really cater for one couple each), all of the meals which were top notch.

We got there around 2pm on Friday arvo, it is just past Sabie on the way to Hazyview (about 4 hours from Pretoria). We got straight into the relaxin with a park off and a beer on the outdoor sun-bed admiring the awesome view, that set the pace for the rest of the arvo just kicking back enjoying well deserved rest.

After dinner we were set to try and learn how to play backgammon, unfortunately Zett carked it as soon as she lay down on the couch (poor thing has been working too hard) so I ended up learning to play with an online version before retiring also.

The "Blue Moon" lodge

Next day we were keen to stretch the legs a bit and headed down to the river on our bikes to find some trails, unfortunately the river walk trail was unridable, after persisting and carrying our bikes for a bit and then trying to scale wet rocks in our riding shoes (plastic clogs) we eventually conceded defeat and retreated back to the lodge to get some shoes and return.

We made it our mission to walk down the river till we found a spot where we could cross by jumping from rock to rock, we did eventually find a spot and get across, though we did get a little wet in the process .

We kicked back for the rest of the arvo after a hot shower and got in a couple of games of backgammon before dinner, afterwards we fired up the open fire and had our own little party, more backgammon with some chess and checkers thrown in for good measure, it got pretty crazy!

The View

later on I went out to get some more wood for the fire and noticed quite a large fire across the valley, all the lodges have massive thatched roofs, this lodge obviously wasn’t a Timamoon one but it’s roof was going up and we thought the owners should know about it, failing for reach the on the phone we were in the Pax mobile on a mission to got wake them up, after fumbling around the outside of their house in the dark we did eventually raise them and they called in the bush-fire brigade.

Apparently no-one was hurt and they only lost one lodge thankfully.

This wasn’t to be the only random event to happen at the end of our weekend, on the way home the next day we had to help load this poor old guy who’d hit a wild goat on his motor bike onto the ambulance. Holding his unconscious blue wrinkly head in my hands with his nose smashed and bleeding while he gasped for air shook me up a bit (no-one else knew how to take off a motorbike helmet).

More disturbing was the incompetence of the ambulance guys, if it wasn’t for one guy who stopped by that knew how to use the suction and shove in the breathing tube I don’t think he would have made it, they had shit strewn everywhere, even drove over one of their own bags at one point, bloody scary.

Apart from that it was a super excellent weekend away.

The Activities